Tag Archives: plutonium

Rokkasho redux: Japan’s never-ending reprocessing saga via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

By Tatsujiro Suzuki | December 26, 2023 According to a recent Reuters report, Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd (JNFL) still hopes to finish construction of Japan’s long-delayed Rokkasho reprocessing plant in the first half of the 2024 fiscal year (i.e. during April-September 2024). The … Continue reading

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Atoms for Peace was never the plan via Beyond Nuclear International

By Linda Pentz Gunter […] After summarily tossing aside the Paley Commission report delivered to his predecessor, President Truman, and which advocated the US choose the solar pathway for energy expansion, Eisenhower embraced a very different report. In 1953, the Atomic Energy … Continue reading

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‘Truly shocking’: UK has enough plutonium to make almost 20,000 nukes via Nuclear Free Local Authorities

[…] The 2023 Fissile Material Directory [1] is published in June each year by the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition (RECNA) [2], based at Nagasaki University. RECNA has been established for over twenty years as an educational and research … Continue reading

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Nuclear weapons monitors demand environmental review of new bomb production plans via Beyond Nuclear International

By Marilyn Bechtel Four public interest groups monitoring the nation’s nuclear weapons development sites are demanding the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Agency conduct a thorough environmental review of their plans to produce large quantities of a … Continue reading

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UK Stops Nuclear Reprocessing, but Sellafield Plant to Remain Open for Decades via The Energy Mix

Primary Author: Paul Brown @pbrown4348 Seventy years after the United Kingdom first began extracting plutonium from spent uranium fuel to make nuclear weapons, the industry is finally calling a halt to reprocessing, leaving the country with 120 tons of the metal, … Continue reading

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Why joint US-South Korean research on plutonium separation raises nuclear proliferation danger via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

By Frank N. von Hippel, Jungmin Kang | January 13, 2022 South Korea, like the United States, has long relied on nuclear power as a major source of electric power. As a result, it has amassed large stores of spent nuclear fuel and, … Continue reading

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The history of nuclear power’s imagined future: Plutonium’s journey from asset to waste via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

By William Walker Two histories of nuclear power can be recounted. The first is the history of the active present.  It tells, amongst other things, of the technology’s evolution and role in electricity production, its military connections, installed types, capacities … Continue reading

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Bill Gates’ Fast Nuclear Reactor: Will It Bomb? via The National Interest

The principal reason for preferring fast reactors, historically the only reason, is to gain the ability to breed plutonium. Thus, the reactor would make and reuse massive quantities of material that could also be used as nuclear explosives in warheads. by Victor Gilinsky Henry Sokolski … Continue reading

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Japan’s plutonium stockpile climbs to 46.1 tons in 2020, first rise in 3 years via The Mainichi

[…] Plutonium is extracted from spent nuclear fuel generated at nuclear plants, for the purpose of recycling. However, the international community has expressed concerns over Japan’s large plutonium stockpile, saying it could be converted into nuclear weapons. According to the … Continue reading

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New plutonium research helps distinguish nuclear power pollution from global fall out via EurikAlert!

Lancaster University Researchers looking at miniscule levels of plutonium pollution in our soils have made a breakthrough which could help inform future ‘clean up’ operations on land around nuclear power plants, saving time and money. Publishing in the journal Nature Communications, … Continue reading

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