There are any number of possible workable compromises. This could be one of them. However, no compromise will be workable unless the Iranians sincerely want to reach an agreement. They may temporarily cooperate in order to get a carrot or avoid a stick, but I've seen no evidence whatsoever that they have made a strategic decision to give up their weapons program(s).

As to the rest of the world...the German proposal may have some merit, if it helps the world finally get serious about using nuclear power responsibly.

"According to your own government Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program."

I guess you are talking about the famous National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was leaked. If you read it carefully and all the way to the end, including footnotes, you see a very different picture.

First, the NIE says they DID have a nuclear program, in violation of many treaties and assurances. If the NIE was correct, they GAVE IT UP in 2003. There's a big difference.

Anything else happen in 2003? If they truly did give it up, it is another victory for Bush's preemption doctrine!

Second, Iranians only gave up the bomb assembly part of the program (which they don't need to restart until they have the fuel for bombs), they did not give up the fuel production. In other words, only part of the program was stopped, and "paused" would be a better word than stopped.

Third, elements of the US "intelligence community" have now started retracting the conclusions of that NIE. I suspect that after some time has passed, the spooks will "discover" that Iran still has a program, meaning that they had it all along.

Fourth, the Iranian medium- and long-range missiles make no sense strategically unless they are armed with WMD of some type. The missile program is still going strong. So is the steady stream of apocalyptic rhetoric.

Finally, the idea of a peaceful, Iranian nuclear power program is a joke. Iran is a country floating in oil, yet due to incompetence and corruption can't even manage to refine enough oil to meet its domestic fuel needs -- how on earth will they manage nuclear power generation which is much more complicated and dangerous?

Richelle,

It is a good question.

I don't see any major problem with burying it very, very deep in a geologically stable location.

True, some of the isotopes have a half-life of 1000's, or even 10,000+ years, meaning they don't even begin to be safe until after that time. Happily, in geological terms, even 100,000 years is a very short time.

On a human scale, 10,000 years is a very, very long time, so it is possible that "anything could happen" (i.e. somebody decides to recover the waste and do bad things with it) and so some argue that it is impossible to design a burial system that is perfect enough. This, however, is utopian thinking, or making the perfect the enemy of the good.

The secret of splitting the atom is now well known. So, the way to approach the waste abuse problem is simply to make the waste so hard to access, that it is easier to create new material (for whatever reason) than to recover the waste. That should be possible, I leave the details up to the scientists. There are at least three approaches that should help:

1) The French system of "glassification" seems promising. It might be even better if they combined glassification with burial, instead of dumping it in the sea, but covert dumping at sea means that it will be hard for any bad actor to discover where it was buried. Radiation doesn't travel far in water. Also politics (Not In My Back Yard - NIMBY) make burial difficult.

2) If reprocessing of spent fuel into new fuel were permitted, it would significantly reduce the amount of waste generated. With reprocessing, the remaining waste could be rendered less dangerous and more manageable (chemically and in terms of radiation and half-life).

The international accords that prevent reprocessing need to be revisited; they were the best compromise that was possible during the Cold War, when both sides generally followed them and forced their client states to do the same.

Today, the nations that everyone is worried about don't really play by the rules anyway; and the rest of us could agree to the type of detailed inspections and monitoring that would prevent fuel reprocessing operations from being used to make bomb material.

3) IEC/Polywell fusion is still in development, but if it ever becomes viable, reactors could be built that literally transmute radioactive waste into non-radioactive elements in a short time (days or months). If you are interested, I can provide some links.

So, when you look at how much technology has changed over only the past 100 years, it is hardly likely we will need to get rid of radioactive waste for much more than another 100-200 (??) years. Either we will have non-radioactive fusion technologies, or biological technologies, or something that will render waste-generating nuclear power plants obsolete.

Meanwhile, all we have to do is make the waste harder to recover than the cost of generating new waste.

Interesting. I had always thought it was part of the NPT but [url=http://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf]you are correct it was another Jimmah jamboree[/url].

Apparently Reagan undid the Carter ban but for whatever reasons (probably because it remains a political hot potato) we still don't do it.

This calls for some of our famous, unilateral action!