The President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future met in Washington this week to address an old issue: the reprocessing of nuclear reactor waste. It is an idea that many thought was settled in the 1970s. After India extracted plutonium from its civilian reactor fuel and tested a nuclear weapon in 1974, President Gerald Ford paused the program. President Jimmy Carter, who was trained in the nuclear navy, eventually stopped the reprocessing plant just outside the Savannah River Site (SRS) gate in Barnwell, South Carolina. A DCBureau.org camera crew visited the old, abandoned plant last month.
Continue reading Closing the Nuclear Circle or Opening a Cornucopia of Plutonium?
Rob Pavey of the Augusta Chronicle reports that the multi-billion dollar plant to create weapons grade based reactor fuel has run into a major problem – no customers. The DOE’s Savannah River Site already burdened with a nuclear waste legacy is now the gathering place for the return of huge amounts of weapons grade nuclear materials. The very secretive National Nuclear Security Administration has been managing the Mox plant construction project that has been challenged by cost overruns, charges of racial discrimination, fraud and numerous technical problems. Now NNSA has to find customers after a test of Mox fuel failed in a Duke Power reactor. Duke was originally a partner in the Mox plant being built by Shaw Areva for DOE but dropod out when the test mox fuel array did not behave as expected in a reactor test.
