As with reactors, the first aim of nuclear fuel reprocessing was to obtain plutonium for bomb making. In 1943 the Clinton Laboratories developed a bismuth phosphate carrier process technique that successfully isolated plutonium. Uranium, which was not needed for the bomb, was removed, along with fission products, as waste. Clearly this was not satisfactory for commercial purposes and after the war attention turned to methods for separating both plutonium and uranium. A number of processes were investigated but in 1950 the PUREX (plutonium uranium extraction) process, developed at ORNL, was chosen for the reprocessing facilities to be built at Savannah River and Hanford.9 The details of this were later released as part of the UN ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme and it is now the standard technology. Processes were also developed by ORNL for thorium fuel.