Nuclear reprocessing

The French do something right...

Used uranium is removed from reactor cores and chemically manipulated to restore its radioactivity. This process creates new fuels—and only small amounts of waste byproducts. The process can be repeated a third time and perhaps a fourth.

Yet in the United States, where reprocessing was invented, used uranium is simply discarded.

The result is highly wasteful: The once-used uranium still retains 96 percent of its energy potential. The result is likewise highly dangerous: That 96 percent potent uranium also retains a corresponding proportion of its toxicity to human life. So why do we not reprocess?

The decision was not made by accident. Back in the 1970s, the U.S. made a conscious policy decision to shut down its reprocessing facilities. The decision had nothing to do with energy policy, and everything to do with that era’s arms control illusions.

One of the byproducts of reprocessing uranium is plutonium. The plutonium produced by a civil reactor is not weapons-grade. It can be used as a fuel itself, and in France it is. But theoretically, this low-grade plutonium could be reprocessed again and again and enriched to a point where it could be used as a weapon.

On the basis of this fact, the Carter administration decided that the U.S. must eschew reprocessing altogether. It reasoned as follows: If the U.S. civil nuclear program permitted any reprocessing, even for fuel purposes only, that would compromise U.S. efforts to persuade other countries not to reprocess. And (the reasoning continued) an across-the-board ban on reprocessing was the only way to ensure against nuclear proliferation.

This reasoning lacked cogency, to put it very mildly.

First, even assuming that other nations cared about the example set by the U.S. civil nuclear program, they were bound to notice that the U.S. also maintained a military nuclear program. "Do as we say, not as we do," is not a principle likely to carry much weight.

Second, the notion that other nations would forgo nuclear weapons because we set them an example was naïve at best, narcissistic at worst. Does Iran care that the U.S. does not reprocess? Does North Korea? States make their nuclear decisions for their own reasons.

States that have drawn back from the nuclear threshold—Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa being the outstanding examples—have done so because a) new, democratic governments replaced nondemocratic governments and preferred to spend their money in other ways; and b) they feared inspiring counter-proliferation by their immediate neighbors. The only other motive that seems to work is c) the direct application of force, as with Israel against Iraq.

Gandhian self-sacrifice, by contrast, has had zero effect.