Fred Barker is an independent nuclear analyst. He is also a member of the Government's Radioactive Waste Management
This is surely the time for all advocates of nuclear power to abandon their allegiance to the reprocessing of spent fuel. After all, reprocessing - and the transport and use of the separated plutonium - increases the chance of catastrophe, raises costs, encourages secrecy and exacerbates controversy. To stand a chance of ever building new nuclear power stations again in the UK, it is in the industry's own interest to engineer the swiftest practical switch to an alternative strategy based on the storage of spent fuel.
