Compared to electric generating plants fueled by coal and other fossil fuels, nuclear plants have a very light “carbon footprint.” Current public policy, however, favors solar, wind and other “green” energy sources, largely because used nuclear fuel remains radioactive, and policy-makers can’t decide what to do with it.

What we ought to do is what other countries do: recycle it. Doing so would provide a huge amount of zero-carbon energy that would help us reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

A major obstacle to nuclear fuel recycling in the United States has been the perception that it’s not cost-effective and that it could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Those were the reasons President Jimmy Carter gave in 1977 when he prohibited it, preferring instead to bury spent nuclear fuel deep underground. Thirty-seven years later we’re no closer to doing that than we were in 1977.

France, Great Britain and Japan, among other nations, rejected Carter’s solution. Those countries realized that spent nuclear fuel is a valuable asset, not simply waste requiring disposal.

As a result, France today generates 80 percent of its electricity needs with nuclear power, much of it generated through recycling.

As for concerns about proliferation, the reality is that no nuclear materials ever have been obtained from the spent fuel of a nuclear power plant, owing both to the substantial cost and technical difficulty of doing so and because of effective oversight by the national governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

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