Nuclear cooperation

last updated 8 January 2015

Paris

The U.S. sent weapons-grade nuclear material abroad this week for the first time—to France. The U.S. and Russia agreed in 2000 to try to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation by reprocessing the plutonium from decommissioned, Cold War—era nuclear weapons into reactor fuel. But the U.S. lacks reprocessing technology, so it sold some of the plutonium to France. The French nuclear utility will convert the plutonium into fuel rods for power plants and ship them back to the U.S. Anti-nuclear activists across Europe protested the shipment, saying the material in transit would be vulnerable to terrorists. But French officials said they’d been reprocessing other countries’ nuclear material for decades without incident.