Re: Reprocessing

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@pnl.gov>]

Neil Keeney wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From:	radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu [SMTP:radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu]
Sent:	Tuesday, October 10, 2000 6:16 AM
To:	Multiple recipients of list
Subject:	RADSAFE digest 3461

	<snip>

 Recall that somewhere around 
the mid 70's when President Jimmy Carter said "Nope" to commercial 
reprocessing (Morris, IL facility) even though this is how we get the bomb 
plutonium over on the national "defense" side of nuclear.  

	<snip>

Jim Dukelow responds.

This isn't how I remember it -- memory that a modest Internet search reinforces.

Sometime around 1974-5, I and another graduate student got the $2 tour of the
Morris facility from the plant manager.  He said that GE decided to open it
because it was so badly designed that it could never be maintained.  In his
words, "Somebody's got to be able to run in there and bang on a pipe with a
hammer to break up the blockages of the hygroscopic powders".  That couldn't be
done at Morris.  The decision never to open Morris was taken in 1974, well
before the Carter presidency.

Carter had called for the abandonment of reprocessing during the 1976 election
campaign.  Five days before the election, in a speech at Portsmouth, OH,
President Ford said that control of nuclear proliferation had to take precedence
over commercial and national economic interests.  He called for a delay of up to
three years in starting the Barnwell reprocessing plant.  That was easy for him
to say, because Barnwell was probably two or three years away from clearing all
of the regulatory hurdles and the back end of the facility still hadn't been
designed.

Carter won the election and instituted the policy that reprocessing should be
abandoned in the U.S. and elsewhere.  His administration had only limited
success in convincing the rest of the world.

The Reagan administration reversed Carter's policy in 1982, but it also
eliminated all government funding for reprocessing.  By that time Clinch River
was close to cancellation and much of the economic rationale for reprocessing
was gone.

Finally, civilian nuclear reprocessing is not, in any way, the source for
weapons plutonium.  All nations known to have built weapons have obtained the
plutonium using reactors and reprocessing facilities dedicated to that task.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my
management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
************************************************************************
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription
information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html