71.   Military shipyards also dot the landscape, containing thousands of spent nuclear fuel assemblies, in some cases housed in corroding steel and concrete containers.

72.   Most spent fuel is stored in water-cooled pools at the plants, and there is a problem of dwindling space.

73.   Northern States says it is running out of space for spent fuel at its twin Prairie Island reactors, near Red Wing, Minn.

74.   Nuclear reprocessing, which takes spent fuel from reactors and turns it into reusable uranium and much smaller amounts of plutonium, is a long-range business.

75.   Once freed from the spent fuel, the plutonium could be diverted to make bombs.

76.   One reason the Energy Department wants the spent fuel back is that even now, it contains materials that could be used to make a nuclear bomb.

77.   One unresolved issue is the storage of spent nuclear fuel.

78.   Otherwise, plutonium should remain in the form of spent fuel, which is not readily usable for bombs.

79.   Packing the spent fuel is more problematic because it is highly radioactive.

80.   One sticking point was what to do with the spent fuel.