Managing Military Uranium and Plutonium in the United States and the Former Soviet Union: Ending Production of Excess Fissile Materials

ENDING PRODUCTION OF EXCESS FISSILE MATERIALS

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.

Ending the relentless growth in the stockpiles of weapon-usable nuclear materials worldwide is a critical aspect of any comprehensive plan for effective management of these materials. The United States and Russia have both ceased producing HEU for weapons, and the United States has ceased producing weapons plutonium as well— although no verification of these facts is in place at present.28 In Russia, three military plutonium-production reactors continue to operate, not because the plutonium is needed for new weapons, but because the reactors provide essential heat and power for hundreds of thousands of residents of nearby communities. Ending this production has been the first priority of the effort to limit further accumulation of excess materials. These reactors, located at Krasnoyarsk-26 (Zheleznogorsk) and Tomsk-7 (Seversk), are graphite-moderated thermal plants similar to the Chernobyl type, with significant safety weaknesses and no containment vessels (though the Krasnoyarsk-26 facility is underground).

In June 1994, the United States and Russia signed an agreement under which these reactors would be shut down by the year 2000 (with verification that the plutonium produced in the interim would not be used in weapons), and the United States was to help Russia identify alternative sources of heat and power. Russia never allowed this agreement to enter into force, as doing so would have created a legal commitment to shut the reactors down at a time when Russia was not yet confident that alternative energy would be available— and when Russia was unsatisfied with what it saw as minimal US assistance in that regard. The United States funded feasibility studies of both conventional and nuclear replacement power sources that analyzed the costs, schedules, and potential financing arrangements for different approaches to providing the necessary power. But neither the United States nor Russia was prepared to provide the financing required to build major new power plants, and MINATOM insisted (over the objections of some of the local authorities) that nuclear plants must be replaced by nuclear plants, not conventional ones.

Ultimately, the two sides agreed in principle to convert the three remaining production reactors to a new fuel cycle whose spent fuel will contain dramatically lower quantities of plutonium (of far lower isotopic quality) and which will not require near-term reprocessing. The conversion will also significantly increase the plants' safety. This conversion will cost tens of millions of dollars rather than the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars required for new plants, but it also means that plants that will never be as safe as modern reactors will continue to operate for a longer period, and the existing plants will eventually have to be replaced anyway when their operational life runs out (estimated to occur in approximately 2010).

After substantial delays caused primarily by turf and funding disputes on the US side, this conversion effort is now moving forward, with the conversions expected to be accomplished during the summers of 1999 and 2000. The US contribution to the project is expected to be somewhat less than $100 million. The United States and Russia are still negotiating a modified agreement changing the 1994 reactor-shutdown agreement into a reactor-conversion agreement (for a useful account of the history of this project see 70).

The second step in this path is a worldwide fissile cutoff convention, banning production of plutonium or HEU for nuclear explosives or outside of international safeguards. Such an agreement would be a major nonproliferation achievement and would mean placing enrichment and reprocessing plants worldwide under international safeguards, including those in the former Soviet Union, which will require a major improvement in MPC&A at some facilities. The IAEA secretariat has estimated that the most likely approaches to monitoring such an agreement might increase the IAEA's annual safeguards costs by $40-$90 million, depending on the types of inspections included (71); the costs of initially preparing older reprocessing plants for safeguards would also be significant.

Unfortunately, since 1993, when President Clinton called for such an agreement and the UN General Assembly unanimously supported its negotiation, virtually no progress has been made. Several countries have objected that an agreement limited only to new production would effectively "grandfather" existing stockpiles, and they have blocked progress until the major nuclear-weapon states and threshold states agree to include negotiations on their existing stockpiles, which those countries have refused to do. No break in this deadlock is expected in the near term. In the interim, a number of analysts have suggested steps toward a "fissile moratorium" in which states would make political commitments not to produce plutonium or HEU for nuclear explosives during the period before an agreement is reached, paralleling the nuclear test moratorium that contributed to the recent negotiation of a comprehensive nuclear test ban (72). The United States, Russia, Britain, and France have already formally declared, in different contexts, that they have permanently ceased production of fissile materials for weapons, but no verification of these commitments is in place. China has indicated publicly that it has not produced fissile material for weapons in recent years, but has not committed not to do so in the future in the absence of a negotiated agreement; the same is true for Pakistan. India and Israel have not made similar statements (72).

It is also important to limit the ever-increasing buildup of weapon-usable civilian separated plutonium around the world. Regardless of countries' views of the best approach to the nuclear fuel cycle, it makes little sense to pay the cost of reprocessing long before the separated plutonium is actually needed for use in reactors, leaving the plutonium stored in weapon-usable form for years or decades at a time. Nevertheless, in discussions of plutonium management among several of the major countries involved, the participating states have rejected US suggestions that they make commitments to cap and reduce these growing stockpiles on specified timetables. Arrangements that would allow utilities to postpone implementation of their reprocessing contracts until they could make use of the resulting separated plutonium (or cancel such contracts with less financial penalty) would be a significant step toward ending this continued buildup.

For example, despite having no commercial-scale plutonium fuel fabrication capability— and therefore no near-term need for civilian plutonium— Russia continues to reprocess at the Mayak plant, adding another ton or more annually to the roughly 30 tons of plutonium in storage there. The Mayak plant's economic survival depends on a relatively small amount of hard-currency income from foreign reprocessing contracts. Providing alternative jobs at Mayak that would offer the same or more income (and providing assistance in dry-cask storage for the countries sending their spent fuel there for reprocessing) could offer the possibility of achieving at least a temporary moratorium on reprocessing in Russia.29 More broadly, many utilities' decisions to contract with reprocessors to separate plutonium from their spent fuel are driven not by a desire for the resulting separated plutonium but by the lack of available alternatives for storage and management of their spent fuel. In a number of countries, political or licensing restrictions have limited the expansion of spent fuel storage capacity, giving some utilities no alternative but to find someone who will take their spent fuel (only the reprocessing companies, to date) or to shut their reactors down. Increased efforts to provide interim dry-cask storage of spent fuel— including reexamination, over the longer term, of the possibility of some form of international site for long-term spent-fuel storage30— would allow utilities greater flexibility in choosing whether or not to commit their spent fuel to reprocessing.

28 The United States has, however, recently restarted one of its reprocessing plants at the Savannah River Site to clean out solutions held within the reprocessing canyons and reprocess certain types of fuel at the site that are judged to be unsuitable for direct disposal. (An additional reprocessing operation, using a molten salt "pyroprocessing" technology, has also been started in Idaho to demonstrate the technology and to process some sodium-contaminated fuel also considered unsuitable for disposal without processing.) The United States has announced that the Pu-239 separated in these operations will be declared excess to military needs.
29 Russia is also planning construction of a massive new reprocessing plant at Krasnoyarsk-26 (Zheleznogorsk). MINATOM would like to be able to change Russian law to permit it to offer reprocessing contracts to foreign utilities under which Russia would keep the waste and plutonium separated during reprocessing, meaning that utilities could send their spent fuel to Russia and never have to worry about it again. This increased incentive for utilities could result in a major increase in global reprocessing. For the moment, however, prospects for financing this plant and for such a change in the atomic law appear slim.
30 While such an international site may not be politically realistic in the near term, it is likely to be essential in the longer term, as many smaller countries are unlikely to be able to find appropriately remote domestic sites for long-term storage or disposal of their nuclear wastes. International attention to the possibility of such a site has increased in recent years, and the possible commercial benefits of such an operation— which could compete commercially with reprocessors in managing utilities' spent fuel— may someday be enough to overcome the obvious political difficulties.