Management of Plutonium and the Future of Nuclear Power

In May 1979 I first met Andre Dmitreyvich Sakharov at his apartment on Tsaicholova Street. I had three matters to discuss. One was how to help Yuri Orlov who was then in prison camp in Permsk; the second was about our new results on b decays that were just coming from the Cornell storage ring CESR, and the last was about an article he had written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on nuclear power. I wanted to know whether he had changed his support for nuclear power because of the Three Mile Island accident 6 weeks earlier. He had not. I was glad to find that his thinking was similar to, and reinforced my own. It seems appropriate therefore that I talk about developments at this memorial meeting.

Plutonium was discovered by McMillan and Seaborg and they were awarded the Nobel prize for this discovery in 1957. It is a a useful material that can bring great advantages to mankind but is dangerous because it can be misused and be a source of war, suffering and perhaps the end of civilization. For the latter reason it is regarded by many in the US public as the embodiment of evil, and the breeder reactor has become a symbol for public concern about nuclear power. Useful because it is a way to unlock the energy available in uranium 238 and put it to the service of man. Dangerous because a small quantity - merely 5 kg - suffices to make a nuclear fission bomb of considerable explosive power. In the last two years two committees in America have examined the question of how to prevent the plutonium from getting into "unauthorized" hands. The one, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) chaired by Pief Panofsky, addressed how to dispose of "weapons grade" plutonium declared surplus to the excessively large arsenals of Russia and America. They believed that presents a clear and present danger to the United States, mainly because they were uncertain of the reliability of the Russian security. President Yeltsin's proposal for an internationally monitored plutonium storage facility in the Urals might help in this regard. The second committee of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), chaired by Glenn Seaborg and Richard Kennedy addressed the management of all plutonium including that from nuclear power. The second committee was primarily composed of persons who had positions of responsibility in the US, but also in Europe and even in Russia, and I had the honor of being merely an academic - perhaps a token one. I will discuss the reports of these committees and make an appeal for immediate action.

Plutonium is a key element in present plans for nuclear power. 30% of the electricity from light water reactors comes from fission of plutonium and it is a hazardous element in the waste. The world must come to an understanding and agreement on how to manage this material in future. It is not enough to ban its use, because we can produce more. We also have to control the way of producing it. Before 1975 there were coherent plans in much of the world for a nuclear fuel cycle which for brevity I will call Fermi's dream. Uranium ore would be processed to form uranium metal, burning the uranium 235 in an electric power producing reactor, reprocessing the fuel to separate the uranium 235 and plutonium 239 for use in subsequent reactors. If the reactor is a fast neutron reactor, other transuranic elements can also be broken up by fission. All that would be left for subsequent waste disposal would be fission products themselves, almost all with half lives of 30 years or less. The fast neutron reactor of preference was the liquid sodium cooled fast reactor. I note that the Experimental Breeder Reactor I was the first to generate electricity - enough to power a small town in Idaho. With this it was envisaged that all the energy in uranium, including both isotopes could be unlocked. Then low grade uranium ores could be used and there would be fuel forn 100,000 years.

There are three reasons why I am interested in nuclear power, and other environmentalists should be:

(1) The major alternate to nuclear power is the burning of coal which inevitably produces air pollution. Even after the controls of the last century, many scientists believe that fine (probably acid) particles cause premature death for 70,000 people a year in the USA and proportionately elsewhere. Nuclear power in ordinary operation has no important emissions.

(2) The burning of any fossil fuel produces carbon dioxide, which probably changes the earth's greenhouse, and may induce major climate change. At the Rio de Janiero in 1991 and in Berlin in 1995 the world's politicians agreed to study this.

(3) One requirement of an energy system is its sustainability. It is important that one has enough fuel for the foreseeable future. Fermi's dream of a breeder reactor encompassed this. No other energy source does at the present time. Distinguished Russians emphasized this. Pietr Kapitza mentioned this several times in the 1970s. Sakharov discussed it in his "Bulletin" article, and again at the Conference on a Nuclear Free World in Moscow in February 1987.

It is useful to distinguish 3 different forms in which plutonium appears.

WEAPONS GRADE plutonium is chemically pure and the isotopic purity is 95% or more pure plutonium 239. It is comparatively "easy" to make a bomb from this material and all known stockpiled weapons use it.

SPENT FUEL is the fuel after use in a reactor together with all fission products and actinides. It needs chemical processing to enable a bomb to be made.

REACTOR GRADE plutonium is chemically pure plutonium but it has isotopic purity corresponding to staying in a reactor a long tome: typically 25% Pu 240. It was hoped that the presence of Pu 240 would make it harder to make a nuclear weapon, because of "preignition" by the spontaneous fissions.

In the early 1970s problems appeared in the Fermi dream. The distinction between weapons grade and reactor grade plutonium began to vanish. Military secrecy forbad details from being made public, but in the 1990s bomb designers told us that they can design a bomb with isotopic purity as low as 50%. By 1975 It was realized that the existence of many tons of chemically separated plutonium might lead to a possibility of theft of enough material to make a nuclear bomb. The presence in the hands of a small country, or of a terrorist group, is unacceptable and would be a nightmare. This led a study by the Ford Foundation study and the decision of President Carter to abandon the plans in the US for nuclear reprocessing, and slow the development of a breeder reactor. Since that time the US has had no coherent policy about nuclear energy.

Governments and environmental groups have ignored the air pollution warnings, preferring what I call a "conspiracy to whitewash coal". This may be changing. A recent report from the National Resources Defence Council in the USA takes the mortality coefficients from the Harvard School of Public Health and calculates city by city, confirming the 70,000 premature deaths. In spite of political rhetoric, no country has taken any appreciable action about the threat of global warming - although the minuscule carbon tax in Sweden is a small beginning. And the availability of oil and natural gas has increased markedly since 1973, and the price has dropped, putting the sustainability issue on the back burner. In contrast, the inflation corrected cost of nuclear power has more than doubled in the USA largely due to public demand for ever increasing safety and perception of safety. In addition supplies of low cost uranium ore have increased so that the need for a breeder reactor recedes into the future.

Many scientists have argued that the only real issue about nuclear power is the connection with weapons. While this may not be completely true, I assume for today's dicussion that if this can be resolved, tthe others will fade into insignificance. I suspect that we have 40 years before a renewed interest in all of these environmental issues will affect our governments, and we have 40 years to have a nuclear power program that includes use of plutonium, that is acceptable to the people. But we do not now have a plan, and I do not believe that we even have a clear statement of the problem that can be generally accepted.

On the one hand President Carter, followed by President Clinton, argue that by refraining from reprocessing we were setting an example to the rest of the world and indicating that we believed that it was not necessary. On the other hand there are those, exemplified by a letter from several past presidents of the American Nuclear Society to US Secretary of Energy Ms O'Leary in mid-August 1995, suggesting that the US should immediately plan to reprocess fuel again. I suggest that we use the 40 years avaailable in a positive way and reconsider from scratch Fermi's plan and see whether we can ensure that it is a dream not a nightmare. The emphasis of the 1994 NAS study was on the short term disposal of weapons plutonium. The US administration has already rejected the "clear and present danger" so that we now can consider the long term which must, in my view and ask the following:

(1) What are the true economic costs of reprocessing and can they be brought down?

(2) What are the advantages (expressed in $$$) of long lived disposal of fuel from which the plutonium has been removed? including the adavantages in public perception?

(3) Can we make a proliferation resistant fuel cycle work?

(a) A modification of the PUREX cycle to keep radioactive products with the plutonium? (CIVEX)

(b) A new cycle with electrorefining that cannot separate pure plutonium (IFR cycle).

(4) What are the possible ways of using existing internationally available, (or planned) facilities in such a research effort? e.g: Putting an IFR fuel cycle into Beloyarsk and Phoenix? Reconfiguring Le Hague or Sellafield to become more proliferation resistant and/or cheaper to operate?

(5) Is it economically preferable to store the excess pure plutonium waiting the 40+ years till a breeder reactor is needed, or to burn it in MOX fuel in present reactors, and make it again when needed?

Public perception will still depend on our ability to control nuclear weapons proliferation among countries. Here there are both successes and failures. 50 years ago, when as a graduate student I first discussed this matter with those who had made the first bombs, we knew that any industrialized country could make them without outside assistance within a few years (I suggest one year now), and a third world country within about 10 years. The only thing that any technical non proliferation procedure can do is to slow this down a little and give the world warning that a country is proceeding in a certain way. US politicians have hard time understanding these limits of technology and seem to put absolute reliance on export controls. But we must not forget that a delay of even a few years can give opportunity for diplomacy to act.

We also believed that 100 countries would have a bomb within 25 years (1970) but it never occurred to us that any country would have more than 10 or 20. We were wrong. On the latter count it is clear that the USA and USSR were both crazy. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis the USA had a few mre than 100 bombs with delivery system, and the USSR a few less than 100. I was scared stiff. The increase to 30,000 bombs and 6,000 delivery systems did not scare me more. Even with the policy of mutual deterrence it is far too many. The idea of insisting on equality is false. Any country which reduces unilaterally to 100 is doing the right thing by its own people. I am encourage that we have reduced weapons, but we have a long way to go.

On the first count I suggest that it is instructive to understand the reasons why a country decided to make nuclear weapons. Even more important why a country decided NOT to and whether we can reinforce these reasons. A major reason why a country decided to make them was prestige. England and France did so to be taken seriously by the USA. In this the USA was at fault, and continued to be at fault for some time, in only taking seriously these countries after they had a bomb. South Africa has dismantled its few weapons, not wanting them to be controlled by the ANC. Brazil and Argentine, stimulated I am glad to say by the physical societies of both countries, realized that a bomb program no longer gave prestige and have abandoned their programs. It is vital for scientists to go out and talk to the potential proliferators, understand their concerns and try to address them. Alas few US scientists and diplomats do this, but instead lecture to them from Washington or academia. Iyengar noted that "as long as nuclear non-proliferation initiatives restrict their attention to the spread of nuclear materials and 'know-how' from the 'haves' to the 'have nots', without taking into account the needs fears and capabilities of the non-nuclear states they are doomed to failure." I hope you in Russia will do so. Nuclear engineers will have that opportunity in Iran as you complete the nuclear reactor there. Please keep that channel of communication open and use it. I do not think we will persuade India away from its position, factually correct, that NPT is a colonialist treaty. But we might persuade India and Pakistan to come to a non-nuclear agreement on their own which would satisfy the rest of the world. I myself have reopened private talks with Indian scientists on these matters.

Iyengar P.K. (1995) "Non-Proliferation and Advances in Nuclear Science" Current Science v68 252.

Wilson R. (1977) "How to have Nuclear Power without Nuclear Weapons" ull. Atom. Sci. Nov. p 39

Sakharov A.D. (1979) 'Nuclear Power and the Freedom of the West" Bull. Atom. Sci.