Savannah River Site is honored to have director Tom Clements participate in activities from August 3-9, 2016 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on the 71st anniversary of the bombings.
Clements is making several presentations, including in Tokyo, on plutonium proliferation, with a focus on the U.S. plutonium disposition program and the failed MOX program of DOE/NNSA/CB&I AREVA MOX Services.
Given AREVA’s role in the MOX debacle in the US, people in Japan need to hear about that as effort mount to halt start-up of Japan’s Rokkasho reprocessing plant and construction of a MOX plant at the Rokkasho site. As is predictable, AREVA’s self-serving hand is at play in Japan in the misguided, costly and failing plutonium programs.
Recall that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was made from highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the Oak Ridge site and that the Nagasaki bomb was made from plutonium from the Hanford site. SRS produced about 36 metric tons of plutonium, enough to make thousands of nuclear weapons. Though plutonium production has stopped, SRS remains the site to process radioactive tritium gas used in all nuclear weapons to boost their explosive power. Thus, SRS is a key nuclear weapons site and is still The Bomb Plant, y’all!