THE US has a problem with plutonium. Along with Russia, it is dismantling a lot of nuclear weapons and needs to do something with the fissile material they contained.
So the government is paying a power company to burn it in a reactor to make electricity. The plutonium is first turned into mixed oxide reactor fuel – that is plutonium and uranium – in France, where MOX fuel is common. And the first consignment was shipped back to American shores this month.
Some people object to the idea of shipping plutonium from US government labs to fuel-making plants and then back to…
