A nuclear fuel bank is a proposed approach to provide countries access to enriched nuclear fuel, without the need for them to possess enrichment technology. The basic concept is that countries who do have enrichment technology would donate enriched fuel to a "bank", from which countries not possessing enrichment technology would obtain fuel for their power reactors.
The concept of providing an assured supply of nuclear fuel and thus avoiding the need for countries to build indigenous nuclear fuel production capability has long been proposed as a way to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons and, eventually, eliminate them altogether. Austria, Russia, the European Union, the United States, and others have supported various concepts of an international fuel bank. Many non-nuclear-weapon states have been reluctant to embrace any of these proposals for varying reasons.
Read more about Nuclear Fuel Bank: Overview, Proposals, Recent Developments
Famous quotes containing the words nuclear, fuel and/or bank:
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have passed down the river before sunrise on a summer morning, between fields of lilies still shut in sleep; and when, at length, the flakes of sunlight from over the bank fell on the surface of the water, whole fields of white blossoms seemed to flash open before me, as I floated along, like the unfolding of a banner, so sensible is this flower to the influence of the sun’s rays.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)