First, ending the stalemates on the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Fissile material in this form is difficult to use in a weapons program, U.S. and European officials say.
Fissile material in this form is difficult to use in a weapons program, U.S. and European officials said.
Argentina, Italy and the United Arab Emirates said they were working to install radiation detectors to check cargo for fissile material.
One reason why many people distrust nuclear power is because they believe it is impossible to separate civil reactors from weapons-grade fissile material.
And we recognize that it is not a problem for governments alone to control this fissile material, it requires good regulations and public-private partnerships to get it right.
Crucially, Iraq has lacked fissile material (enriched uranium or plutonium).
And the result is, as you suggested, that India now gets to produce an unlimited amount of fissile material from something called fast breeder reactors, and please don't ask me what that means.
Hence presumably reprocessing is involved in the final stage, since if the protactinium-233 is left in the reactor it will be at least partly converted to protactinium-234, which is not a useful fissile material.
The Obama administration has staunchly opposed allowing countries seeking nuclear-cooperation with the U.S. to engage in enrichment or reprocessing, because either path could be used to create the fissile material required to create an atomic weapon.
We know that completing a treaty that will ban the production of fissile material will not be quick or easy - but the Conference on Disarmament must resume its work on this treaty as soon as possible.
But, in effect, off-shore, outside of Iran, so that this would satisfy the concerns of others like the United States and the Europeans that Iran couldn't secretly use this process to create a stash of what's called fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
The order invoked the authority, inter alia, of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706) and declared a national emergency to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the risk of nuclear proliferation created by the accumulation of a large volume of weapons-usable fissile material in the territory of the Russian Federation.
Given a start with some other fissile material (U-233, U-235 or Pu-239) as a driver, a breeding cycle similar to but more efficient than that with U-238 and plutonium (in normal, slow neutron reactors) can be set up. (The driver fuels provide all the neutrons initially, but are progressively supplemented by U-233 as it forms from the thorium.) However, there are also features of the neutron economy which counter this advantage.
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The going for a fissile-material cut-off treaty at the log-jammed Conference on Disarmament could be harder still.
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