Nuclear Facts

The Security and Environmental Health Risks of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Must Be Further Reduced

Although the nuclear fuel cycle emits only small amounts of global warming pollution, nuclear power still poses significant risks to the world. In a number of countries, peaceful nuclear materials and equipment have already been diverted to secret nuclear weapons programs, and could be again. Even worse, they are susceptible to theft by, or eventual sale to, terrorists or international criminal organizations.

Storage pools of spent nuclear fuel are likewise vulnerable to terrorist attacks that could disperse lethal levels of radioactivity well beyond the plant perimeter. The accidental release of radioactivity, whether from a reactor accident, terrorist attack, or slow leakage of radioactive waste into the local environment, poses the risk of catastrophic harm to communities and to vital natural resources, such as underground aquifers used for irrigation and drinking water.

There are continuing occupational and public health risks associated with uranium mining and milling, especially in areas where such activities are poorly regulated. And underground repositories, meant to isolate high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from people and the environment for thousands of years, are subject to long-term risks of leakage, poisoning the groundwater for future generations.

All of these problems have potential remedies, but most are not in effect today. For example, current international arrangements are insufficient to prevent a non-weapon state, such as Iran or Japan, from suddenly changing course and using nominally peaceful uranium enrichment or spent-fuel reprocessing plants to separate nuclear material for weapons.

While long-term isolation of nuclear waste in stable geologic formations appears achievable technically, there is not a single long-term geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel in operation anywhere in the world.

Before nuclear power can qualify as a strategically and environmentally sound approach to reducing global warming pollution, the international nuclear industry, the respective governments, and the International Atomic Energy Agency must also insure that:

• nuclear fuel cycles do not afford access, or the technical capabilities for access to nuclear explosive materials, principally separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium;
• the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty regulating nuclear power’s peaceful use is reinterpreted to prohibit the spread of latent as well as overt nuclear weapons capabilities, by barring exclusively national ownership and control of uranium enrichment (or reprocessing) plants in non-weapon states;
• the occupational and environmental health risks associated with uranium mining and milling are remedied; and
• existing and planned discharges of spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste are safely sequestered in geologic repositories that meet scientifically credible technical criteria for long-term containment of the harmful radioactivity they contain.