At one point in a wide-ranging op-ed back in March, Frank von Hippel made the case for a global switchover to multinational consortia for uranium enrichment:
[It] would make it more difficult for any one country to divert the material to military ends. In fact, Urenco, the West’s most successful uranium enrichment enterprise, is already under the joint ownership of Germany, the Netherlands and Britain.
The United States should help shape this industrial model into an international one, in which all enrichment plants are under multinational control. Doing so would make it more difficult for countries like Iran to justify building national enrichment plants that could be used to produce nuclear weapons materials.
The attractions of the proposal are clear enough, in principle – much broader access to state-of-the-art technology without the proliferation risks involved in national fuel cycles. But offering URENCO as an example of how to do it rings false.
Really, has there been a bigger disaster for nonproliferation? Brazil, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea, and probably others have been the unintended beneficiaries of URENCO centrifuge technology. Perhaps Dutch and German engineers needed their own ISTC years before it was established for the benefit of Russian scientists.
And lest you think it’s just a URENCO problem, consider where North Korea got its reprocessing technology: the defunct Eurochemic consortium based in Belgium. That seems less like a URENCO-style case of massive and recurring intellectual property theft, and more like a giveaway. According to Mark Hibbs in the Feb. 28, 1994 issue of NuclearFuel,
As early as 1970, in open IAEA publications and in so-called external technical reports (ETR), Eurochemic made public schematic blueprints for plant construction, flow charts for process engineering, and operations results. ‘There was no secret about this work,’ an official at KFK [the Nuclear Research Center at Karlsruhe] said.”
The multinational approach remains an attractive idea, on paper. But work remains to be done to establish why it has gone so wrong in the past, and what could be done to prevent similar episodes in the future.