The New York Times has blogged that a new Government Accountabilty Office (GAO) report finds the proposal to "revive" commercial reprocessing (plutonium extraction from irradiated nuclear fuel) in the U.S. still full of disconnects. The article reports on reprocessing's inherent nuclear weapons proliferation risks, due to the separation of weapons-usable plutonium. Such risks led the Ford and Carter administrations to ban U.S. commercial reprocessing beginning in 1976, in direct response to India's detonation of a nuclear device secretly created from "Atoms for Peace" reprocessing technology provided by the U.S. and a research reactor provided by Canada.
The article also states that irradiated nuclear fuel is comprised of "95.6 percent unused uranium," and that this is "not particularly hard to dispose of." But such a statement flies in the face of evidence presented by public interest experts like Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, who has warned that "depleted uranium" (mostly U-238, left over after uranium enrichment activities) should be disposed of in deep geologic disposal (as is planned for high-level radioactive waste and trans-uranic waste) due to its radiological hazards. Dr. Doug Brugge of Tufts University has warned about uranium's toxic heavy metal hazards, including its estrogen-mimicing properties that risk reproductive harm in mammals.