Word: plutonium
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...issues most important to them. He says he endorses "a shelter for capital gains with a credit on gross income, and permitting a more rapid acceleration of depreciation on capital spending." His tireless support of nuclear power includes a vote as recent as last year to continue the plutonium breeder program. He has voted against consumer interests in oil price controls, the Consumer Protection Agency and the Consumer Cooperative Bank. Labor he has opposed by voting to cut back the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and to deny black lung benefits to coal miners, food stamps to the families...
...diminish European reliance on the U.S. for enriched reactor fuel. To increase the amount of energy they can get from a given amount of uranium, the French also operate one of the world's largest plants for reprocessing spent fuel rods to extract unused uranium 235 and plutonium. But retreating nuclear fuel this way also produces highly radioactive liquid wastes that must be stored indefinitely. The French now refrigerate the waste and store it in double stainless-steel tanks, sheathed in reinforced concrete then hermetically sealed in a reinforced concrete vault, and buried several meters below ground...
Most striking of all is the French commitment to fast-breeder reactors like Super Phenix, which produce or "breed" more fuel than they consume. That is because breeders, which are fueled by plutonium and uranium 238, generate more plutonium than is "burned" during the nuclear cycle. The danger is that plutonium, if it winds up in the wrong hands, can also be used to make nuclear weapons. For this reason President Carter is opposed to the construction of the experimental fast-breeder on the bank of the Clinch River in Tenn. Skeptics argue that Super Phenix, which will cost...
...restrict the spread of bomb building know-how have failed: If a junior at Princeton can design a bomb, and a journalist can find the plans to one in a public library, any nation can. As a result, American policy should focus on limiting the spread of the plutonium that is the prerequisite of any nuclear weapon as the only way to curb proliferation...
...restricting the spread of weapons-grade plutonium is to limit the spread of nuclear breeder reactors, which produce plutonium, and reprocessing plants, which extract plutonium from the spent fuel rods of conventional reactors. President Carter has tried to pursue this policy--in exactly the wrong manner. Many harder hit by OPEC's price hikes than any industrialized country, less developed nations, see nuclear power as the only hope for attaining energy self-sufficiency. These had depended upon the United States to develop the breeder reactor and nuclear fuel reprocessing technologies for them to guarantee a future supply of nuclear fuel...