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Here’s an interesting factoid. The UK and US each possess about 100 MT of separated plutonium. However, the UK stockpile is largely civilian, whereas the US stockpile is almost entirely military.

The UK is currently engaged in a debate about what to do with this plutonium. Last year the Royal Society published a report on the subject and last week the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (the UK public body charged with cleaning up Britain’s messy nuclear legacy) published draft options for public comment.

The NDA report spells out the options, which broadly fall into three categories: “store indefinitely”, “immobilise and dispose” and “reuse and dispose”. It runs through the pros and cons of each option and, frankly, there’s not much point me recounting the argument here—it would take about as long as the report itself.

One conclusion that is worth highlighting, however, because it is potentially particularly controversial concerns immobilization with high level waste:

To achieve this method of plutonium disposition in the UK would require retaining high level waste liquors at Sellafield for the length of the plutonium immobilization programme, which would be around 20 years once the new plant had been built and commissioned. In practice this would mean delaying the vitrification of some of the High Level Liquid Waste currently stored at Sellafield. Given that this is the highest hazard material at Sellafield, and that this strategy would delay completion of hazard reduction of the High Active Liquid Waste until all the plutonium had been immobilised, in 40-50 years, the NDA is minded to dismiss this as a credible option. However, some commentators believe this option offers potentially very high proliferation resistance. In reality, the activity of the high level waste glass drops off sharply after 200-300 years and the waste form will offer no higher proliferation resistance than any of the above candidate wastes.

What I would say is that the NDA report makes it clear quite how tricky a problem this is. For instance, one “easy” option (if you ignore the political and security problems) might be to sell UK plutonium to another state that wants it for MOX fabrication. However, I didn’t realized that

Thorp [the UK reprocessing plant for LWR fuel] derived plutonium does not currently have the capability to be exported as there are no transport container licenses for Thorp plutonium cans.

Moreover, the nature of the problem is very sensitive to the time taken to implement a solution. LWR fuel has a relatively high proportion of Pu-241 which (with a half life of 14.4 years) decays into Am-241. This may be useful in smoke detectors but it is a pain in MOX fuel fabrication (being a strong gamma emitter). Therefore, the feasibility of certain MOX fuel fabrication schemes depends on how quickly they can be implemented (bear in mind that the recent history of the UK’s nuclear programme is full of delays that are best measured on a geological timescale).

Of course, it’s always possible to design new containers or remove the Am-241 chemically. My point is that these problems make determining the “best” solution a nightmare.

Anyway, the NDA is seeking public comments, if you’re interested.

Finally, it would be remiss of me writing on this subject not to mention the International Panel on Fissile Materials. Their 2007 annual report has an excellent chapter detailing the woes of the US programme to deal with separated plutonium and I notice that Martin Forwood has recently published a paper with them on the UK mess. I haven’t read it yet but look forward to doing so.

ISIS posted a copy of that letter Iran sent to UN SecGen Ban Ki Moon last week. The letter, entitled The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Proposed Package for Constructive Negotiations, does not mention a suspension of uranium enrichment, a key demand of the P5+1, but it suggests the possibility of intrusive inspections and multinational enrichment on Iranian soil.

The Iranians have dangled these possibilities in the past, and although neither could prevent Tehran from diverting centrifuge technology to a clandestine facility, the added transparency would make it harder. How much so is open to debate.

What really jumped out me, however, was Iran’s proposal for:

An effort to encourage other states to control the export of nuclear material and equipment.

That’s a remarkable statement coming from a country that has decried the existing export control regime as a suppliers’ cartel bent on holding back the economic development of developing countries.

Perhaps some nuance was lost in the translation. (The original Farsi text is included in the .pdf file that ISIS posted). Either that, or Tehran is trying to head-off the regional proliferation consequences of its actions, as its Arab neighbors suddenly acquire interest in nuclear energy.

I just returned from an informative lunch at the Council on Foreign Relations featuring Ambassador Tetsuya Endo, who chaired a recent Japanese government task force on nuclear energy. Fuel assurance was a prominent theme in the not-for-attribution discussion, and I was surprised to hear several prominent American nonproliferation experts assert that there never has been, nor ever will be, any real fuel assurance problem.

There is a legitimate debate to be had on the reliability of the existing constellation of nuclear fuel suppliers. I am conducting a study on this question that I hope to complete in the next 6-8 weeks. My view, in summary, is that a state’s confidence in the existing commercial market for enriched uranium is primarily a function of its broader political and economic relationship with one or more of the main suppliers. I will elaborate further when the study is complete.

But there is no room for debate on whether nuclear fuel assurance has been a legitimate concern in the past. The experts were wrong — it most certainly has.

For example, it became a major issue in the 1970s when, among other disruptive developments, the United States implemented a series of changes in enrichment services contracting policy that dramatically undermined global confidence in its reliability as a supplier of enriched uranium. The effect was to “increase the pace of commitments to plutonium fuels, breeder reactors, and indigenous enrichment and reprocessing plants,” particularly in Western Europe, where Urenco and Eurodif were taking shape.

That quote comes from a masterful 1979 MIT Energy Laboratory study conducted for DOE by Thomas L. Neff and Henry D. Jacoby, entitled Nuclear Fuel Assurance—Origins, Trends, and Policy Issues. The study really captures the prevailing sentiment during this key historical period:

The evolution of commercial nuclear power and nuclear fuel supply internationally has been characterized by interdependent changes in technological, political and commercial dimensions. What was once a world in which the U.S. was the dominant force in all three dimensions—the major source of technology and fuel supplies as well as political leadership in spreading atomic power and controlling it—is now a world in which these powers must be shared with other states whose balance of interests is not necessarily the same as that of the United States. Other industrialized countries have developed their own domestic nuclear industries—first reactors and now enrichment and other fuel cycle services—thus reducing U.S. involvement and influence abroad. New suppliers have also begun to compete with the United States in the remaining export markets, notably the developing countries; this competition has been made more intense by the need to find external markets for nuclear industries whose domestic markets are threatened by public opposition or other difficulties. In addition, the rising expectations and desires for autonomy of the developing world have altered their traditional relationships with industrialized countries.

These changes have been paralleled by a new awareness of the importance of secure energy supplies to national health and security, engendered, initially, by the oil embargo and price increases of 1973-74. The countries of Western Europe and Japan—whose established economies are critically dependent on energy which is largely imported—and the developing countries—whose hopefully rapid growth is dependent on increasing energy supplies—were also more strongly affected than the U.S. by multiple failures and growing pains of the nuclear fuel supply system over the past five years.

Thus, while insecurity of fossil fuels was intensifying interest in nuclear power, there were increasing concerns about the security of nuclear fuel supply. In part these were due to conventional market development problems but they also reflected the changing political and commercial relationships between the United States and its traditional nuclear customers. Both have been responsible for the drive for nuclear autonomy represented by acquisition of LWR fuel cycle facilities and development of plutonium breeders.

This study is required reading for anybody interested in nuclear fuel assurance.

Addendum: For more on the chaotic nuclear fuel market of the 1970s, I also recommend Neff’s book-length analysis, The International Uranium Market (1984), Edward F. Wonder’s Nuclear Fuel and American Foreign Policy (1977), William Walker and Måns Lönnroth’s Nuclear Power Struggles (1983), and Michael J. Brenner’s Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation—The Remaking of U.S. Policy (1981). Paul Joskow provides an excellent overview of the 1975 Westinghouse debacle in Commercial Impossibility, the Uranium Market and the Westinghouse Case (6 J. Legal Stud. 119 [1977]).