In 16th century Japan, the national aristocracy, a coterie of priests and samurai warriors, decided that guns, which had been introduced a century earlier, were a threat to the established order and should not proliferate. 

    Instead the weapon of choice would be the samurai sword, a somewhat outmoded instrument that nevertheless had an archaic appeal and was free of the leveling aspects of gunpowder.  As Noel Perrin chronicled in Giving up the Gun, the priests succeeded in erasing all record of guns from artwork and historical documents so that the Samurai ruled in splendid isolation – until Admiral Perry showed up in 1853 with a few gunboats and the medieval era was suddenly over. 

    Today America seems to be trying to do something similar with nuclear power.  The Obama Administration, in conjunction with a druid-like caste of environmentalists urging everyone to “go green,” has decided to exile nuclear power to from the public square.  It’s not that the technology will be weighed against the alternatives, such as the medieval notion of trying to run an industrial nation on windmills.  Instead, we will simply pretend that nuclear doesn’t exist.

    Nowhere was this more on display than in March when the administration announced the 20-year effort to open a repository at Yucca Mountain will be abandoned.  The decision was almost a foregone conclusion.  The site was the personal bugbear of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was determined his state would not become “the nation’s nuclear dump.”  President Barack Obama virtually promised Nevada residents during the election he would kill the project.  In any case, Yucca was a waste of money anyway, made necessary only by President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 decision to abandon nuclear reprocessing.

    What was far more indicative of the administration’s attitude was the simultaneous announcement by Energy Secretary Steven Chu - a Nobel Prize winner, no less - that in addition to giving up Yucca Mountain we would not pursue nuclear reprocessing in the manner of the French and Japanese.  Instead, he said, we would kick the can another twenty years down the road by setting up a special commission to find some alternative.  The reason we can’t simply emulated the French, said Chu, is because such reprocessing “might lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

    It is almost comical in the year 2009 that anyone in the United States should think that by abstaining from nuclear reprocessing we are somehow saving the world from nuclear weapons.  Look around you.  Is North Korea plotting to steal plutonium from American reactors in order to build a bomb?  Is Iran purloining uranium from American enrichment facilities?  Did Dr. A.G. Kahn of Pakistan run an international swat team planning to raid French reprocessing plants for plutonium?

    Wake up America!  We no longer control this technology.  The world is moving past us.  The French are twenty years ahead in constructing a nuclear fuel cycle.  The British, Canadians and Japanese have all continued reprocessing.  The Russians are selling nuclear technology to Hugo Chavez and the rest of South America.  Even the Chinese made certain they got the specs for their two Westinghouse reactors so they can reverse-engineer them.  In five years, China will also be marketing its own reactors.  Meanwhile, like Buddhist monks, we sit chanting, “I have banished all thoughts of nuclear from my head.  Everyone else must do the same.”  For perhaps the first time in history, America is falling behind on a world-changing technology.

    Here are the facts about reprocessing`.

    Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old uranium-238, the non-fissionable isotope that forms 99.3 percent of the natural ore.  U-238 is mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves.  Its half-life is 5 billion years – the same age as the earth.  It has been around forever and will be around long after humanity has left the scene or colonized other planets.  At Yucca Mountain, we were basically building a $30 billion repository for natural uranium.

    One percent of the fuel rod is U-235, the fissionable isotope that fuels the reactor.  Only 0.7 percent of the natural ore, U-235 is “enriched” to 3 percent for reactor fuel.  (In order to get a bomb, you have to enrich up to 90 percent, which is why nuclear reactors can’t blow up.)  The 1 percent in a spent rod can be recycled as fuel.  The standard technique is to mix it with plutonium to form a “mixed oxide (MOX).”  A boatload of MOX fuel just left France for Japan, where it will fuel Japan’s new MOX reactor.  It was not attacked by pirates. 

    Three percent of the spent fuel is fission products – the smaller elements into which U-235 splits – and “actinides,” artificial elements above uranium on the period table that are formed when U-238 absorbs neutrons.  All are highly radioactive – the most radioactive substances on earth, in fact.  The radiation dose from a spent fuel assembly is twice what you would you standing at ground zero in Hiroshima.  Yet the quantity is so small it can be handled safely by remote industrial processes.  The bowels of the French fuel fabrication plant at Avignon look like a collection of giant fish tanks, with machines chopping up and separating fuel rods behind thick protective glass.

    Some of the isotopes in a fuel rod will remain radioactive for millions of years while others will spend their energy in a few days.  Since an isotope’s level of radioactivity is inversely proportional to its half-life, the ones with the shortest half-lives are the most immediately dangerous.  Most of them are gone after three years spent underwater in storage pools.  Those with geological half-lives – such as U-238 - are relatively harmless.  Perhaps the most troublesome are those with intermediate half-lives like strontium-90 and cesium-137, which both mimic calcium and can enter the food chain if they get loose in the biosphere. They remain dangerous for a few hundred years.

    Yet many of these isotopes also have industrial and medical uses.  Americium is used in home smoke detectors.  (Ralph Nader has been opposing it for decades, preferring charred embers to a little radioactivity.)  Iodine-131 is used to treat thyroid cancer, palladium-103 for prostate and samarium-153 for breast cancer.  Technicium-99, an element that does not exist in nature, is most commonly employed diagnostic tool in radioactive medicine, employed 40,000 times a day.  Even Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 have industrial uses and are sold commercially.  Altogether, nuclear medicine is a $7 billion industry.  None of our isotopes are produced domestically, however.  We have to import them all from Canada because we are afraid to deal with our spent fuel.

    The last one percent is plutonium and this is where the troubles start.    Plutonium-239 is the only isotope besides U-235 that undergoes fission in a way that can sustain a chain reaction.  It can be used for reactor fuel or a bomb – and indeed almost all the nuclear bombs in the world are made with plutonium.  Yet handling plutonium at reprocessing plants is hardly different from handling it at our nuclear arsenals and nobody has managed to steal any from there yet. 

    So why did we abandon reprocessing?  The story begins in the early 1970s when New Yorker writer John McPhee met Ted Taylor, an eccentric genius who had designed many of the army’s smallest nuclear weapons.  Taylor had become obsessed with the idea that if he could build a nuclear bomb anyone else could as well.  He was especially stricken with the idea that that plutonium would be stolen by terrorist factions somewhere in the chain of reprocessing and fashioned into bombs.  ““I think we have to live with the expectation that once every four or five years a nuclear explosion will take place that will kill a lot of people,” he told McPhee.  “I can imagine – in the worst situation – hundreds of explosions a year.”  Everyone else McPhee interviewed for the book told him that Taylor was exaggerating wildly, but the repentant bomb-maker made a much better story and so Taylor became the principle focus of The Curve of Binding Energy. 

    Published in 1973, the book became a sensation among the budding anti-nuclear movement.  Those fears seemed realized in 1974 when India took a small research reactor the Canadians had given them and exploded a test weapon.  By the time Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 he was well schooled.  Citing nuclear proliferation, he canceled the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was to be fed by federal fuel reprocessing effort.  In one stroke, Carter had created the problem of “nuclear waste.”

    All this might have been worth the effort if it had had any affect whatsoever on the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  But it mattered not at all.  If anything, it may help spread nuclear technology, since we have ceded the task of providing the world with nuclear energy to other not always friendly countries. 

    France, Britain, Canada, Russia and Japan went right ahead reprocessing and there has not been the slightest hint that anyone has tried to steal plutonium from their operations.  It’s not surprising.  The task would be about the equivalent of stealing gold from Fort Knox.  Reprocessing plants have the security features of high-grade prisons.  The French reprocessing plant at La Hague is surrounded by barbed wire and observation towers manned by armed guards.  Radiation monitors are everywhere.  You cannot move from one part of the plant to another without being scanned for material.   

    Another impediment to building bombs from reprocessed material is that reactor plutonium does not make very good bomb material.  This has been known since Los Alamos.  When Pu-239 stays in a reactor beyond a six months it starts to mutate into Pu-240, Pu-241 and Pu-242, all of which are either less or more fissionable.  Either will contaminate a nuclear device by upsetting the chain reaction.

    Instead, the best way to get bomb-grade plutonium is to run the reactor for a few months and then extract the plutonium before it mutates into the higher isotopes.  This is what the North Koreans did with their homemade reactor – and why we knew they were doing it.  (The reactor was built from plans of a British model made public during Atoms for Peace,)  Plutonium that has been in a reactor for five years is much more difficult to engineer into a bomb.  The U.S. and Britain have done it a couple of times but it required a highly technical effort.

    Thus, the door we have locked against nuclear proliferation was never open in the first place.  What we have accomplished by abstaining from recycling spent fuel is exactly nothing.  All we have done is create problems for ourselves.

    But of course environmentalists and anti-nuclear crusaders revel in this fiasco.  “What do you do with the waste?” is always the trump card against nuclear energy.  Many states such as California have passed laws saying no reactors can be built until the waste problem is solved.  And of course it will never be solved without reprocessing.  Steven Chu and the Obama Administration are doing their best to make sure that never happens. 

    Like the 19th century Japanese, however, we won’t be able to remain isolated forever.  Areva, the French nuclear giant, has signed contracts to revive the Barnwell reprocessing facility.  In the end, the company may simply end up taking the material off our hands and shipping it to France – for a hefty price.  Areva is already taking enriched uranium from former Soviet weapons, “blending it down” and selling it to us as reactor fuel.  Half the light bulbs in America are now fueled by a former Soviet weapon – a swords-into-plowshares triumph that somehow still manages to escape public attention. 

    The truly sad thing is to see America falling to the back of the pack in a technology we once pioneered.  The discovery of nuclear energy was the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century and will almost certainly come to dominate 21st century energy generation.  Yet we are being left behind.  Most of the nuclear engineers in this country are now over 50 and will be retiring in another ten years.  If they do not impart their knowledge to a new generation, it will be lost forever. 

    Yet still we continue to dither.  In ways, we are like the fading Russian aristocrats in “The Cherry Orchard” who sit nattering amiably about the weather while their prize cherry orchard is being cut down to make way for condominiums. 

    At one point, Lopakhin, the despised peasant entrepreneur who is developing the property, is about to take leave when Ranevskaya, the family matriarch, addresses him,  “Oh, don’t go,” she says.  “You’re so . . . . amusing.”

    That’s exactly what Steven Chu is saying to the French and Japanese about their reprocessing efforts.  “Amusing, perhaps . . . . . but not for us.”