20 Mar 2006 Recycling Nuclear Fuel

Physicists Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford, who are the star contributors of our Nuclear Policy Center, have a letter in this week’s edition of the journal Nature (Nature 400) .

The letter begins:

We believe that your worry about U.S. plans to reprocess nuclear fuel (“Recycling the Past” Nature 439, 509-510; 2006) is misplaced. Since President Carter imposed a reprocessing ban in 1977, it has become clear that other nations’ decisions about building nuclear weapons do not depend on what the United States does with its spent fuel.

Furthermore, we consider your claim that “recycling involves separating components that can readily be used to build nuclear weapons” to be misleading on two counts…

Read it all here.