In 1983, a Columbia University undergraduate named Barack Obama wrote an article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” for the school publication Sundial. Obama expressed the hope that someday humanity would abolish nuclear weapons and create a “nuclear free world.” Obama never abandoned that dream. The Nobel Foundation awarded him its Peace Prize last December in large part because of his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” [More]
The article this links to appears to me to be far more about fear than science or even good governmental policy.
I actually consider the “two steps back” to be steps in the right direction! The other step I believe President Obama needs to take is to reverse Jimy Carter’s fear based ban on nuclear fuel reprocessing—especially now that it appears we have at least one viable reprocessing method (created by our own national labs) that never, at any stage in the process, produces any weapon usable products (whether Uranium or Plutonium).*
I’m not saying that one shouldn’t be concerned about the potential for the wrong people to get their hands on the wrong materials. What I want is for us (as a people and our government) to be reasonable about our fears.
David
* OK, any radioactive material could be used with a conventional explosive to create a “dirty” bomb of one sort or another. However, this is not unique to reprocessed nuclear fuel. In fact, one thing I can agree with the article’s writer, at least to some extent, is that nuclear waste (especially the highly radioactive, short lived true waste, unlike the long lived, not nearly so radioactive fuel components) has perhaps the most potential as a “dirty” bomb component. So this stuff needs to be secured.
Fortunately, the reprocessing of nuclear waste separates this short lived true waste from the longer lived fuel components, so its volume is greatly decreased, and the storage times are greatly reduced. Instead of having to store the more bulky unprocessed nuclear waste for millions of years, you only have to worry about a significantly reduced volume of material that decays in far less time (on the order of hundreds of years or less).
This reduced waste steam is then easier to secure, both because it takes up less space, and because it lasts for far less time.