American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Rosner discusses fuel cycle security concerns via E&ETV

How should the international community address security concerns associated with the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle? During today’s OnPoint, Robert Rosner, senior adviser to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ project on the Global Nuclear Future discusses a new AAAS report that makes recommendations on fuel cycle safety concerns.

And the question really is are nations really, that are not technologically ready, what do you say to them about going forward? And basically what we’ve been proposing is to argue that in those cases they do need help. One of the key issues is the backend. The backend means once the fuel is used up and comes out, it’s now actually material that contains stuff, if you like, plutonium for example, that’s fissile and can be used for making bombs. And so the backend is one of the key elements to safeguard and the question is how do you convince folks, for example in Vietnam, for example in South Korea, the countries that are the aspirants, to take care of this material properly? And we have a proposal to do that that basically revolves around making a business case that is an economic case for disposal of the material on a site that’s hosted by a country that’s actually going to make some money. That is, they can actually see benefits from being host to a repository.

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