[NukeNet] Sign-on for G8 meeting--no reprocessing, no GNEP

[Michael Mariotte]

Dear Friends,

 

Below is an important sign-on appeal from our friends at Alliance for
Nuclear Accountability. We hope your group will sign this letter, as
NIRS has.

 

Michael Mariotte

Nuclear Information and Resource Service

 

 

We are seeking ORGANIZATIONS to sign on to a letter opposing the Global
Nuclear Energy Partnership and the return to reprocessing.  The letter
will be delivered to the Great 8 Nation Summit (G8 Summit} that will be
held in St. Petersburg, Russia July 14 - 17.  This letter will join
statements written by other NGOs from around the world, opposing
reprocessing and demanding cleanup of the existing radioactive
contamination.

 

Please send YOUR NAME, YOUR ORGANIZATION, YOUR CITY, and YOUR STATE to

jdartana at earthlink.net

 

We are seeking hundreds of US based NGOs to sign this letter.

PLEASE FORWARD THIS WIDELY TO YOUR COLLEAGUES.

 

Please send your response to Jodi Dart, Program Director, Alliance for
Nuclear Accountability

jdartana at earthlink.net 202-544-0217 ext 180

 

DEADLINE: July 10, 2006

**********************

 

Letter for sign-on:

July 14, 2006

Dear G8 Leaders,

As you gather at this G8 Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia to discuss
global energy security, the undersigned public interest organizations
from X countries urge you to reject U.S. President George W. Bushs
proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). Under GNEP, the U.S.
and a few other selected countries would reprocess the worlds commercial
nuclear waste, and use the separated plutonium in fast neutron reactors.
We are opposed to this proposal, because global experience in the past
60 years has shown that reprocessing is extremely polluting and
expensive, and undermines global nonproliferation efforts. Moreover,
efforts to build fast reactors have been safety and economic failures.
No solution has been created to deal with the nuclear waste generated by
nuclear power or reprocessing. GNEP would result in no new energy
supplies for a several decades and perhaps much longer, while investment
in energy efficiency and renewable energy would provide energy now and
long-term without proliferating nuclear weapons materials.

Of the G8 members, five countries (France, Japan, Russia, the United
Kingdom, and the United States of America) have reprocessed or are
reprocessing domestically. Two other G8 countries, Italy and Germany,
sent their waste to France and the UK for reprocessing. None of these
countries have solved, or even improved, its nuclear waste problem by
reprocessing. In fact, reprocessing waste is not easily contained and
has contaminated the global environment. The most radioactively
contaminated places on Earth, including Lake Karachai in Russia and
Hanford in the United States, are from reprocessing waste. In Europe,
both France and the UK discharge radioactive waste into the sea. This
waste has contaminated water as far away as the Arctic, and has been
found in marine life in Norway and Denmark. In the United States,
reprocessing waste threatens to contaminate the Columbia River and the
Savannah River, two of the most important water resources in the
country.

Despite spending more than $100 billion globally, no country has
successfully commercialized reprocessing and transmutation technologies.
All of these programs are heavily subsidized by their governments. A
July 2000 report commissioned by the French government concluded that
reprocessing and plutonium fuel are uneconomical, costing about $25
billion more than a once-through fuel cycle. Last year, 20 tons of
uranium and plutonium leaked from a pipe at the U.K. government-owned
THORP reprocessing plant. The plant, which was losing money even when
operational, remains closed and its future is uncertain. Meanwhile, the
Japanese company, Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd., recently started up its
Rokkasho reprocessing plant, which took 13 years to build and cost $20
billion, three times more than initially estimated.

Reprocessing also makes it easier for terrorists to obtain the fissile
material needed to make nuclear weapons, and undermines nonproliferation
efforts. As a result of global commercial reprocessing, 250 metric tons
of plutonium has been separated and remains vulnerable to theft. This
amount of plutonium is equivalent to more than 30,000 nuclear bombs.

The proliferation-resistant reprocessing technologies currently being
researched by the U.S. Department of Energy are not sufficient to
prevent theft by terrorists, while the plutonium mix that results from
these technologies could be used to make a nuclear weapon. Like the
existing, decades-old PUREX process, these technologies would inevitably
make weapons-usable material harder to track and easier to lose.
Moreover, the materials, technical personnel, technologies and
specialized equipment involved in these processes could leak out, as
they have in the past, to foreign clandestine weapons programs or be
diverted within a states program to make nuclear weapons. The fact is
that any reprocessing technology is more dangerous than leaving the
weapons-usable plutonium bound up in highly radioactive, easy to track,
bulky spent fuel rods.

In order to reduce the radioactivity of the reprocessed waste, it is
necessary to build one fast neutron reactor to every three light water
reactors. Since the early 1950s, governments around the world have made
huge investments into the development of fast reactors, but the results
have been safety and economic failures.

As you consider global energy security at this Summit, we urge you to
acknowledge the economic, safety, and proliferation failures of
reprocessing and transmutation. GNEP would threaten, not improve, global
energy security. Instead, we ask you to put the vast financial resources
that would be needed for GNEP into research and development of energy
efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Sincerely,

Please sign on YOUR NAME, YOUR ORGANIZATION, YOUR CITY AND YOUR STATE

EXAMPLE:

Susan Gordon

Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

Seattle, WA

 

 

Don't forget to sign the Petition for A Sustainable Energy Future, at
www.nirs.org <http://www.nirs.org/>  and send it to your friends,
classmates, colleagues, church groups, and everyone else to sign as
well!

 

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