Some Press, page-32

From the same document
https://www.wise-uranium.org/epusa.html#PADUCAHSILEX

Critics demand assessment of proliferation risks of laser enrichment

In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by the ton. That might be good news for the nuclear industry. But critics fear that if the work succeeds and the secret gets out, rogue states and terrorists could make bomb fuel in much smaller plants that are difficult to detect. Iran has already succeeded with laser enrichment in the lab, and nuclear scientists worry that GE's accomplishment might inspire Tehran to build a plant easily hidden from the world's eyes.
Backers of the laser plan call those fears unwarranted and praise the technology as a windfall for a world increasingly leery of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. But critics want a detailed risk assessment. Recently, they petitioned Washington for a formal evaluation of whether the laser initiative could backfire and speed the global spread of nuclear arms.
"We're on the verge of a new route to the bomb," said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised President Clinton and now teaches at Princeton University. "We should have learned enough by now to do an assessment before we let this kind of thing out." (Boston Globe Aug. 21, 2011)

Proliferation risks from laser enrichment technology exceed benefits, scientists sayThe US Congress should take the lead on discouraging efforts to advance uranium-enrichment technology, argue Francis Slakey and Linda R. Cohen in an Opinion piece in this week's Nature. They believe that the newest laser enrichment technology - called separation of isotopes by laser excitation (SILEX) - offers more potential risks than benefits. It is not critical for expansion of the nuclear power industry today, or in a future where greenhouse-gas emissions are tightly capped and the nuclear industry favoured. Capital costs and regulatory policies will determine the size of that industry. "Rather, the development and potential risk of misappropriation of an enrichment facility too small and efficient to be detected could be a game changer for further nuclear proliferation," say the duo.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is considering an application to operate a full-scale commercial SILEX plant in North Carolina; this is open to public petition until 15 March. A final decision is expected to take at least another year. Slakey and Cohen urge Congress to require that proliferation risks be evaluated as part of the NRC licensing process, starting with the SILEX application. If the proliferation risks of such technologies beyond the licensee's control are deemed too high, requested users should not be licensed, they say. Such a barrier would discourage commercial research and development in this area.

Opinion: Stop laser uranium enrichment, by Francis Slakey and Linda R. Cohen, in: NATURE Vol.464 No.7285, 4 March 2010, pp 32-33