The Petition
Reversing a thirty-year practice of not separating nuclear bomb-grade material from nuclear waste due to cost and proliferation concerns, the Bush Administration in February 2006 unveiled its plans for reprocessing U.S. and foreign nuclear waste as part of its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program. Dubbed a non-proliferation initiative that will address the problem of nuclear weapons, GNEP contains several useful provisions for reducing the risks of nuclear proliferation such as the establishment of an international fuel bank by supplier countries and the take-back of spent fuel from recipient countries. However, as part of this initiative, the Bush administration is forging ahead with plans to build a full-scale commercial reprocessing plant and fast reactor that would separate from nuclear waste the material necessary to make nuclear weapons. The Department of Energy is seeking sites for these full-scale facilities even before the commercially-viable and proliferation-resistant technology is available which would be many decades at best. This effort to reprocess nuclear waste at a time when the United States is seeking to prevent the spread of this sensitive technology weakens nuclear non-proliferation efforts to stop other countries from engaging in this practice and would make available material to terrorists seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
