Wampum

Use or Lose?

The question posed is this, the agreements between weapons states to reduce their stocks of weapons-grade materials, highly enriched uranium and plutonium, presents an economic choice -- use or dispose the stocks? There are different answers possible for the uranium and plutonium stocks, differences that arise from physics. This post is concerned with the plutonium stocks in the US and Russia.

A few weeks ago 134 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium left Los Alamos and was transported to Charleston. On 20 September the plutonium was loaded onto two vessels operated by British Nuclear Fuels, the Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail, and today those ships are at Cherbourg.

From Cherbourg the plutonium will be taken to the Areva-Cogema nuclear fuels reprocessing complex at La Hague, Normandy, and subsequently to the Cadarache MOX fabrication complex, near Aix en Provence. There the plutonium will be blended with uranium (20/80) into metal oxide mix (MOX), pellatized, and the transport route reversed to the US, where the fuel elements will be burned in a commercial reactor to generate electricity.

The IHT cheerily reports this as "a remarkable display of French-US cooperation" and concludes "if the process goes well, Areva will build a MOX fabrication plant in South Carolina. The entire deal could be worth more than quarter of a billion to Avrea alone."

But the question posed is disposition of surplus weapons plutonium in the United States and Russia, consistent with non-proliferation, and safety. The question not posed was could one shipment of surplus weapons plutonium actually be transhipped in seven transport modes across North America, the North Atlantic, from Normandy to the Alps, and back, without loss to the elements, accident, or theft. Nor was the question posed can the Bush regime "loan" France the equivalent of a third of the Pakistani nuclear weapons inventory in an era of "freedom fries". Nor was the question posed how public resources, the public cost of plutonium, from creation to MOX fuel element delivery at Charleston, are transformed into private wealth, commercial electrical power.

There was a "plutonium economy" fashion in the nuclear power and weapons industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Fast breeder reactors were the rage, of which only one survives in Japan. The original purpose of the La Hague facility was providing plutonium for FBRs, it is a solution for a problem cheap uranium, and the global inventory of down-blend available HEU has solved. The Cadarache MOX facility likewise is build-out made under a set of economic assumptions that are invalid.

The use of MOX fuel for disposition would establish the infrastructure of facilities and financial interests for a long-term plutonium economy and hence pose additional proliferation risks. The US is relinquishing its decades-old policy of not using plutonium in commercial reactors, and aiding Russian plans to build a plutonium economy.

Russia intends to reprocess and recycle spent MOX fuel elements, to recover separated plutonium. The net effect is that the Russian surplus plutonium will not be confined to a highly radioactive matrix so that it cannot again be used in weapons, but only a portion of that surplus will be locked up in MOX form at any point in time, and a MOX fabrication facility could be used for commercial purposes after military plutonium disposition is completed, establishing a plutonium economy in Russia.

The real significance of today's news from Cherbourg is that post-Cold-War disarmament has been hijacked by the Putin and Bush regimes and that stock of weapons-grade plutonium has been converted into a fundamentally more hazardous and weapons-capable stock, to bail-out the nuclear industry. The right answer, if one believes John Kerry that the single greatest threat to the United States is the Soviet-era nuclear weapons arsenal, is vitrification. The US and Russian governments should vitrify their plutonium and store the resulting glass logs. Vitrification followed by secure storage would be a safer, faster, and cheaper way to address the urgent short-term security goal of putting surplus plutonium into non-weapons-usable form and to gain the time needed to arrive at sound agreements on long-term plutonium security issues.

If, one hundred day's after January 20th, you can't lay your hands on the Executive Order that slags-to-glass today's test shipment of US surplus plutonium, and breaks the hearts of the Plutoniam Sect of The International Atom Men, then you've elected George W. Bush, and the single greatest threat to the United States is a WMD presently in possession by a terrorist organization, and disarmament means a marriage of Ready Kilowatt (and investors) and the Peaceful Atom (and investors).

See Will Disposition be the Road to a Plutonium Renaissance? by Arjun Makhijani for some of the policy commentary (December 1997) that today's piece draws upon.

Posted by EBW at October 6, 2004 08:20 AM | TrackBack