China Says It Is At Least A Decade From Reprocessing Commercial Nuclear Fuel

Published on Tuesday January 18 2011
 

China's state nuclear power company says it's at least a decade away from beginning large-scale commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing.

The official China Daily newspaper cites an unidentified official with the China National Nuclear Corp. as making the remark at a news conference Monday.

That follows the announcement earlier this month that Chinese scientists had mastered a technology for extracting plutonium and uranium from fuel rods used in nuclear power plants that could potentially provide China with a significantly larger stock of those elements.

Several countries already possess the means to reprocess nuclear fuel, which costs significantly more than using it once and creates extracted plutonium that can be used in nuclear weapons.