Repreocessing rights of plutonium crucial: BARC

Mumbai: Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) has said that reprocessing rights of plutonium was crucial as it would help in dealing with problems of proliferation as well as nuclear waste.

Present nuclear power plants utilise only 0.7 per cent of uranium and the remaining 99.3 per cent is the spent fuel Plutonium, which remains highly radioactive for over 10,000 years in the storage. This Plutonium can be reprocessed to generate power.

It was this consideration that led India to take up a three-stage nuclear power programme where in the stage II --fast breeder programme-- uses the spent fuel from pressurised heavy water reactor (thermal).

The fast breeder reactor which uses highly radioactive plutonium generates manageable waste and most plutonium is converted into useful energy, said BARC director Dr S Banerjee told PTI.

It was this reason that India has been insisting on right to reprocess in the current Indo-US civilian nuclear deal.

If plutonium is not reprocessed, "then we will be doing injustice to mother earth by storing highly radioactive spent fuel in underground water storage."

That is, plutonium which is a proliferation material is made into an almost non-proliferating one. This process is known as the "closed" nuclear fuel cycle and has been adopted by a number of countries, the United Kingdom, Japan and France among them.