Article
from
Annual Review of Energy and the Environment
AVOIDING ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN THE NUCLEAR CITIES
Bunn, Matthew, and John P. Holdren. "Managing Military Uranium and Plutonium in the United States and the Former Soviet Union." Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 22 (1997): 403-486.
All the measures described above are essential parts of a long-term program to manage and control weapon-usable plutonium and HEU. None of these efforts will be successful in the long run, however, absent a still broader agenda of reform, including improving the economic conditions of those responsible for nuclear weapons and materials. Desperate people are ingenious in overcoming obstacles; whatever security technologies are deployed, significant proliferation risks will continue to exist if the personnel who must guard and manage nuclear weapons and fissile materials are underemployed, ill paid, embedded in a culture of growing crime and corruption, and confronted with an uncertain future offering no assurance that they will be able to provide the necessities of life for themselves and their families. These issues can only be addressed as part of a broad effort devoted to economic renewal in the former Soviet Union and the establishment of a strengthened legal system able to cope with crime and corruption.
A critical step in that broader effort will be developing new businesses to diversify the economic base of the nuclear cities in the former Soviet Union. Economic collapse in these cities would pose a serious threat to the security of the United States, given the large quantities of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials stored there. The recent suicide of the director of Chelyabinsk-70, one of Russia's two premier nuclear weapons design laboratories— apparently in significant part provoked by anguish over inability to pay his people's salaries— highlights the desperation felt by some in Russia's nuclear cities.
Diversifying the economies of these cities will not be easy. They were created for only one purpose: the production of nuclear weapons and their essential ingredients. By design, they are remote and isolated, limiting the opportunities for trade. They remain "closed cities," meaning that no one can enter or leave without special permission. While these cities once received the best of everything the Soviet Union had to offer, including deep respect from the society at large for their scientific contributions and national defense mission, their economies have virtually collapsed with the drastic decline in central government funding for nuclear weapons activities. (In the United States, the contraction of the nuclear weapons complex has been accompanied by a vast increase in spending on cleanup (so that some sites now employ more people than they did in the days of maximum production), and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on easing worker and community "transition" from government dependence; but in a Russian society short on cash for even the most basic needs, a similar approach has not been possible.) In general, these cities have seen less of the benefits of reform than virtually any other part of Russia. Thus, efforts to develop new businesses in these cities are certain to be difficult and are likely to require enormous creativity, perseverance, and substantial government subsidies.
Some programs designed in part to foster such diversification are already underway. The International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow, a similar center in Kiev, and a variety of lab-to-lab programs are already employing thousands of former Soviet weapons scientists in useful civilian work. (Thousands more, however, are either still focusing their efforts on weapons of mass destruction or remain underemployed.) A recent review by the National Research Council strongly supports the science centers program, pointing out the critical role it has played in providing peaceful work as an alternative to work that might be offered by potential proliferating states and recommending that core funding be continued at least until 2003 (124). Similarly, DOE's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program (IPP, formerly the Industrial Partnering Program), which seeks to provide initial funds to link Russian and US laboratory technical experts with businesses willing to invest in commercializing their technologies, is examining scores of potentially promising technologies (125)--but only a small number have graduated to the commercialization stage, and few if any have yet demonstrated that they will be ongoing, commercially self-sustaining ventures. Both of these programs are making important progress and adapting to new opportunities. The ISTC, for example, has launched a "partners" program to facilitate funding from other government agencies and private entities who want to accomplish research programs through the ISTC mechanism. Neither of these programs, however, is specifically targeted on the nuclear cities, and as of today, there are no mechanisms to support establishment of new businesses in these cities in which US labs and businesses do not play a central role. Similarly, existing defense conversion programs have begun contributing to the shift of some facilities from commercial to civilian production, but none of these programs has been targeted specifically at the nuclear cities and only a tiny amount of funding from them is going to the nuclear cities.
Nevertheless, the prospects are not entirely bleak. The nuclear cities have a variety of diversification efforts underway, with varying degrees of success; in some cases, thousands of people are employed in non-nuclear work, and in others (such as Tomsk-7), employment has actually increased in recent years because of the volume of foreign commercial uranium processing contracts. As a result of an IPP-organized conference in late 1996, a major US-funded feasibility study is under way that is intended to provide an investment-quality plan for the construction of a large silicon plant at Krasnoyarsk-26; IPP and the US Defense Enterprise Fund are involved in financing the initial studies, but the project is intended to be commercially self-sustaining and to employ many of the workers who will lose their jobs at the reprocessing plant there when conversion of the plutonium production reactors is complete (126; M Bunn, unpublished data; Russian institute officials, personal communications).
A large international effort is needed to identify and support new business prospects for these cities. While some successful diversification is already underway, in other cases diversification has had few successes and will require major cultural changes and substantial government financial support. A useful first step might be to organize business development conferences in each of the major nuclear cities, bringing together local interests with ideas for new businesses, Russian and foreign investors, and international banks and financial institutions. The emphasis should be on partnership with private industry, in order to target funds to projects that business identifies as having a substantial chance of success. There are also opportunities for increased US funding for work in these cities on projects that directly benefit the United States. For example, some of the substantial research and development of nuclear cleanup technology now underway could be contracted to Russian experts, potentially improving the cost effectiveness of the development effort while providing new jobs in the nuclear cities.
