The Obama Administration has dismissed spent-fuel reprocessing systems already used in France and Japan because of security and environmental risks.
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Would it make sense to embrace some sort of closed-fuel cycle, with limited reprocessing of spent fuel?
Creating international nuclear fuel banks and shared management of enrichment, reprocessing and spent fuel storage facilities would make nonproliferation sense as well as supporting civil nuclear power in energy-thirsty Asia.
North Korea has said that it will reactivate all of its nuclear facilities and go ahead with reprocessing spent fuel.
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The answer lies in its plant for reprocessing spent fuel, built partly to take used fuel from Germany and Japan (which largely paid for its construction) and partly to produce the plutonium that was once expected to be needed as fuel for fast-breeder reactors, in Britain and elsewhere.
Rokkasho has been seen as a facility that will allow Tokyo to reduce radioactive wastes from its nuclear power plants by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
Still, in a September letter to the United Nations, North Korea announced that Pyongyang's"reprocessing of spent fuel rods is at its final phase and extracted plutonium is being weaponized, " state media reported at the time.
South Korean negotiators had been seeking a new nuclear-cooperation agreement with the U.S. that would allow it to begin enriching uranium and reprocessing spent reactor fuel, arguing these technologies are crucial for Seoul to expand and secure its civilian nuclear-power program.
But China is growing increasingly anxious, both at North Korea's brinkmanship (before the 1994 deal the previous Clinton administration had considered reprocessing of spent fuel as justification for a military strike), and at America's firm insistence that North Korea dismantle its illicit weapons programmes before relations can improve.
Reprocessing the remaining spent fuel rods at Yongbyon would give it one more bomb.
That led the current North Korean president, Kim Jong Il, to order the reprocessing of the nation's spent nuclear fuel rods, to expel the inspectors and to explode two nuclear devices, destabilizing the region, Carter said.
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Reprocessing the recovery of plutonium from spent reactor fuel to make new fuel was conceived when plutonium was valuable.
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