The only way this works is if we, that is, the government, steps in to free up these programmers.

So that's our job and your job to find this common sense solution, but we have to find a solution.

I just think it's an important statement for the Committee to make.

If reprocessing is economically unjustifiable and militarily dangerous, why should any agreement we sign provide advance consent to engage in this activity?

As Senator Markey has already noted, it has one clause that is not in every 123 agreement but that is far from unprecedented.

What concerns me is that by allowing Norway to export our spent nuclear fuel to other countries for reprocessing, we are as a country promoting a technology that is bad for nonproliferation.

It is about a precedent that is set. It is about further momentum which is created towards a reprocessing world that ultimately increases the likelihood of these nuclear materials falling into the hands of those who would use them for…

It always has been and it continues to be where we kind of preach temperance but from a bar stool, saying do not do it, but yet here, once again, we are going to allow Norway to take our materials and take it to France.

Providing an alternative to avoid the reprocessing option, which has proliferation implications, and offering other alternatives, it seems to me, should be explored as a way of solving Norway's problem without actually yet creating another…

I think we do. So I do not understand why, again, we would move to our nonproliferation policy as a solution for a private sector problem that is, from the definition of what they are going to be doing with it, strictly contained within…

As you testified in March, reprocessing makes no financial sense, but it is not only economically unjustifiable, it is also dangerous.

I do not agree that this agreement in any way encourages Norway to pursue such technology.

By saying that we give permission for Norway to take our nuclear materials to France, we are just sending a dual message that would be hard to miss by the French.

At the end of the day, we wind up being part of this with that wink and nod to this ultimately very dangerous technology that some day very well could come back to haunt the whole planet.

My answer would be, of course, it makes it harder to discourage other countries, the deeper we get involved in the industry ourselves even indirectly, as you are saying here.

So we are trying to encourage people, I would think, to not act in a way that is uneconomic, which is reprocessing, to also act in a way which can provide a safe alternative.

So the need for the joint research between the United States and Norway at Halden in Norway appears to be the main reason for a new 123 agreement.

Every time we do it, there should be a good reason for it. That is my view.