Clearly, there are several different stories to tell about plutonium. We will start with the future benefits, then discuss the weapons connection, and conclude with the toxicity question.
Fuel of the Future
As uranium occurs in nature, there are two types, U-235 and U-238, and only the former, which is less than 1% of the mixture, can be burned (i.e., undergo fission) to produce energy. Thus, present-day power reactors burn less than 1% of the uranium that is mined to produce their fuel. This sounds wasteful but it makes sense economically, because the cost of the raw uranium at its current price represents only 5% of the cost of nuclear electricity (see Chapter 13 Appendix). However, there is only a limited amount of ore from which uranium can be produced at anywhere near the current price, perhaps enough to provide lifetime supplies of the fuel needed by all nuclear power plants built up to the year 2025. Beyond that, uranium prices would escalate rapidly, doubling the cost of nuclear electricity within several decades.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. The fuel for present-day American power plants is a mixture of U-238 and U-235. As the reactor operates, some of the U-238, which cannot burn, is converted into plutonium. This plutonium can undergo fission and thus serve as a nuclear fuel. In fact, some of it is burned while the fuel is in the reactor, enough to account for one-third of the reactor's total energy production. But some of it remains in the spent fuel from which it can be extracted by chemical reprocessing. This plutonium could be burned in our present power reactors, but an alternative is to use it in another type of reactor, the breeder, whose fuel is a mixture of plutonium and uranium (U-238). Much more of the U-238 in the breeder is converted to plutonium than in our present reactors, more than enough to replace all of the plutonium that is burned. Thus, a breeder reactor not only generates electricity, but it produces its own plutonium fuel with extra to spare. It only consumes U-238, which is the 99+% of natural uranium that cannot be burned directly; therefore, it provides a method for indirectly burning this U-238. With it, nearly all of the uranium, not less than one percent as in present type reactors, is eventually burned to produce energy. About a hundred times as much energy is thus derived from the same initial quantity. That means that instead of lasting only for about 50 years, our uranium supply will last for thousands of year. As a bonus, the environmental and health problems from uranium mining and mill tailings will be reduces a hundred fold. In fact, all uranium mining could be stopped for about 200 years while we use up the supply of U-238 that has already been mined and is now in storage.
Deriving 100 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium fuel means that the raw fuel cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced is reduced correspondingly. In fact, the fuel costs per unit of useful energy generated in a breeder reactor are equivalent to those of buying gasoline at a price of 40 gallons for a penny! (see Chapter 13 Appendix). Instead of contributing 5% to the price of electricity as in present-type reactors, the uranium cost then contributes only 0.05% in a breeder reactor. If supplies should run short, we can therefore afford to use uranium that is 20 times more expensive, for even that would raise the cost of electricity by only (20 x .05 =) 1%. How much uranium is available at that price?
The answer is effectively infinite because it includes uranium separated out of seawater.1 The world's oceans contain 5 billion tons of uranium, enough to supply all the world's electricity through breeder reactors for several million years. But in addition, rivers are constantly dissolving uranium out of rock and carrying it into the oceans, renewing the oceans' supply at a rate sufficient to provide 25 times the world's present total electricity usage.2 In fact, breeder reactors operating on uranium extracted from the oceans could produce all the energy humankind will ever need* without the cost of electricity increasing by even 1% due to raw fuel costs.
The fact that raw fuel costs are so low does not mean that electricity from breeder reactors is very cheap. The technology is rather sophisticated and complex, involving extensive handling of a molten metal (liquid sodium) that reacts violently if it comes in contact with water or air. Largely as a result of the safety precautions required by this problem, the cost of electricity from the breeder will be substantially higher at today's uranium prices than that from reactors now in use.3 Nevertheless, France, England, and the Soviet Union have continued with developing breeder reactors, and several other countries, including Germany and Japan, are involved to a lesser degree. The American program was at the forefront 20 years ago, but it became a political football and is now essentially dead.
On the surface, the opposition to the U.S. breeder reactor is based on the fact that uranium supplies are plentiful and cheap, leaving little incentive for an expensive development program at this time (less expensive research is continuing, most notably in a test reactor at the Hanford site in Washington State). Why, then, have other countries continued to press on with their development programs? First, even if development goes forward at the hoped-for pace, it will be many years before the first commercial breeder can become operational and many more before its use would become widespread; it is better to start up any new technology slowly, allowing the "bugs" to be worked out before a large number of plants is built. Second, we are not that certain about our uranium resources; they may be substantially below current estimates. Having the breeder reactor ready would be a cheap insurance policy against that eventuality, or against any sharp increase in uranium prices for whatever the reason. And third, the breeder reactor development program has substantial momentum, with lots of scientists, engineers, and technicians deeply involved. It is much more efficient to carry the program to completion now than to stop it, allow these people to become scattered, and then start over with a new team of personnel later.
Not far beneath the surface, there is substantial opposition to the breeder because of distaste for plutonium and general opposition to nuclear power. There are also some fears about the safety of breeder reactors, but experts on that subject (of which I am not one) maintain that they are extremely safe, and even safer than present reactors.3,8 They have the important safety advantage of operating at normal pressure rather than at very high pressure, as is the case for present reactors. There are therefore no forces tending to enlarge cracks or to blow the coolant out of the reactor (this is the blowdown discussed in Chapter 6.).
A key part of the breeder reactor cycle is the reprocessing of spent fuel to retrieve the plutonium. In fact, this must be done with the spent fuel from present reactors in order to obtain the plutonium necessary to fuel the first generation of breeder reactors. As long as there is no reprocessing, the plutonium occurs only in spent fuel, where it is so highly dilute (� of 1% of the total) that it is unusable for any of the purposes usually discussed. Moreover, spent fuel is so highly radioactive (independently of its plutonium content) that it can only be handled by large and expensive remotely controlled equipment. It therefore cannot be readily stolen or used under clandestine conditions. Without reprocessing, there is no use for plutonium for good or evil.
It should also be recognized that plutonium plays only a minor role in waste disposal problems, and a negligible role in reactor accident scenarios. Thus, as long as there is no reprocessing, which is the present status in the United States commercial nuclear power program, plutonium issues have no direct relevance to the acceptability of nuclear power.
However, it is my personal viewpoint that it is immoral to use nuclear power without reprocessing spent fuel. If we were simply to irretrievably bury it, we would consume all the rich uranium ores within about 50 years. This would deny future citizens the opportunity of setting up the breeder cycle, the only reasonably low-cost source of energy for the future of which we can be certain. By such action, our generation might well go down in history as the one that denied humankind the benefits of cheap energy for millions of years, a fitting reason to be eternally cursed. On the other hand, if we develop the breeder reactor, we may go down in history as the generation that solved the world's energy problems for all time. Future generations might well remember and bless us for millions of years.
Unfortunately, the people in control are not worried about the long-range future of mankind. People in the nuclear power industry are concerned principally about the next 30 or 40 years, and politicians rarely extend their considerations even that far into the future. Whether or not we do reprocessing will have little impact over these time periods; thus the prospects for early reprocessing are questionable.
The situation was very different only a few short years ago. A large reprocessing plant capable of servicing most of the power plants now operating in the United States was constructed near Barnwell, South Carolina, by a consortium of chemical companies. The main part of the plant, costing $250 million, was completed in 1976, but two add-ons that would have cost about $130 million were delayed by government indecision. Since the add-ons would not be needed for several years, it was expected that the main part of the plant could be put into immediate operation.
At that critical point, the U.S. Government decreed an indefinite deferral of commercial reprocessing. The reason for the decree involved our national policy on discouraging proliferation of nuclear weapons, which will be discussed later in this chapter, but from the viewpoint of the plant owners, it was a disaster. They had been strongly encouraged to build the plant by government agencies — for example, federally owned land was made available to them for purchase — and every stage of the planning was done in close consultation with those agencies. They had scrupulously fulfilled their end of the bargain, laying out a large sum of money, and now they were left with a plant earning no income.
By the time the Reagan Administration withdrew the decree forbidding reprocessing 5 years later, the owners had lost heart in the project and were unwilling to provide the money, now increased to over $200 million, to provide the add-ons. The Barnwell plant was abandoned. It is generally recognized that there will be no commercial reprocessing in the United States unless the government provides assurances that money invested would be compensated if the project were again terminated by political decree, and guarantees to purchase the plutonium it produces. The latter requirement is necessary because the Barnwell plant was originally built with the understanding that utilities could purchase the plutonium to fuel present reactors, but the government has not taken action to allow this and probably will never do so. It is now widely agreed that it would be better to save the plutonium for breeder reactors. Since there are no commercial breeder reactors in the United States and will not be any for many years, this leaves the government as the only customer for the plutonium from a reprocessing plant.
Aside from the idealistic considerations of providing energy for future generations, an additional driving force behind getting reprocessing plants into operation is their contribution to waste management. Power plants are having difficulty in storing all of the spent fuel they are discharging; reprocessing gives them an outlet for it. Furthermore, the amount of material to be buried is very much reduced if the uranium is removed in reprocessing. There is also considerably more security in burying high-level waste converted to glass and sealed inside a corrosion-resistant casing, than in burying unreprocessed spent fuel encased in asphalt or some similar material.
On the other hand, there has been strong opposition to reprocessing. There have been well publicized attacks on its environmental acceptability, ignoring the contrary evidence in the scientific literature in favor of "analyses" by "environmental groups" tailored to reach the desired conclusion. There were widely publicized economic analyses of unspecified origin claiming that reprocessing was a money-losing proposition, even when the real professionals in the business considered it to be economically advantageous.9 There was a considerable amount of publicity for a paper issued by the DOE claiming that the Barnwell plant was technically flawed,10 but it turned out the paper was by a scientist with little experience in the field who had never visited the plant and was confused over differences between reprocessing fuel from present power reactors and breeder reactors; the paper had accidentally slipped through the DOE reviewing process and was disavowed and strongly critiqued by the head of the division that had issued it.11
A major part of this opposition to reprocessing came from those opposed to nuclear power in general for political and philosophical reasons. They realized that it was too late to stop the present generation of reactors, but if they could stop reprocessing, nuclear power could have no long-term future. However, the most important opposition to reprocessing came from its possible connection to nuclear weapons. If there is a connection between nuclear electricity and nuclear explosives, reprocessing is the bottleneck through which it must pass. We now turn to a discussion of that matter.
Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
Everyone agrees that nuclear weapons can have very, very horrible effects and that it is exceedingly important to avert their use against human targets. One positive step in this direction is to minimize the number of nations that have them available for use — that is, to avoid the proliferation of nuclear weapons. To what extent do nuclear power programs frustrate that goal?
If a nation has a nuclear power reactor and a reprocessing plant, it could reprocess the spent fuel from the reactor to obtain plutonium, and then use that plutonium to make bombs. On the other hand, there are much better ways for nations to obtain nuclear weapons. There are two* practical fuels for nuclear fission bombs: U-235, which occurs in nature as less than 1% of normal uranium, from which it must be removed by a process known as "isotope separation," and plutonium, which can be produced in nuclear reactors and converted into usable form through reprocessing. Either method can produce effective bombs, although the best bombs use a combination of both. Both the isotope separation and the reactor-reprocessing methods are used by all five nations known to have nuclear weapons, the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China. (India has also exploded a nuclear device but claims that it was for nonweapons purposes.)
However, there is a subtle aspect to producing plutonium by the reactor - reprocessing method, and to explain it we will divert briefly to review our Chapter 7 discussion of how a plutonium bomb works. There are two stages in its operation: first, there is an implosion in which the plutonium is blown together and powerfully compressed by chemical explosives that surround it, and then there is the explosion in which neutrons are introduced to start a rapidly escalating chain reaction of fission processes that release an enormous amount of energy very rapidly to blow the system apart. All of this takes place within a millionth of a second, and the timing must be precise — if the explosion phase starts much before the implosion process is completed, the power of the bomb is greatly reduced. In fact, one of the principal methods that has been considered for defending against nuclear bombs is to shower them with neutrons to start the explosion early in the implosion process, thereby causing the bomb to fizzle. For a bomb to work properly, it is important that no neutrons come upon the scene until the implosion process approaches completion.
Plutonium fuel, Pu-239, is produced in a reactor from U-238, but if it remains in the reactor it may be converted into Pu-240, which happens to be a prolific emitter of neutrons. In a U.S. power plant, the fuel typically remains in the reactor for 3 years, as a consequence of which something like 30% of the plutonium produced comes out as Pu-240. If this material is used in a bomb, the Pu-240 produces a steady shower of 2 million neutrons per second,12 which on an average would reduce the power of the explosion tenfold, but might cause a much worse fizzle. In short, a bomb made of this material, known as "reactor-grade plutonium," has a relatively low explosive power and is highly unreliable. It is also far more difficult to design and construct.
A much better bomb fuel is "weapons-grade plutonium," produced by leaving the material in a reactor for only about 30 days. This reduces the amount of Pu-240 and hence the number of neutrons showering the bomb by a large factor.
One might consider trying to use a U.S.-type power reactor to produce weapons-grade plutonium by removing the fuel for reprocessing every 30 days, but this would be highly impractical because fuel removal requires about a 30-day shutdown. Moreover, the fuel for these power reactors is very expensive to fabricate because it must operate in a very compact geometry at high temperature and pressure to produce the high-temperature, high-pressure steam needed to generate electricity.
It is much more practical to build a separate plutonium production reactor designed not to generate electricity but rather to provide easy and rapid fuel removal in a spread-out geometry with fuel that is cheap to fabricate because it operates at low temperature and normal pressure. Moreover, it can use natural uranium rather than the very expensive enriched uranium needed in power reactors. For a given quantity of fissile material, the former contains 4 times as much of the U-238 from which plutonium is made, hence producing 4 times as much plutonium. A plutonium production reactor costs less than one-tenth as much as a nuclear power plant13 and could be designed and built much more rapidly. All of the plutonium for all existing military bombs has been produced in this type of reactor except in the Soviet Union where a compromise design allowing both electricity generation and plutonium production is employed (see Chapter 7).
Another alternative would be to use a research reactor, designed to provide radiation for research applications* rather than to generate electricity. At least 45 nations now have research reactors, and in at least 25 of these there is a capability of producing enough plutonium to make one or more bombs every 2 years. Research reactors are usually designed with lots of flexibility and space, so it would not be difficult to use them for plutonium production.
A plant for generating nuclear electricity is by necessity large and highly complex, with most of the size and complexity due to reactor operation at a very high temperature and pressure, the production and handling of steam, and the equipment for generation and distribution of electricity. It would be impossible to keep construction or operation of such a plant secret. Moreover, only a very few of the most technologically advanced nations are capable of constructing one. No nation with this capability would provide one for a foreign country without requiring elaborate international inspection to assure that its plutonium is not misused. A production or research reactor, on the other hand, can be small and unobtrusive. It has no high pressure or temperature, no steam, and no electricity generation or distribution equipment. Almost any nation has, or could easily acquire, the capability of constructing one, and it probably could carry out the entire project in secret. There would be no compulsion to submit to outside inspection.
In view of the above considerations, it would be completely illogical for a nation bent on making nuclear weapons to obtain a power reactor for that purpose. It would be much cheaper, faster, and easier to obtain a plutonium production reactor; the plutonium it produces would make much more powerful and reliable bombs with much less effort and expense.
The only reasonable scenario in which U.S.-type power reactors might be used is if a nation decided it needs nuclear weapons in a hurry. In such a situation, 1 or 2 years could be saved if a power reactor were available and a production or large research reactor were not.13 However, nearly all nations that have a power reactor also have research reactors. Moreover, it would be most unusual for this time saving to be worth the sacrifice in weapons quality.
But obtaining plutonium is not the only way to get nuclear weapons. The other principal method is to develop isotope separation capability. Nine nations now have facilities for isotope separation,13 and others would have little difficulty in acquiring it. A plant for this purpose, costing $20-200 million, could provide the fuel for 2-20 bombs per year and could be constructed and put into operation in 3-5 years.13 The product material would be very easy to convert into excellent bombs, much easier than making a plutonium bomb even with weapons-grade plutonium.
This assessment is based on present technology, but several new, simpler, and cheaper technologies for isotope separation are under development and will soon be available. They will make the isotope separation route to nuclear weapons even more attractive. There are also new technologies under consideration for producing plutonium without reactors, which may make that route more attractive.
The way I like to explain the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation is to consider three roads to that destination: (1) isotope separation, (2) plutonium production with research or production reactors, and (3) plutonium production in U.S.-type power plants, with (2) and (3) requiring reprocessing. The first two roads are much more attractive than the third from various standpoints; they are like super highways, while the third is like a twisting back country road. In this analogy, how important is it to block off the third road while leaving the first two wide open? The link between nuclear power and proliferation of nuclear weapons is a weak and largely insignificant one.*
But that is certainly not the impression the public has received. The great majority of stories about nuclear weapons proliferation involves nuclear power plants. They generally give the impression that without nuclear power there would be no proliferation problem. They rarely differentiate between a power reactor and other types more suitable for making bombs. I believe most Americans think that the Iraqi reactor destroyed by an Israeli air raid was a nuclear power plant, when in fact it was a large research reactor.
Even though nuclear power plants are only a minor source of weapons proliferation, nobody is saying that elaborate precautions should not be taken to see that the plutonium in them is not used for that purpose. The programs for dealing with that problem are known as "safeguards". They are administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) based in Vienna. The IAEA has teams of inspectors trained and equipped to detect diversion of plutonium. In nations subject to safeguards programs, the IAEA has access to all nuclear power plants, reprocessing plants, and other facilities involved in handling plutonium. (The principal other facility would be for fabricating plutonium fuel for use in breeder reactors or perhaps in present reactors.) There has been an impressive development in techniques and equipment for carrying out these inspections. For example, the Barnwell reprocessing plant developed an automatic computer-controlled system that gives a warning in less than an hour if any plutonium in the plant should not be where it is supposed to be. With such measures and IAEA inspectors on the scene or making unannounced visits, it would be very difficult for a nation to divert plutonium from its nuclear power program without the rest of the world knowing about it long before the material could be converted into bombs.
These safeguards would be much easier to circumvent with a production or research reactor or with an isotope separation plant. These are much smaller operations with far less support needed from foreign suppliers; it would not be difficult to build them clandestinely. The IAEA safeguards system thus does much more to block off the twisting back country road than the super highways.
Nonproliferation Politics
One would have thought that these safeguards would be enough attention paid to the back country road, but the Carter Administration saw fit to go a step further. It decided to try to prevent the acquisition of reprocessing technology by nonnuclear weapons nations. As you may recall, reprocessing is a bottleneck that must be passed if nuclear power plants are to be used to make bomb materials; thus the goal of the government was, in principle, a desirable one. However, the method for implementing it was disastrous.
At that time (1977), Germany was completing a deal to set up a reprocessing plant in Brazil, Japan was building a plant, and France was negotiating the sale of plants to Pakistan and Korea. The Carter goal was to stop these activities through moral and political pressure. To set the moral tone for this effort — essentially to "show that our heart is in the right place" — he decided to defer indefinitely the reprocessing of commercial nuclear fuel in the United States.* This was the move that prevented the Barnwell plant from operating.
There were several problems with this approach. One was that the U.S. Government continued to do reprocessing in its military applications program, which was something of a dilution of the high moral tone being advertised. Another was that Germany had just won the Brazilian contract after stiff bidding competition with U.S. firms. The Germans therefore interpreted the U.S. initiative as sour grapes over the loss of business. But a much bigger problem arose from the political pressure used: the United States delayed and threatened to stop shipments of nuclear fuel to nations that would not cooperate.
American manufacturers had built up a thriving export business of selling reactors to countries all over the world. Part of the deals was a guaranteed future supply of fuel for the reactors; this meant U.S. Government participation in the contracts, because it possessed the only large-scale facilities for isotopic enrichment of uranium. These sales contracts had no clauses allowing interruption of the fuel supply — no one would spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a power plant without a guaranteed fuel supply — so the delays and threatened withholding of shipments by the United States represented a direct and illegal breach of contract. Even nations with no interest in reprocessing were deeply upset by the very principle of this action. I remember sitting in a frenzied session of a meeting in Switzerland on this subject. The session was in German, for the benefit of Swiss journalists, and I did not understand much of it, but I kept hearing the word "nonproliferationpolitik" accompanied by expressions of intense anger and banging on the table. At one point Yugoslavia, which purchased a Westinghouse reactor, was close to breaking off diplomatic relations with the United States over this issue.
Not only was withholding fuel shipments a breach of contract, but it was a violation of the International Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons. That treaty states that a nonweapons nation that signs the treaty is entitled to a secure and uninterrupted supply of fuel for its power reactors. Thus the United States became the first nation to violate that treaty, which is the most important safeguard the world has against proliferation. Incidentally, this furor in Europe, Asia, and South America over the Carter initiative received virtually no media coverage in this country.
But the worst problem with the Carter initiative was that it failed to achieve much in the way of results. The United States had enough political leverage over South Korea to force that country to cancel its purchase of a reprocessing plant. France cancelled its sale to Pakistan, probably in recognition of the fact that Pakistan had expressed ambitions for building nuclear weapons, but perhaps also partly as a result of American political pressure. However, the German deal with Brazil was not cancelled in spite of constant political pressure, including several face-to-face meetings between President Carter and German Chancellor Schmidt. The Japanese reprocessing plant was completed and started up. No other reprocessing activity anywhere in the world except in the United States was stopped by the Carter initiative.
While the Carter initiative had little impact on the international proliferation problem, it did have two very important negative effects on this country: it prevented the start-up of the Barnwell plant, as discussed earlier, which has had a long-lasting devastating effect on commercial reprocessing in the United States; and it has completely ruined the U.S. reactor export business. Several nuclear power plants are purchased by foreign countries every year, and at one time, American companies got the lion's share of the business. In recent years, however, the United States has become universally regarded as an unreliable supplier. France and Germany get nearly all of the business. The Soviet Union and Western Europe have become important international suppliers of fuel.
But perhaps the most disturbing effect of our national nonproliferation politics was that it caused us to lose most of our influence in international nonproliferation efforts. Before 1977, the United States played leading roles in all international programs and planning to discourage proliferation. We were the leading force in drawing up the international nonproliferation treaty and in getting it ratified by most nations of the world. We led the way in seeking and developing technological methods of assuring compliance, and of limiting problems. However, since the United States "went its own way," we have lost much of our credibility and have had much diminished influence in international nonproliferation programs.
In trying to understand the failure of the Carter effort to stop the spread of reprocessing technology, it is important to consider how effective it might be in stopping weapons proliferation. One obvious limitation was that it was designed only to obstruct the back country road, doing little to obstruct the two main highways to proliferation. Most of the world outside the United States recognized that point and, hence, regarded the Carter initiative contemptuously.
If a nation decides to develop nuclear weapons, lack of reprocessing facilities would hardly stop it. Fourteen nations now have such facilities, and others would have little difficulty in developing them. A commercial reprocessing plant designed to operate efficiently and profitably with minimal environmental impact is a rather expensive and complex technological undertaking, but the same is not true for a plant intended for military use where the only concern is obtaining the product. Construction of such a plant requires no secret information and no unusual skills or experience. Details of reprocessing technology have been described fully in the open literature. It was estimated13 in 1977 that a crude facility to produce material for a few bombs could be put together and operated by five people at a cost of $100,000. A plant capable of longer-term production of material for eight bombs per year could be built and operated by 15 people, half of them engineers and the other half technicians, at a cost of $2 million. Either of these plants, or anything in between, could probably be built and operated clandestinely.
Thus, stopping reprocessing of commercial power reactor fuel is hardly an effective way of preventing weapons proliferation, and it is not widely viewed as such outside of the United States. On the other hand, reprocessing provides an important source of fuel for present reactors that could tide a needy nation over for a few years in an emergency. It is, furthermore, the key to a future system of breeder reactors which is the only avenue open to many nations for achieving energy independence. Unlike this country, with its abundant supplies of coal, oil, gas, rich uranium ores, and shale oil potential, many nations are very poor in energy resources. These include not only heavily industrialized nations like France and Japan, but nations aspiring to that status like Brazil, Argentina, and Taiwan. It is not difficult to understand why these nations are unwilling to trust their very survival to the mercy of Arab sheiks or the whims of American presidents for the indefinite future. They desperately want some degree of energy independence, and reprocessing technology is the key to the only way they can foresee of ever achieving it.
Above and beyond the practical difficulties U.S. nonproliferation policy has encountered, we might ask how important is its goal. There never was any hope that it could prevent a major industrialized nation from developing a nuclear weapons arsenal — there are now five nations with such arsenals. It could only hope to prevent a less-developed country like Brazil from taking such a step. By signing the international nonproliferation treaty, Brazil has renounced any such intentions. A Brazilian reprocessing plant would be subject to very close scrutiny by IAEA inspectors to see that its plutonium is not diverted for use in weapons. Add to this the facts that the plutonium it produces is ill-suited for use in weapons, and that a separate, secret plant could be built and used to produce weapons grade plutonium, and it seems clear that stopping a Brazilian reprocessing plant will not be the action that prevents that nation from developing nuclear weapons.
But suppose it did allow Brazil to develop a small arsenal of nuclear weapons — what could it do with it? It could threaten its neighbors, but they could easily be guaranteed against attack by the large nuclear weapons powers; Japan, Germany, and Scandinavia, for example, do not feel threatened by Russian or Chinese nuclear weapons because they are covered by the U.S. umbrella. There are few places in the world where a small nation could use a nuclear bomb these days without paying a devastating price for its action.
If one attempts to develop scenarios that might lead to a major nuclear holocaust, fights over energy resources such as Middle East oil must be at or near the top of the list. Anything that can give all of the major nations secure energy sources must therefore be viewed as a major deterrent to nuclear war. Reprocessing of power reactor fuel can provide this energy security, and therefore has an important role in averting a nuclear holocaust. That positive role of reprocessing is, to most observers, more important than any negative role it might play in causing such a war through proliferation of nuclear weapons.
After all of this discussion of proliferation, it is important to recognize that the use of nuclear power in the United States has no connection to that issue. If we stopped our domestic use of nuclear power, this would not deter a Third World nation from obtaining nuclear weapons, or conversely, use of nuclear power in the United States in no way aids such a nation in obtaining them. The only possible problems occur in transfer of our technology to those countries.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the proliferation problem is the utter lack of information on it that has been made available to the American public. I doubt if more than 1% of the public has any kind of balanced understanding of the subject. Based on the little information provided to them, most people have a distinct impression that our use of nuclear power adds substantially to the risk of nuclear war.
This impression has been cemented by the tactic of anti-nuclear activists to tie nuclear weapons and nuclear power together in one package, purposely making no effort to distinguish between the two. Consider this from an Evans and Novak column after the November 1982 election: "Eight states and the District of Columbia voted for a nuclear freeze [on weapons], but the one crucial issue on any ballot — Maine's referendum on [shutting down] the Yankee Power Plant — the pronukes won." The terms "antinuke" and "pronuke" are often used interchangeably in referring to nuclear weapons and power plants for generating electricity.
A Tool for Terrorists?
A rather separate issue linking nuclear power with nuclear weapons is the possibility that terrorists might steal plutonium to use for making a bomb. This issue was first brought to public attention in 1973 in a series of articles by John McPhee in the New Yorker magazine later published as a book.14 He reported on interviews with Dr. Ted Taylor, a former government bomb designer. Taylor had been worried about this problem for some time and had tried to convince government authorities to tighten safeguards on plutonium, which were quite lax at that time, but he could not stir the bureaucracy. The McPhee articles provided an instant solution to the lax safeguards problem — over the next 2 years, they were dramatically tightened. They also made Ted Taylor an instant hero of the antinuclear movement and the terrorist bomb issue stayed in the limelight for several years.
Let's take a look at that issue. To begin, consider some of the obstacles faced by terrorists in obtaining and using a nuclear bomb.15 Their first problem would be to steal at least 20 pounds of plutonium, either from some type of nuclear plant or from a truck transporting it. Any plant handling this material is surrounded by a high-security fence, backed up by a variety of electronic surveillance devices, and patrolled by armed guards allowing entry only by authorized personnel. The plutonium itself is kept in a closed-off area inside the plant, again protected by armed guards who allow entry only to people authorized to work with that material. These people must have a security clearance, which means that they are investigated by the FBI for loyalty, emotional stability, personal associations, and other factors that might suggest an affinity for terrorists activities. When they leave the area where plutonium is stored or used, they must pass through a portal equipped to detect the radiation emitted by plutonium. It will readily detect as little as 0.01 percent of the quantity needed to make a bomb, even if it were in a metal capsule swallowed by the would-be thief. Plants conduct frequent inventories designed to determine if any plutonium is missing. In some plants these inventories are carried on continuously under computer control so as to detect rapidly any unauthorized diversion. There are elaborate contingency plans for a wide variety of scenarios.16 When it is transported, plutonium is carried in an armored truck with an armed guide inside. It is followed by an unmarked escort vehicle carrying an armed guard. All guards are expert marksmen qualified periodically by the National Rifle Association.
The truck and the escort vehicles have radio telephones to call for help if attacked, and they report in regularly as they travel. There are elaborate plans for countermeasures in the event of a wide variety of problems.17
The only significant transport of plutonium in connection with nuclear power would be of ton-size fuel assemblies in which the plutonium is intimately mixed with large quantities of uranium from which it would have to be chemically separated before use in bombs. If terrorists are interested in stealing some plutonium, it would be much more favorable for them to steal it from some aspect of our military weapons program where it is frequently in physical sizes and chemical forms easier to steal and much easier to convert into a bomb. That also would give them weapons-grade plutonium, which is much more suitable for bomb making than the reactor-grade plutonium from the nuclear power industry. It would be even better for them to steal some high-purity U-235 (which is not used in nuclear power activities) from our military program, since that is very much easier to make into a bomb. Of course, their best option would be to steal an actual military bomb.
It should be recognized that all of this technology for safeguarding plutonium is now used only for material in the government weapons program. There is essentially no plutonium yet associated with nuclear power. One might wonder how it would be possible to maintain such elaborate security if all of our electricity were derived from breeder reactors fueled by plutonium. The answer is that the quantities of plutonium involved would not be very large. All of the plutonium in a breeder reactor would fit inside a household refrigerator,* and all of the plutonium existing at any one time in the United States would fit into a home living room. The great majority of it would be inside reactors or in spent fuel, where the intense radiation would preclude the possibility of a theft. As in the case of radioactive waste, the small quantities involved make very elaborate security measures practical.
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