Nuclear Energy Initiative Holds Uncertainties

President Bush’s new nuclear energy initiative is supposed to help cure America’s “addiction to oil” by redesigning a taboo technology, originally used to obtain plutonium for bombs, to reuse spent nuclear fuel.

Unlike past reprocessing methods, the administration says, the new technique would make it prohibitively difficult for would-be proliferators to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel, and it would drastically reduce the volume of radioactive waste to be stored at repositories such as Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

washingtonpost