The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference (NPT Rev-Con) takes place at the United Nations headquarters every five years. The treaty was enacted in 1970, and currently 191 nations have joined it. In 1995 parties to the treaty agreed to its indefinite extension. To a large extent, the treaty was a product of consensus defined by international regimes during the Cold War.
The treaty has eleven articles that rest on three conceptual pillars.
• Nonproliferation: The five nuclear-weapon states (at that time when the treaty entered into force) agree not to transfer nuclear weapons or to help develop nuclear weapons in nonweapon states. Nonweapon states also agree to accept international safeguards.
• Disarmament: As embodied in Article VI, the five nuclear-weapon states—the United States, Soviet Union (now Russia), United Kingdom, France, and China—are to halt the nuclear arms race and undertake negotiations “in good faith” to achieve nuclear and general disarmament.
• Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy: Nations can transfer nuclear technologies and materials to signers of the NPT, and these nations have “an alienable right” to develop civil uses of atomic energy.
The Plutonium Problem
Plutonium makes up about 1 percent of spent nuclear fuel and is a powerful nuclear explosive, requiring extraordinary safeguards and security to prevent theft and diversion. It took about six kilograms to fuel the atomic bomb that devastated Nagasaki in 1945. Unlike plutonium bound up in highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel, separated plutonium does not have a significant radiation barrier to prevent theft and bomb making, especially by terrorists.
Nuclear power involves dual-use technologies that can be used to develop nuclear weapons. In fact, the first major U.S. generator of nuclear-power electricity in the 1960s was a dual-purpose reactor operating at the Hanford site producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
Figure 4.1. The global nuclear power fleet discharges nearly 100 metric tons of plutonium per year. About 20 percent of the nuclear power plants (77) are based on original designs for the production of plutonium for weapons.
One out of five power reactors in operation throughout the world currently is based on original designs to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. In 2015 the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that nuclear power plants generated 380,500 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, which contain roughly 3,800 tons of plutonium.
The most efficient producer of plutonium is the pressurized heavy-water reactor (PHWR). This reactor runs on natural uranium that doesn’t require enrichment, and is moderated with deuterium, also known as heavy water. It doesn’t require shutdowns to discharge spent fuel, which makes it more difficult to safeguard because spent fuel rods are discharged out of the reactor while the reactor is still going. By comparison, light-water reactors require low-enriched uranium and have to be shut down for spent fuel discharging and refueling.
Data collected by the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory indicates PHWRs produce nearly twice as much plutonim-239 as light-water reactors. Designed at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project in World War II, five pressurized heavy-water reactors were deployed at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina and became “workhorses” producing a large fraction of nuclear weapons material for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. They are deployed and sold by Canada as CANDU reactors (short for CANada Deuterium Uranium).1 The PHWR has also become a major concern for nuclear proliferation. This type of reactor provided India and Israel with plutonium for their first nuclear weapons and is providing Pakistan with plutonium for its nuclear weapon. Iran is currently converting its PHWR to refrain from producing weapons-grade plutonium as part of the nuclear deal framework with the United States, permanent members of the UN Security Council, and the European Union.
Nuclear Recycling
Over the past few years, attention to the recycling of nuclear power spent fuel has grown. Fears of global warming due to fossil fuel burning have given nuclear energy a boost; over the next fifteen years dozens of new power reactors are planned worldwide. To promote nuclear energy, the Bush administration sought to establish international spent nuclear fuel recycling centers that are supposed to reduce wastes, recycle uranium, and convert nuclear explosive materials, such as plutonium, to less troublesome elements in advanced power reactors.
The key to recycling is being able to reuse materials while reducing pollution, saving money, and making the Earth a safer place. On all accounts, nuclear recycling fails the test.
In order to recycle uranium and plutonium in power plants, spent fuel has to be treated to chemically separate these elements from other highly radioactive by-products. As it chops and dissolves used fuel rods, a reprocessing plant releases about fifteen thousand times more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power reactors and generates several dangerous waste streams.2 If placed in a crowded area, a few grams of waste would deliver lethal radiation doses in a matter of seconds. The recycling plants also pose enduring threats to the human environment for tens of thousands of years.
European reprocessing has created higher risks and has spread radioactive waste across international borders. Radiation doses to people living near the Sellafield reprocessing facility in England were found to be ten times higher than for the general population.3 Denmark, Norway, and Ireland have sought to close the French and English plants because of their radiological impacts.4 Discharges of iodine 129, for example, a very long-lived carcinogen, have contaminated the shores of Denmark and Norway at levels a thousand times higher than nuclear weapons fallout.5 Health studies indicate that significant excess childhood cancers have occurred near French and English reprocessing plants.6 Experts have not ruled out radiation as a possible cause, despite intense pressure from the nuclear industry to do so.7
Nuclear recycling in the United States has created one of the largest environmental legacies in the world. Between the 1940s and the late 1980s, the Department of Energy and its predecessors reprocessed tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel in order to reuse uranium and make plutonium for nuclear weapons.
By the end of the Cold War about 100 million gallons of high-level radioactive wastes were left in aging tanks that are larger than most state capitol domes. More than a third of some two hundred tanks have leaked and threaten water supplies such as the Columbia River.8 The nation’s experience with this mess should serve as a cautionary warning. According to the Department of Energy, treatment and disposal will cost more than $100 billion; and after twenty-six years of trying, the Energy Department has processed less than 1 percent of the radioactivity in these wastes for disposal.9 By comparison, the amount of waste from spent power reactor fuel recycling in the United States would dwarf that of the nuclear weapons program—generating about twenty-five times more radioactivity.10
Since the 1970s, the United States has refrained from reprocessing commercial spent power reactor fuel to use plutonium in power plants. Instead, intact spent fuel rods are sent directly to a repository—a “once through” nuclear fuel cycle. Radioactive materials in spent fuel are bound up in ceramic pellets and are encased in durable metal cladding, planned for disposal deep underground in thick shielded casks.
Although the United States continued to reprocess spent fuel from military reactors, the “once through” fuel cycle was adopted by President Carter in 1977 for commercial nuclear power. Three years earlier, India had exploded a nuclear weapon using plutonium separated from power reactor spent fuel at a reprocessing facility. President Ford responded in 1976 by suspending reprocessing in the United States. President Carter converted the suspension into a ban, while issuing a strong international policy statement against establishing plutonium as fuel in global commerce. President Carter’s decision reversed some twenty years of active promotion by the Department of Energy’s predecessor, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, of the “closed” nuclear fuel cycle. The Commission had spent billions of dollars in an attempt to commercialize reprocessing technology to recycle uranium and provide plutonium fuel for use in “fast” nuclear power reactors.
Nuclear recycling advocates are seeking to overturn this long-standing policy and point to a new generation of “fast” reactors to break down plutonium so it can’t be used in weapons. Since the 1940s, it was understood that “fast” reactors generate more subatomic particles, known as neutrons, than conventional power plants, and it is neutrons that split uranium atoms to produce energy in conventional reactors. The United States actively promoted plutonium-fueled fast reactors for decades because of the potential abundance of neutrons, declaring that they held the promise of producing electricity and making up to 30 percent more plutonium than they consumed.
With design changes, fast reactors are, ironically, being touted in the United States as a means to get rid of plutonium. However, the experience with “fast reactors” over the past fifty years is laced with failure. At least fifteen “fast” reactors have been closed due to costs and accidents in the United States, France, Germany, England, and Japan. There have been two fast reactor fuel meltdowns in the United States, including a mishap near Detroit in the 1960s. Russia operates the remaining fast reactor, but it has experienced fifteen serious fires in twenty-three years.11
Plutonium is currently used in a limited fashion in nuclear energy plants by being blended with uranium. Known as mixed oxide fuel (MOX), it can be recycled only once or twice in a commercial nuclear power plant because of the buildup of radioactive contaminants. According to a report to the French government in 2000, the use of plutonium in existing reactors doubles the cost of disposal.12
The unsuccessful history of fast reactors has created a plutonium legacy of major proportions. Of the 370 metric tons of plutonium extracted from power reactor spent fuel over the past several decades, about one-third has been used. Currently, about 200 tons of plutonium sits at reprocessing plants around the world—equivalent to the amount in some 30,000 nuclear weapons in global arsenals.13
The key to nuclear nonproliferation is not access to knowledge, it’s access to the actual explosive materials. This is the essential safeguard that’s required. The secrets of how to make nuclear weapons are not so secret anymore; and the technologies, while some are hard to come by, can be obtained. But it’s access to the nuclear weapons materials, especially plutonium, enriched uranium, and uranium 233, that must be addressed.
As a senior energy advisor in the Clinton administration, I recall attending a briefing in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences on the feasibility of recycling nuclear fuel. I’d been intrigued by the idea because of its promise to eliminate weapons-usable plutonium and to reduce the amount of waste that had to be buried, where it could conceivably seep into drinking water at some point in its multimillion-year-long half-life.
But then came the Academy’s unequivocal conclusion: the idea was supremely impractical.14 It would cost up to $500 billion in 1996 dollars and take 150 years to accomplish the transmutation of plutonium and other dangerous long-lived radioactive toxins. Ten years later the idea remained as costly and technologically unfeasible as it was in the 1990s. In 2007 the Academy once again tossed cold water on the Bush administration’s effort to jump-start nuclear recycling by concluding that “there is no economic justification for going forward with this program at anything approaching a commercial scale.”15
But after a period of several hundred years, when the fission products in spent nuclear fuel decay and greatly reduce the radiation barrier, a great deal of plutonium, in the thousands of metric tons, becomes much more accessible. What will we do with all this plutonium we’ve been generating worldwide? How can we even predict what the world will be like three hundred years from now? Figuring out how to geologically dispose of spent power reactor fuel without having to reprocess it, is a key long-term strategic problem, with no easy solution.