Plutonium economy

The world is on the brink of a commitment to the widespread use of recycled plutonium as a nuclear fuel. The advent of a plutonium economy, while holding the promise of a virtually inexhaustible energy resource, brings disturbing questions of risk. After introducing the subject via brief remarks, two separate articles carry the brunt of this special report. The first article, Security Implications of Alternative Fission Futures (by Feiveson and Taylor) discusses the risks and the difficulties involved in coping with them. The second article, Energy Waste and Nuclear Power Growth (by von Hippel and Williams) examines the energy-use scenarios on which ERDA's projections of U.S. nuclear power growth are based. The authors first determine how large a nuclear economy U.S. uranium resources could sustain, then turn to the question of size of the U.S. nuclear economy in the year 2000, and finally discuss the relevance of their conclusions to the uranium supply-demand situation treated as a global rather than as a purely U.S. problem. A separate abstract was prepared for each article