Each of these facilities is federally owned. The only private reprocessing in the US was conducted at the West Valley plant in New York. That plant was closed in 1972 and the separated plutonium was turned over to the federal government, while responsibility for clean-up of the facility is being shared by New York state and the federal government. Stabilizing, containing, and monitoring all the radioactive wastes and environmental contamination created by 50 years of reprocessing in the US could cast taxpayers about $1 billion for every ton of plutonium produced, according to Department of Energy estimates.

President Reagan's Energy Secretary, John Herrington, publicly declared that the US had produced a plutonium surplus even before the Cold War came to an end. Once it did end and arms reduction agreements were signed, President Bush's Energy Secretary, Admiral James Watkins, announced that reprocessing operations would be phased out. The phase out, however, has run into political hurdles at all but the Hanford Reservation, which locked the doors on its last reprocessing plant earlier this year. Supported largely by the desire to protect jobs, reprocessing projects at SRS and INEL have actually been gaining momentum, rather than being brought to a timely and safe end.

SRS is home to the last two reprocessing plants in the US based on decades-old PUREX technology. These mammoth concrete structures, built in the 1950s, were slated to be shut down by the turn of the century. This date, based on the time necessary to complete reprocessing of various on-site irradiated fuels and other nuclear materials left over from Cold War operations, has been extended to about 2002 because of delays caused by safety concerns. Additionally, SRS managers and local community officials are proposing to extend operations as much as 30 years by bringing in wastes from other DOE facilities, and possibly commercial reactors, for reprocessing at SRS.

At INEL, the reprocessing plant operated during the Cold War has been placed in standby and is not expected to operate again. However, a new, smaller reprocessing plant using a new technology which is not yet commercial has been brought on-line. This technology, often referred to as pyroprocessing or electrorefining, was developed as a part of the US breeder reactor program, which was canceled in 1995 because of continuing nonproliferation, technical, and economic concerns. The reprocessing component of the program, however, was kept alive and renamed a waste management operation. This is especially troubling to nonproliferation proponents because this new reprocessor can be constructed in a much smaller space than the old-style plants and as a waste management technology its design characteristics may not be fully protected.

The next year will be a critical juncture in the fate of reprocessing in the US as key decisions are made about whether to move forward with the planned shut down of reprocessing plants or to expand their role. Two opposing views dominate the current discussion. The view most consistent with longstanding US policy is that since there is no longer a military need to separate plutonium, it is time to shut down the remaining reprocessing capacity and implement better techniques for managing spent fuels and other nuclear materials. People supporting a different view propose the federal government's current and future spent fuel management needs as a rationale for extending reprocessing in the US, with the hope that such an approach will ultimately be tied to a revitalization of the nuclear power industry.

Brian Costner is the director of the Energy Research foundation in Columbia, South Carolina.