No nuclear meltdowns.

You are certainly on target with your January 2009 headline, "Future of Nuclear Energy Hinges on Recycling Technology."

However, you call the Three Mile Island incident a "meltdown." It was no such thing, it was a coolant leak. TMI had no deaths and went back onstream within a few years, while Chemobyl did cause deaths and has not been reopened because it is still radioactive. For that matter, Chernobyl had a meltdown, not an explosion, and nothing even remotely close to the predictions of additional deaths from radiation have come about.

Highly politicized groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists talk about reprocessing as leading to nuclear proliferation without the slightest evidence that this has ever happened or is even in danger of happening in those countries that have been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel over the decades. There have never been any allegations from responsible sources that Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan obtained plutonium from diverted spent nuclear fuel.

If the United States is ever going to make a serious effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power generation, then nuclear power plants will be an indispensable element in the program. Reprocessing needs to be an essential part of such a program, and as you point out, France, the United Kingdom and Russia have been doing it without incident for many years.

Roger F. Jones

Broomall, PA