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The history of nuclear power's imagined future : plutonium's journey from asset to waste

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Walker_2021_BotAS_history_nuclear_CC.pdf (1.018Mb)
Date
07/09/2021
Author
Walker, William
Keywords
Nuclear futures
Plutonium
Reprocessing
Fast breeder reactor
Nuclear trade
Spent fuel management
Nuclear history
Nonproliferation
JZ International relations
T-NDAS
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Abstract
Separated civil plutonium should be formally regarded as a waste, not a fuel that has value. It is time for governments and industries to acknowledge – everywhere – that civil reprocessing, plutonium’s provider, is a waste-generating and complicating technology, a source of dangers and burdens rather than putative benefits. Much better solutions to spent fuel management and energy production now exist. Long unwanted as fuel by utilities, immense stocks of plutonium have accumulated in France, Japan, Russia, and the UK from reprocessing programs launched in the 1970s. Politically embedded, they continued long after the “plutonium economy” and its fast breeder reactors had lost credibility. China, a recent advocate, should beware of the costs of going down this road and of stoking insecurities in Asia and beyond if connections to weapon programs are feared. Drawing upon a recent book by Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, and Jungmin Kang, this essay provides a fresh perspective on plutonium and reprocessing’s troubled international histories, including histories of imagined futures that have so heavily influenced their politics and economics.
Citation
Walker , W 2021 , ' The history of nuclear power's imagined future : plutonium's journey from asset to waste ' , Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , vol. 77 , no. 5 , pp. 259-264 . https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2021.1964257
Publication
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2021.1964257
ISSN
0096-3402
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/23943

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