Year
1999
Abstract
On April 7, 1977, President Carter announced his policy Carter to defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Many of us in the nuclear community have wondered just what led up to this policy. Along with other Americans, we often wonder how major government decisions are actually made. Who put the ideas together and who made the case against reprocessing? How much of this was Jimmy Carter's own thinking? Who drafted his speeches? How much of it was politics? During the Presidential campaign, Carter's pollster found that proliferation was a concern, but only if specific question on it prompted a response. And what had President Ford been doing? Ford had actually used quiet diplomacy to slow international nuclear deals in Pakistan, Korea and Brazil. President Ford supported nuclear power, but five days before the 1976 election, he suddenly announced a \"hold on reprocessing.\" How did that come about, and what did it mean? What role did secrecy play? Weapons technology was classified. However, basic nuclear physics was textbook. Was Ted Taylor right about anybody building a bomb out of any mixture of plutonium isotopes? Is that all there is to the story? Would a nation divert it from its commercial fuel cycle? What is the verdict on this policy now, 22 years later? Does it influence our energy future? And what impact does it have on the safe disposition of excess weapons plutonium?