I just finished up a tour of France's Spent Fuel Recycling Facility at La Hague.  It was a truly astonishing experience.  This is going to constitute the last chapter of my book, due out in September, but it's worth writing about in the interim.  The French are immensely proud of all this but not too smug, which is nice.  They just say, "Look, you invented this technology, we just put it into practice when you decided not to do it."  They freely acknowledge the American contribution.  The solvent for extracting plutonium from the spent rod, for example, was discovered after a long process of trial and error by Glenn Seaborg in 1944.  Nothing much has changed since then.  The most amazing realization is that the plutonium in commercial spent fuel CANNOT BE MADE INTO A BOMB. It's too poisoned by other non-fissioning isotopes.  That means our entire effort to abandon recycling in order to "prevent nuclear proliferation," initiated in 1977 by the Carter Administration, has been a fool's errand.  There was never any possibility of making bombs from commercial reactors in the first place.  But for that we have backed up the fuel cycle, created a whole articial problem of "nuclear waste," and spent untold billions in trying to create an underground repository at Yucca Mountain that will but rod that are 95 percent natural uranium.  Meanwhile France has all its high-level by-products stored beneath the floor of one large room - about the size of a basketball gymnasium actually - which we visted at La Hague.  It was fun to stand in that room and realize the entire solution to America's nuclear problems lay right beneath our feet.

We're sitting in a Paris hotel now getting ready to come back to the States.  There'll be much more to talk about when I get back and can start sorting this stuff out.  But for now it's tremendously exciting to see a country that has forged ahead with the tehcnology and proved it is everything it promises.