Nuclear Power Related Media Thread, page-5989

These concerned scientists seem to have it all wrong and may actually cause more harm than good by opposing this without considering all of the facts, they seem to suffer from Semmelweise's Reflex.



I can see a way where the US will send the Uranium bundle from Used Nuclear Fuel to Canada for re-enrichment and Canada will send "CANDU unf to the US for separation of the Pu bundle for use in the US in a Natrium reactor which will be burnt as fuel, it solves two problems, one is fuel supply for the Natrium in the US, the other is what to do with Pu in Canada, instead of burying it it can be recycled as fuel safely in the US, which in turn saves Canada a problem with what to do with CANDU Used Nuclear Fuel, Canada could recieve back the Uranium bundle after being treated in the ARC in the US attached to the Natrium , which could then be sent back to Canada and be re-enriched into LEU and recover the U238 as future fuel as well.

https://thebulletin.org/2024/03/nuc...essing-plutonium-despite-proliferation-risks/

Nuclear industry wants Canada to lift ban on reprocessing plutonium, despite proliferation risks

By Gordon Edwards, Susan O’Donnell | March 11, 2024

Plutonium is “the stuff out of which atomic bombs are made.” Plutonium can also be used as a nuclear fuel. Reprocessing is any technology that extracts plutonium from used nuclear fuel. In Canada, the nuclear industry seems determined to close the nuclear fuel cycle by pushing for a policy to permit reprocessing—thereby seeking to lift a 45-year-old ban.
In 1977, Canada tacitly banned commercial reprocessing of used nuclear fuel, following the lead of the Carter administration, which explicitly opposed reprocessing because of the possibility it could lead to increased proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world.^[1] That unwritten policy in Canada has held sway ever since.^[2] New documents obtained through Canada’s Access to Information Act reveal that, behind closed doors, the nuclear industry has been crafting a policy framework that, if adopted, would overturn the ban and legitimize the extraction of plutonium from Canada’s used commercial nuclear fuel.
For over two years, documents show that the Canadian government has held a series of private meetings with industry representatives on this subject, keeping such activities secret from the public and from parliament. This raises questions about the extent to which nuclear promoters may be unduly influencing public policymaking on such sensitive nuclear issues as reprocessing in Canada.^[3] But, given the stakes for the whole society and even the entire planet, the public must have a say about nuclear policy decisions.

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Background to the ban. In the months preceding the 1977 ban, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL)—a corporation that is wholly owned by the Canadian government—was seeking approval to build two commercial reprocessing plants. “We are already late in starting,” warned AECL’s chairman Ross Campbell during a day-long seminar on the Canadian nuclear fuel cycle. “Admittedly, [it] takes a certain amount of guts,” said the company’s president John Foster, “because authorities all over the world are proceeding with understandable caution in the face of the bad name undeservedly attached to plutonium…. But plutonium is an extremely useful material, and we will be dealing in it.”