Winds of Change Newsletter, February 2006     See sidebar for table of contents

They Say Nuke Like It’s a Good Thing

According to the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, the Bush administration plans to announce a $250 million initiative to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, a first step toward reversing a 1970s policy that rejected reprocessing as too dangerous to pursue.

That’s part of Bush’s effort to jump-start the nuclear-power industry. Under the plan, the US would take spent radioactive fuel from foreign countries and use a new process to reprocess it here.

The Bush proposal, tentatively called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, would give U.S. vendors, such as General Electric Co., opportunities to sell nuclear-power reactors and nuclear fuel to developing nations.

Thomas B. Cochran, a nuclear physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the new reprocessing technology “uneconomical, unreliable, unsafe and unworkable.”