Plutonium Dirty Bomb = Stupid, pointless, overblown...
You need to reread the article a little more carefully. It talks about terrorists wanting to make a dirty bomb but doesn't specify any material. It also states that terrorists want to get fissile material (which could be uranium OR plutonium, it doesn't state which) to make something beyond a dirty bomb (ie, nuclear bomb). Seriously, if a terrorist goes after plutonium, or even uranium, to make a dirty bomb... I can't even explain the stupidity of that.
Can you tell me why a terrorist would try to get through ENORMOUS security to get plutonium when they can get Cobalt 60 from medical/dental and food processing facilities without even trying?
The whole point of a dirty bomb isn't to kill, it's to scare and to play psychological games while causing a lot of money to be spent/lost in the cleanup. There was a pretty amazing study done at USC showing the damage that would be caused by a dirty bomb at a US port. If you are interested it's worth the time.
As far as reprocessing, China, France, UK, India, Japan, and Russia all reprocess spent fuel. The article you chose doesn't do much service as there are inconsistencies. First it states that Frances outside customers dropped reprocessing because it did not make economic sense. This is a half truth. It didn't make economic sense to send it to FRANCE to be recycled. Japan actually opened their own reprocessing facilities. Economic factors were part of Germany's discontinuance, but that's partly because they chose not to reprocess in Germany, and partly due to the nuclear rebuttal that Germany went through and are now paying for with energy supply problems.
Next, the article plays some games with numbers and makes it sound bad and is a little disingenuous. According to the Charpin report quoted by your article, reprocessing only raises the cost by about 1%. While it's still a lot of money, the French reasons for reprocessing are to limit waste, fully realizing it will cost a little more. The article makes it sound like the economics are bad so it isn't worth it, while the French say that even though it's more expensive it's worth it.
Next, the leakage discussion in France. The amount of tritium they are leaking into the groundwater is about the same amount of radioactive material that we eat every year from bananas and other potassium containing foods. It sounds scary (and really should not be leaked regardless), but it's not as consequential as they want you to believe.
I could continue to go subject by subject to talk about the weirdness of the article, but with all the nice little facts I found, not to mention who it is written by, I'm not impressed with that article. can we get a different article?
