by Arjun Makhijani

Because nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide, the nuclear industry claims that nuclear power can help save the Earth from global warming. But the twin specters of nuclear waste and proliferation raise questions about whether nuclear power can fulfill this promise and what the price of trying might be.

When the uranium fuel of a nuclear power plant is used to generate electricity, the left over "spent fuel" is a mixture of radioactive substances, of which one percent is plutonium-a highly toxic material used to make nuclear weapons. Because plutonium stays radioactive for tens of thousands of years, spent fuel must be disposed of in a deep geologic repository in order to prevent it from being easily accessed for retrieval of plutonium. Building such facilities is politically fraught. The proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada is a legal and technical mess after decades of research and $9 billion in expenditures. France's repository program is also in deep trouble, and Germany's ground to a halt in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, nuclear waste keeps piling up. The odds that commercial nuclear power will lead to some of the plutonium in spent fuel being used in bombs increase with time, the number of power plants, and the number of places that they are built. The world's spent nuclear fuel already contains enough plutonium to make about 200,000 nuclear bombs. To mitigate the waste problem, the nuclear establishment is advocating "reprocessing"-in which plutonium is separated out and recycled as nuclear fuel.

The proliferation risk was enough for the United States to stop its own commercial reprocessing program and to discourage reprocessing abroad, after the 1974 Indian nuclear test. The Bush administration is reversing that longstanding abstinence and leadership by example. This is a mistake. Reprocessing is already the cause of much trouble. North Korea got its plutonium from a supposedly commercial reprocessing program. Rising tensions between Japan and China, partly over oil and gas, rights have prompted some leading figures in Japan to advocate that Japan should acquire its own nuclear arsenal. With stocks of plutonium, mainly reprocessed in France, that Japan already possesses, Japan could become a nuclear weapon state if it so chose probably in as little as six months. The world's most powerful countries should be careful of heading down a path that could lead to a proliferation nightmare.

Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland

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