Project, defended as having minimal risks, is effort to reduce weapons stockpile.
Critics fear theft of deadly material by terrorists.
The U.S. nuclear power industry, long identified with the peaceful uses of atomic energy, is on the verge of a new, potentially more perilous involvement with key materials used in nuclear weapons. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association, at least two utility companies, Duke Energy Corp. of North Carolina and Virginia Power, are bidding on a government project to run commercial reactors on a mixed oxide fuel, known as MOX, made up in part of plutonium extracted from the nation's surplus stockpile of nuclear weapons. No companies operating reactors in California are known to have bid on the plutonium fuel at this point. Industry representatives maintain that the storage of the MOX fuel will pose minimal risks because the fuel will be quickly processed in the reactors. Once the fuel is placed in a reactor, the plutonium cannot be safely extracted.