terror risks of nuke fuel

another myth from the nuclear industry, exploded.


Terror risks of nuclear fuel

By Mark Clayton, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Thu Mar 16, 3:00 AM ET

The Bush administration's plan to deploy a high-tech fuel to power a new generation of nuclear reactors worldwide has a potentially explosive problem:

It is too easy for terrorists to grab and turn it into a nuclear bomb.

That's the criticism expressed by nuclear scientists and in several little-known federal studies about the technology underlying the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, unveiled last month. Administration officials tout GNEP for technological breakthroughs that dramatically reduce the nuclear waste from civilian reactors and, at the same time, greatly reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.

Using GNEP's new fuel technology, called UREX-Plus, the United States could safely end its three-decade moratorium on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel intended to keep plutonium from spreading, officials say. "The goal of GNEP is recovery of the energy in a way that doesn't promote weapons," Energy Secretary
Samuel Bodman told a US Senate committee last month.

Knowledgeable critics have said from the outset that the new reactor fuel envisioned in GNEP is not so very hard to turn into bombs. But what has not been widely known is that their views are echoed by the US Department of Energy's own studies. According to a 2004 study conducted for an Energy Department blue-ribbon commission, for instance, the UREX-plus technology was only slightly more "proliferation resistant" - difficult to turn into bombs - than the PUREX process used by other nations. The US has often criticized PUREX for its vulnerability.

"The bottom line is that UREX-plus is not much more proliferation resistant - by their own estimates," says Henry Sokolski, former deputy for nonproliferation policy at the Defense Department in the first Bush administration.
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