TURNING SWORDS INTO FUEL

The Barnwell plant is not immediately suitable for reprocessing weapons-grade plutonium; it is meant for dissolving fuel rods in acid and separating out the plutonium, uranium and neptunium in the Purex process (well described and easily understandable in R.L. Murray's Nuclear Energy, 3^rd ed., 392 pp., Pergamon Press, New York, 1988, $24.50 at the time of publication). The first two are then used by a fuel fabrication plant to manufacture "mixed oxide fuel."

A fuel rod is a long, hollow metal cylinder filled with fuel ele-ments, one of many in the fuel rod assembly that is under water in the reactor to heat the water by the release of fission energy. The fuel elements inside the rods are at present made of uranium oxide using partially enriched uranium. They have the form of low cylinders, shaped much like an aspirin tablet, only larger. They sit on top of each other like Rolaids in a package.

A fuel rod with mixed oxides is the same, except that the Rolaid package in the tube consists alternatively of one element of plutonium oxide, one of uranium oxide, one of plutonium oxide, etc., throughout the rod.

That is the final outcome; now back to the beginning, the plutonium in the stored weapons. (Incidentally, nuclear weapons are not cannon balls that you can store on a shelf. They contain tritium, with a halflife of 12 years, as an essential ingredient and must therefore be reprocessed every few years anyway.)

Once the weapons-grade plutonium is "denatured" by con-taminating it with the other plutonium isotopes, that should be enough to keep away all rational thieves and terrorists. The remainder cannot be large, for the baloney about "the most toxic substance known to man" and "a fearsome fuel toxic beyond human experience" (both puerile lies) must have done its work. Even so, it would be wise to spike the denatured plutonium by something really dangerous, say, cobalt 60, a strong gamma-ray emitter. If nothing else, it would be worth the irony of having to put something radioactive in with the "most toxic substance known to man" to make it dangerous.

Chemically, plutonium is as dangerous as other heavy metals such as lead or uranium, all of which are also bone-seeking poisons. Radiologically, plutonium dust is dangerous when breathed in large quantities. But even then it leaves you some 15 to 40 years of good health before you may get lung cancer, which is induced much more reliably by heavy smoking.

Since Barnwell is not directly suitable, new denaturing and fuel fabrication plants would have to be built. But they could be built for a fraction of the $10 billion per year that you pay for the opera-tion, the operating, and the operators of the US Congress.

Highly skilled labor for work with plutonium is available in the thousands at Rocky Flats, Colo., Hanford, Wash., Amarillo, Tex., Savannah, Ga., and many other places throughout the United States.

Of course, in the current economic boom with its full employ-ment the idea of thousands of new jobs may be considered bizarre.