4. Fortunately, some simple steps can be taken immediately to make America's waste less hazardous, as the Blue Ribbon Commission notes. Spent fuel can be moved after a period of cooling from pools to dry storage in casks that are disaster-and sabotage-resistant and durable enough to store waste safely for many decades. The commission suggests that some of these casks be consolidated in regional, well-guarded interim storage facilities away from disaster-prone zones until geological repositories open up. Meanwhile, the commission also recommends that the U.S. government start a consensus-based process of finding new sites for such underground disposal facilities, though the commission stops short of suggesting just where they should be. Transparency is key: Sweden and Finland recently succeeded in this task in large part because they made the (honest) case that nuclear waste that remains above ground poses a much greater threat than buried waste, even to nearby communities.
5. Most of the attention on the commission's work has rightly focused on its efforts to create a process that will lead to the opening of a new Yucca Mountain-like facility But there's another, often overlooked aspect of its analysis that is equally critical: how U.S. policy toward nuclear waste can affect the spread of nuclear weapons around the globe.
6. Nonproliferation campaigners have long warned about a method of handling nuclear waste called reprocessing, in which waste from reactors is chemically treated to isolate and remove fissionable plutonium, which can then be turned into a new fuel, called mixed oxide. That fuel can then be reused in reactors. In theory, reprocessing is designed to reduce the amount of waste at large and increase the efficiency of uranium-reactor fuel; in practice, it is prohibitively expensive, requiring subsidies to make viable, and does not obviate the need for the disposal of the massive quantities of radioactive waste that remain. More importantly, plutonium separated from nuclear waste during reprocessing can also be used to create nuclear bombs. Less than 20 Ib. (9 kg) of the stuff could turn downtown Manhattan into a broiling wasteland of irradiated rubble.
7. The Blue Ribbon Commission doesn't reach a conclusion on whether the U.S. should pursue reprocessing, arguing that consensus on the issue would be "premature." That is a mistake. Reprocessing is a manifestly dangerous technology. In the 1970s, the U.S. renounced commercial reprocessing at home and the spread of the technology abroad because of concerns that it would lead to weapons proliferation. It should not reverse this policy. The spread of reprocessing to countries in unstable or nuclear-armed regions gives them the infrastructure and expertise needed to quickly develop a bomb should they choose to do so. (And don't think safeguards imposed by the International Atomic Energy Agency can stop them. Commercial-scale reprocessing facilities handle so much plutonium that it is almost impossible for inspectors to keep track of it all.) The U.S. must send a message: if the country with the world's largest number of nuclear reactors renounces reprocessing, it delivers a clear signal to countries newly interested in nuclear power that the process is not necessary for the future of the nuclear industry.
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