Waiting For Nukes.(nuclear waste products)(Brief Article)

Patience is an important virtue if you work in the nuclear-power industry, as Jack Allen knows. Five years ago his company, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), finished building a brand-new, state-of-the-art plant that would recycle radioactive material for reuse in nuclear reactors. But it never opened. Politicians dithered over whether it would ever make money, or whether the public would accept the grand opening of a new venture at Sellafield, the target of anti-nuclear protests for more than 25 years. This latest addition to Sellafield's sprawling nuclear-power facilities, which include a power-generating reactor and a reprocessing plant that extracts plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, would provide 400 much-needed jobs to Britain's northwest coast. Authorities weighed their decision with painstaking thoroughness, hearing 9,000 arguments for and against. On Oct. 2, with the world distracted by September 11, they announced their plan to open the plant. Some people accused them of trying to pull a fast one. For local workers, it was a long time in coming. Says Allen: "It was the best Christmas present we could have had."

Are jobs the only good reason to turn on the new Sellafield plant? In an industry rife with sensitive issues, the plant raises a particularly tricky one: what can be done with plutonium, a byproduct of nuclear reactors and dismantled nuclear weapons? The new plant offers an alternative to long-term storage: it blends the plutonium with uranium and produces pellets of "mixed oxide fuel," or Mox, which can fuel other reactors. To its proponents, the Mox plant is a tidy solution: rather than stockpile plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons that terrorists and rogue nations covet, why not turn it into a more benign fuel for power plants? Detractors say making Mox presents its own security risks, and it's too costly besides. Despite the pains authorities took to mollify the public, the plant has attracted a flurry of protests. "Plutonium is an embarrassment for the whole industry," says Greenpeace campaigner Mark Johnston. "Mox is just a way they can sweep it under the carpet for a decade or so."

On its face, the case for Mox appears sound. Britain has long imported spent nuclear fuels from countries including Germany, Switzerland and Japan for reprocessing--separating it into plutonium, uranium and some leftover waste. While these countries ponder how to use or dispose of these materials, they continue to accumulate at Sellafield. Now Sellafield can offer to return the material in a handy form for fuel. The Mox plant takes the reprocessed plutonium and uranium, dries it, pulverizes it and compresses it into ceramic pellets. Plutonium is only 5 percent of Mox by volume, but it packs a wallop--one gram contains as much energy as two tons of coal. "This is a naturally occurring material and virtually free," says Allen. "By returning the fuel to our customers as Mox, we are closing the loop."

The Bush administration this month announced that it favors converting plutonium from dismantled warheads to Mox, and Russia is headed down the ...