April 15, 2010--Obama Understands the Risk of Nuclear Terrorism, Doesn't Make Connection with Nuclear Power

A Blog from Susan Corbett, Chair, South Carolina Sierra Club

This week, I listened to part of the Summit on Nuclear Arms and to our President talking about the fact that an apple-sized amount of plutonium is all that is needed to make a nuclear bomb that would kill tens of thousands of people outright and devastate and contaminate a large area for a long period of time.

What is missing in this global disarmament discussion is the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear power.  They are inextricably linked and cannot be decoupled.  As nuclear power boosters in our state and elsewhere continue to call for the reprocessing of spent reactor fuel as some kind of solution to the waste (it isn't), I can't help but remind everyone why reprocessing was banned in this country in the first place.

A few countries decided to ignore our ban on reprocessing and go it alone.  England at Sellafield, France at La Hague, Russia, and Japan—all have spent-fuel reprocessing plants.  Each and every one of these plants have been economic and environmental disasters.  Watch this YouTube video interview about the world's reprocessing facilities to learn more about the debacle and insanity of reprocessing.

The bottom line is that, around the world, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel has created TONS of weapons usable plutonium.  To date, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, the numbers are something like this: England has about 106 metric tons, France about 28 metric tons, Russia, 45 metric tons, and Japan about 4 metric tons.  The rest of Europe has contributed about 27 metric tons to this pile, creating a stockpile of over 220 metric tons of weapons usable plutonium throughout the world.  When you consider that only 8 kilograms of plutonium is needed to make a deadly, easily handled and relatively easy to detonate bomb, you can see this is a world-wide catastrophe just waiting to happen.

We recently just signed-off on India's plan to reprocess its spent-fuel, allowing more plutonium to be separated in an increasingly unstable part of the world.  The IEAE says that "direct use materials and nuclear explosive devices can be made from commercially produced reprocessed materials."

The half-life of plutonium 239 is 24,000 years.  Why would we want to create more of this deadly, poisonous, indestructible, long-lasting radioactive material?  Other countries have tried to dispose of their stockpiles by blending it into MOX, or mixed oxide fuels, which they use in commercial reactors, but it’s easy to see that the MOX programs have not been able to keep up with the stockpile, and as a result more plutonium is being separated than can be re-used, creating this mountain of weapons usable material.

I hope Energy Secretary Chu and President Obama somehow make the connection between commercial nuclear power and nuclear weapons.  I haven't even talked about enriched uranium here, which is what is going on in Iran . . . fodder for another blog.

Susan