sci.energy

In article , dietz@ says...
>
>
>"nada" wrote in message
>news: @ ...
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>> This was aimed only at civilian nuclear reprocessing facilities not
>> military ones, even though, functionally, there were very similar. I
>> suppose it never occurred to them that any security at the civilian
>> facilities could of been upgraded to that of the military facilities
>> just as easily. So, places like Rocky Flats, CO and Hanford
>> Resevation, WA continued to function including secret plutonium
>> weapons facilities in other other places.
>>
>> It was idiotic and foolish and, obviously, did nothing to stop
>> "proliferation" which wasn't a problem then, in any event.
>
>This betrays a considerable misunderstanding of the situation
>and policy.
>
>Reprocessing presented some hazard not because US plutonium
>would be stolen or diverted clandestinely, but because the US
>would be less able to prevent other countries from cloaking
>military reprocessing in a civilian veneer if the US were doing the
>same.
>
>Now, this isn't a terribly *strong* argument, since there are other
>routes to proliferation. But reprocessing was clearly seen at the
>time to have no economic value of its own, so any such anti-
>proliferation consideration, however small, dominated the non-existent
>benefits.
>
>The US policy against civilian reprocessing was hardly a necessary
>one, since civilian reprocessing had been shown to be uneconomical.
>The West Valley plant had tried for six years and failed, miserably.
>Uranium was, and still is, too cheap for reprocessing to compete.
>
> Paul

One main reason why uranium got to be so relatively cheap was that
the construction of nuclear power plants had already been slowed
down considerably, in the early 1970s, out of very reactionary *political*
motives, and the then ongoing breeder experiments too, out of those
same motives. It was - and is - for breeder reactors in particular that
reprocessing was/is important. The "non-proliferation" consideration
of course was and is a big-power-bully one too.

Rolf M.