January 5th, 2011

This week brought news that Texas will likely be opening its nuclear waste dump in Andrews, near the New Mexico border, to radioactive waste from states across the nation.

Meanwhile, China announced that it has developed new technology to reprocess used fuel from nuclear power plants, potentially greatly extending the amount of power that existing nuclear plants can generate, according to an AP news report. The story noted that the U.S. stopped reprocessing nuclear fuel in the 1970s because of fears that freed plutonium would add to nuclear weapons proliferation. (That was a legitimate concern, but no end run around the problem was ever developed in the interest of keeping our nuclear power processes up to date.)

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