Revive nuclear reprocessing

Letter writer Mark Sather (March 14) asks: “Are you aware of how France ‘disposes’ of their own N-waste after generating 80 percent of their electricity from N-power plants?”

The answer is that they reprocess the spent fuel. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains – from 30 years of generating 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy – beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.

The supposed problem of “nuclear waste” is entirely the result of a decision in 1976 by President Gerald Ford to suspend reprocessing, which President Jimmy Carter made permanent in 1977. The fear was that agents of foreign powers or terrorist groups would steal plutonium from American plants to manufacture bombs.

That fear has proved to be misguided.

America, too, should be reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel; and we should greatly increase the number of nuclear generating plants so that most of our electricity is produced using clean, cheap, nuclear fuel, of which we have an abundance.

Paul J. Henry

Colville