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Fifty years ago the United States tried to head off a nuclear-arms race by proposing that all atomic materials and production facilities dangerous to world security be placed under the control of an International Atomic Development Authority. This "Baruch Plan" was presented to a United Nations commission on atomic energy June 14, 1946, by U.S. representative Bernard Baruch. Although the plan went nowhere because of Stalin and the onset of the Cold War, it was an initial attempt to address a nuclear dilemma that has survived the end of the old bipolar world and still confronts us today.
The dilemma which may yet confound hopes for ending the spread or proliferation of nuclear weapons is simply this: Fissionable atoms are fungible and can be used for either nuclear fuel or nuclear explosives. A solution might lie in creating an international regime for storing and controlling the spent fuel generated by commercial power reactors. Some 430 reactors scattered over 30 countries at more than 200 nuclear stations have created some 700 metric tons of plutonium, more than twice the amount that has ever been present in the arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Plutonium is created when neutrons released by the fissioning of uranium-235 atoms are captured by "fertile" uranium-238 atoms. In every ton of fuel discharged from a reactor there is on the order of 10 kilograms of plutonium, greater than half again the 6.2 kilograms used in the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
The plutonium in spent fuel is several steps removed from a weapons-usable form. During the first years after fuel is discharged from a reactor, dangerously high radioactivity from decay of shorter-lived fission products serves as an inherent safeguard against recovery of the plutonium. Later, in fuel reprocessing, the plutonium is chemically separated from the uranium and fission products in the spent fuel. Then for weapons use it must be converted from an oxide to a metal and be machined into the "pit" that is at the heart of a nuclear bomb.
Although this is probably too much for a terrorist organization, a nation that is acting for itself or as the sponsor of a terrorist group might well look to a store of spent fuel as a source of plutonium for weapons. Moreover, after several decades, the technical difficulties become less, thanks to radioactive decay. For instance, in North Korea or Iran, a small "hot lab" hidden within a chemical or other industrial complex could secretly recover plutonium from one or two tons of fuel a year.
Nuclear "proliferators" looking to spent fuel to build a nuclear arsenal might not be limited to rogue states acting clandestinely. Even a responsible member of the international community might under some circumstances feel coerced into developing its own national nuclear deterrent. What, for instance, might Japan do if the United States withdrew its "nuclear umbrella" and the Japanese found themselves confronted by an increasingly aggressive nuclear-armed China?
In his Atoms for Peace program presented to the United Nations in 1953, President Eisenhower dreamed of reversing the arms race by establishing an international "bank of fissionable materials." The United States and the Soviet Union would deposit materials drawn from their military stockpiles to be dedicated to nuclear power and other peaceful uses. Although the United States made some symbolic contributions of fissile materials to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) after it was established in Vienna in 1957, the "bank" contemplated by Eisenhower never materialized.
By the mid-1950s, proliferation was already under way. Britain had tested its first fission bomb and would soon be testing a thermonuclear weapon. France and China were readying nuclear-weapons programs. Their first bomb tests would come in the 1960s. Israel and India would be acquiring the wherewithal for nuclear weapons programs during the 1960s, and India would detonate a nuclear explosive device in 1974.
But the rampant proliferation many feared at the start of the 1960s never happened. As a vital adjunct of Atoms for Peace, the IAEA not only assisted its member states in developing their civil nuclear programs, it also entered into safeguards agreements with them to allow IAEA inspectors to verify their fissile materials accounts. Should a diversion to weapons be discovered, the U.N. Security Council would be given "timely warning."
Also, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) negotiated during the 1960s, nonnuclear-weapons states pledged never to possess nuclear weapons, and weapons states pledged not to help any state acquire such weapons. Today, the only countries of proliferation concern that still remain outside the NPT are the three that possess undeclared nuclear arsenals--India, Pakistan and Israel. Three other states of concern--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--actually belong to the NPT.
There have been some recent successes for the nonproliferation regime: South Africa's renunciation and dismantlement of its half-dozen secret nuclear bombs; the uncovering of Iraq's nuclear program by the IAEA, acting under special U.N. Security Council mandate; and, similarly, the discovery of the nascent bomb program in North Korea which that country tried to hide by obstructing IAEA safeguards. Further, nonweapons states are now increasingly under pressure as a condition of foreign nuclear supply to place all of their nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards.
But the nonproliferation regime still rests largely on countries living up to obligations voluntarily assumed when they become party to the IAEA and the NPT. Verification of safeguards is formidably difficult and complex, requiring visits by IAEA inspectors to many hundreds of widely dispersed facilities which include nuclear-power stations, research reactors and plants for the conversion, enrichment, reprocessing and fabrication of nuclear materials. Struggling for years on a "zero growth" budget, the IAEA is stretched thin in the face of growing demands, as in monitoring Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union where security and nuclear record-keeping have been lax.
Still missing are a mandate and capability for international control over production, storage and use of fissionable materials. This is true despite the growing accumulation of these materials. There are the large and widely scattered stocks of spent fuel; plutonium and weapons-usable uranium recovered from dismantled U.S. and Russian warheads and stores of separated civil plutonium at fuel-reprocessing plants, especially those in Britain and France where some 80 tons of plutonium are in storage.
Indeed, the stores of separated civil plutonium are comparable to the amount of plutonium now being removed as pits from U.S. and Russian warheads. The U.S. government is groping for a way to eliminate the pits and to render the plutonium to a form that cannot be readily returned to weapons use. The National Academy of Sciences' Committee on International Security and Arms Control would have the warhead plutonium made no more accessible than the plutonium in unreprocessed spent fuel, and honoring this "spent-fuel standard" would be the goal for the next few decades. Wolfgang Panofsky of Stanford University, chairman of the academy committee, believes the same standard should apply to the plutonium separated in the civil nuclear-fuel cycle.
Technically, the easiest way to accomplish this would be to have all separated plutonium, whether from dismantled weapons or civil stocks, made into a mixed plutonium-uranium oxide fuel called "mox" to be burned in specially designated and safeguarded power reactors. Mox is being manufactured from civil plutonium now, but the British and French reprocessing plants are separating plutonium at a rate that will take up all their existing and planned mox production capacity, with no capacity left to reduce the existing plutonium surplus. For this reason, Panofsky, along with others on his committee, believes that "continuing to reprocess now is just wrong."
Indefinite storage of spent fuel, already the practice in the United States and many other countries, is an alternative to early reprocessing. Consolidating most spent-fuel storage at relatively few sites and establishing tight international control over its disposition would strengthen the nonproliferation regime. The first step would be to create an international organization to build and operate a global storage system to receive all spent fuel that has been out of the reactor long enough (typically three-to-five years) to no longer require the heat removal provided by the cooling ponds at nuclear stations. Consolidated storage, which would facilitate the IAEA's inspection and accounting function, might be provided by no more than a half dozen or so international centers: one each for Western Europe and for Russia and Eastern Europe; one or two for Asia; and one or two for the Western Hemisphere with perhaps one in Canada and the other in the United States.
Most storage would be initially at the ground surface or near-surface in massive, heavily shielded, dry casks suitable also for spent-fuel transport, which the new regime would provide along with storage.
This far-flung regime would be under a board of directors appointed by the participating countries. Funding might be by a user fee similar to the U.S. fee of one-tenth-of-a-cent per kilowatt hour on nuclear generation, which brings into the Nuclear Waste Fund more than a half billion dollars a year. Applied to nuclear generation worldwide, such a fee would produce several times that amount. Private contractors could be hired to build and run the storage system, subject to the regime's exacting standards of safety, accountability, security and transparency.
Although title to the spent fuel would remain with the utilities that generated it, none would be released without an explanation satisfactory to the governing board as to what is to be done with it. In keeping with Panofsky's concerns, there should be no releases of fuel for reprocessing that would tend either to perpetuate or increase surpluses of separated plutonium. The regime's rationale would be to afford plenty of time for wise decisions by the nuclear industry and national and international policymakers as to the best disposition of spent fuel.
Leaving aside the control function which the reprocessing nations would surely resist, the regime outlined above describes a proposal for an International Monitored Retrievable Storage System (IMRSS) that has been developed over the past two years through a series of meetings in Germany, France and the United States. Its organizers include three elders of the global nuclear enterprise: Wolf Hafele, a major figure in nuclear research and development in Germany; Chauncey Starr, president emeritus of the Electric Power Research Institute at Palo Alto and Michael May, codirector of Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control and a former director of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons laboratory.
At the IMRSS study group's last meeting, hosted by the French Atomic Energy Commission in November 1995, it was agreed to try to have the G-7 industrial nations place the proposal on their agenda for future study. As the proposal is now defined, the IMRSS governing board would not be given authority to refuse to release spent fuel to its owners, whatever their plans for it. But if political acceptance is ever to be gained for so ambitious an undertaking, concessions will have to be made to broad public concerns going well beyond those of the nuclear industry.
Not the least problem to be overcome would be acquiring the necessary storage sites. Nuclear-waste storage projects typically meet with opposition from the prospective host jurisdictions, usually with the encouragement of environmental and antinuclear groups. This is true for major nuclear-waste storage and disposal projects in the United States today.
Although little vision has been shown in this matter, the Congress and the White House have the chance to test the proposition that spent-fuel storage initiatives, when clearly linked to important nuclear nonproliferation goals, would gain a new urgency and new political support even from unexpected quarters. Tom Cochran, head of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, would be among those interested. His group has a history of pioneering nuclear-disarmament projects with the Russians.
Planning for a new international storage regime would attract greater support if the U.S. government moved decisively to consolidate its own spent-fuel storage which is now scattered across 34 states at 70 nuclear stations. It would set an example for the rest of the world.
The best place for a U.S. spent-fuel storage center is the Nevada test site where the Department of Energy is exploring Yucca Mountain for a geologic repository. A large tunnel-boring machine of the kind used for the English Channel tunnel between France and England has already cut through nearly three miles of hard, dry volcanic tuff, with no disqualifying features encountered. But building the facility on a fixed schedule would be difficult because of the time required to collect the data for performance models vital to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing. As now defined, the repository would contain radioactivity over tens of thousands of years. But Congress would find technical support for an alternative strategy of going for a repository licensed initially only for retrievable storage.
The international significance of spent-fuel storage at the test site would be enhanced if the IAEA, with the help of the U.S. nuclear-weapons laboratories, made it a model of state-of-the-art transparency, accountability and security. The Nevada center might then become the lead ship of a larger international storage regime. There would be at least a small amount of foreign spent fuel present from the outset. For some years now the United States has been taking back foreign research reactor fuel of U.S. origin because it was made from weapons-usable uranium.
Legislation calling for surface storage of spent fuel in Nevada is pending in Congress, backed by the electric utilities and the state commissions which regulate them. Some early retrievable storage inside Yucca Mountain should, however, be provided lest the ultimate goal of permanent geologic isolation be lost as political pressures from the utilities are eased.
Although acting out of a mix of motivations, Congress should be aware that the United States, as the nation that opened the nuclear age, now has an opportunity to help the world close a conspicuous gap in the nonproliferation regime.
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