Author: NuclearAdmin

Fallout: Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia
By Roger Cross
Wakefield Press, 2001
187pp, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Jim Green – written c2000

Fallout recounts the story of the cabal of British and Australian politicians, bureaucrats and scientists who conspired to prevent an informed public debate on the merits of nuclear weapons testing in Australia in the 1950s.

It is also the story of Hedley Marston – a celebrated biochemist working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) – and his fight against those he described as “ruthless liars in high places”.

In 1955, British authorities sought the CSIRO’s assistance with biological experiments on the effects of radiation on animals during and after the weapons tests planned for the Monte Bello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia, and at Maralinga, South Australia.

Enter Marston, using British monitoring equipment to obtain potentially scandalous data on radioactive fallout over vast tracts of Australia, including Adelaide. Worse still for the authorities, Marston was not clearly bound by secrecy provisions.

Marston is an unlikely hero – if a hero at all. He was a bull in a china shop, or, in the words of his friend Dick Thomas, a “Trojan Horse with the mind of a would-be Machiavelli”. He saw himself as a crusader against scientific corruption and for public safety: “I’m more worried than I can convey about the expensive, quasi-scientific pantomime that is being enacted at Maralinga under the cloak of security”, he wrote in a letter to Mark Oliphant in 1956, “and even more so about the evasive lying that is being indulged [by] public authorities about the hazard of fall-out … I nearly blow a gasket every time I think of it. … Apparently Whitehall and Canberra consider that the people in Northern Australia are expendable.”

However, Marston’s “public science and private life is a rewarding study of science in the service of self” according to Roger Cross, the author of Fallout and a senior lecturer in science and mathematics education at Melbourne University.

Cross writes, “the power and prestige of nuclear physicists enabled them to exert considerable influence – to strut the world’s stage – and … they were only matched for pride by biochemist Hedley Marston, who for his part … considered the physicists to be dangerous Johnny-come-latelies who were trespassing on his soil. There were plainly more bombs ready to explode than those slated for Monte Bello and Maralinga.”

Marston’s attempt to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the weapons tests was made somewhat easier by growing public, political and scientific consternation over the effects of weapons testing. In mid-1957, an appeal was signed by 2000 scientists urging an international agreement to stop testing. In Australia, concerns and/or outright opposition to the tests were expressed by trade unions with members working in the area, pastoralists, and the Labor Party among others. Even politicians from federal government’s own ranks began asking questions.

Safety Committee

To calm public fears, the federal government appointed the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee in 1955. British authorities vetted the membership of the Committee, and in the case of Ernest Titterton, there was a clear conflict of interest as he had been involved in the British effort to develop nuclear weapons.

Cross writes: “So a committee of nuclear physicists – men who, to whatever extent, had a vested interest in the continuation of atomic bomb testing in Australia – was appointed by the Australian government to make judgements concerning the biological risks to humans and other forms of life. Never mind that in matters of safety they were not competent to judge.”

The government repeatedly relied on the authority of the Safety Committee. For example, the September 29, 1956 Adelaide Advertiser was headlined, “No Risk From Atom Blast: Minister’s Assurance”, with the minister of supply saying his assurance was based on that of the head of the Safety Committee. And in September 1958, the minister of supply leaned heavily on the authority of the “eminent body of scientists” on the Safety Committee, noting that, “No test can take place in this country until the safety committee is assured that there will be no harm to human beings or stock from each experimental firing”.

The Safety Committee worked tirelessly to pacify legitimate public fears, if necessary with lies and obfuscation. The Committee colluded with politicians, bureaucrats and the establishment media to stage-manage publicity before and after the tests; this was, as Cross notes, “contrary to all acceptable scientific or journalistic practice”.

The Safety Committee knew – from measurements taken by Marston and others – that vast tracts of Australia (including Adelaide) were covered with radioactive fallout following the tests. Scientists were (and are) divided over the health effects of low-level radiation – a point acknowledged by the Safety Committee. Consequently, repeated assurances that the tests posed no risks were nothing more than propaganda.

Marston wrote in a report submitted to Sir Leslie Martin, chair of the Safety Committee, “In the light of our findings, press reports of public statements made by you and by other members of the Safety Committee from time to time during the recent weapons tests have been disturbing. Your ‘unequivocal assurance’ that the fallout is ‘completely innocuous’, that there is ‘no possible risk of danger or harm to any person’, ‘no risk whatsoever to people’, has been the opposite of reassuring. Australian citizens, generally, are suspicious of such statements, and Australian scientists, who ultimately share the effect of the public antagonism that is aroused, are resentful.”

In a letter to Oliphant just prior to the 1956 tests, Marston said the public statements of the Safety Committee were “wickedly misleading” and that the “high-handed bluff” was “sickening”.

No doubt public attitudes were further soured by scientific elitism. An Adelaide-based senior scientific officer with the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment said in 1956 that “the opinion of the man in the street [was] worth only a little more than that of his female counterpart.” Likewise, Philip Baxter, long-time chair of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission and a member of the Safety Committee, argued in the journal Search in 1975 that “In the end, the experts must be trusted”. The realpolitik of the Safety Committee suggests just the opposite.

In a 1957 letter to Oliphant, Marston made the prescient comment that, “Sooner or later the public will demand a commission of enquiry on the ‘Fall out’ in Australia. When this happens some of the boys will qualify for the hangman’s noose.” Surviving members of the Safety Committee, not least Sir Ernest Titterton, were indeed humiliated by the 1985 report of the Royal Commission into the weapons tests in Australia.

Tactics

Any number of tactics were used by the nuclear cabal to suppress information and to suppress dissent.

The government refused to allow the publication of weather conditions in north-western Australia following the June 19, 1956 test at Monte Bello Islands, which, at 3-4 times the power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, was the largest of the 12 nuclear tests carried out in Australia from 1952-57.

Martin claimed that thyroids tested after the September 7, 1956 test at Maralinga showed no evidence of any radioactive iodine or any other radioactive substance, yet Marston’s results indicated just the opposite; almost certainly, Martin was lying or his subordinates were lying to him.

The British authorities tried to get Marston to return his measuring equipment before he had completed his measurements of animal thyroids.

The Safety Committee (and others) went to great lengths to avoid acknowledgement of the contamination of Adelaide following the October 11, 1956 test; this included falsifying information in an article published in the Australian Journal of Science.

One of Marston’s assistants from the CSIRO was interrogated about research methodologies by the vice-chancellor of Adelaide University, A.P. Rowe, an Englishman involved in war-time radar research and former head of British guided missile team. Log books containing records of the experimental measurements were taken away, never to be returned. Cross asks whether Rowe was part of the British secret service, or acting for someone in authority in Australia. “Either seems a likely story.”

Anti-communist red-baiting was a recurring theme in discussions on the weapons tests, as when the minister of supply Howard Beale asserted that radioactive fallout from the tests was not an issue except for “the Communists and a few fellow travellers”.

Publish or perish

Marston’s major experiments involved testing for radioactive iodine in thyroids collected from sheep and cattle around the country. (Strangely, there is not even a passing mention of the use of human guinea-pigs at Maralinga in Fallout. Certainly Marston was not involved in the human experiments – but was he made aware of them, e.g. by CSIRO staff stationed at Maralinga?)

Marston was able to prove that vast tracts of Australia had been subjected to radioactive fallout, and controlled experiments also proved that most of the exposure came from contaminated feed (thus posing a long-term risk) rather than breathing contaminated air (a shorter-term risk).

Without the knowledge of the British or Australian authorities, Marston also measured the radioactive fallout over Adelaide following the test of October 11, 1956.

Marston’s evidence directly contradicted the public statements of the British authorities and Safety Committee that no contamination of populated areas had occurred.

The nuclear cabal were determined to prevent Marston from publishing his research, or failing that, to minimise the political fallout in other ways.

Cross uses the story of Marston’s manuscript to illustrate the politics of scientific publication, mechanisms for suppression of scientific debate and dissent, and the tactics used by the cabal to preserve their power and prestige when under threat.

Delaying tactics were deployed again and again – the tests of September and October 1957 came and went while the nuclear cabal was delaying the publication of Marston’s research.

The British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment had clear authority to vet Marston’s manuscript on the basis of secrecy provisions. Its director, Sir William Penney, demanded only two deletions, but he also said in a letter to the Australian ministry of supply that there might be “political grounds” in Australia to “justify a more restricted circulation”.

Other tactics used by the nuclear cabal in relation to Marston’s manuscript included:
– deliberate obfuscation in relation to scientific data and the interpretation thereof;
– selective use of available scientific data;
– specious and irrelevant comparisons between radioactive fallout from the tests and background radiation (specious because fallout from the tests could have been avoided, and because the comparisons ignored the issue of biological magnification due to the kind of radioisotopes producing the radiation and how they enter the body and concentrate at specific sites);
– pleading with Marston not to publish;
– the Safety Committee placed a number of conditions on publication of Marston’s manuscript despite having no authority to do so (given that Marston’s research was carried out on behalf of the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment);
– once publication was inevitable and could no longer be delayed, the Safety Committee schemed to publish an article critical of Marston’s research in the same issue of the same journal as Marston’s paper;
– the Safety Committee demanded a copy of Marston’s final manuscript prior to publication, a breach of scientific protocol; and,
– there is, according to Cross, “strong evidence” that Titterton lied to Marston’s superior at the CSIRO, falsely claiming that the British authorities demanded certain changes to the manuscript which they had not.

Eventually Marston’s manuscript was published, in the August 1958 Australian Journal of Biological Sciences. Twenty months (and three more weapons tests) had passed since Marston first completed his report.

Marston hoped and expected that publication of his research would fuel the political controversy over weapons testing. In a June 21, 1957 letter to Oliphant, he said that although the “fall-out from it” would “not injure innocent people”, “God help the guilty …”

However, only one publication picked up Marston’s research – a national weekly farmers’ newspaper, Stock and Land.

The research was undoubtedly newsworthy. For example, Marston’s research showed that, as he put it, a “very large amount of radioactivity … clearly indicated that the plume … passed directly over Adelaide”, which was in direct contrast to the pronouncements of the nuclear cabal. Cross notes that, “The people of Adelaide were not told that a radioactive cloud from the third atomic bomb explosion passed over the city, nor that some of the state’s northern communities received several dressings of radioactive debris form the tests. Indeed, they have never been told.”

The daily metropolitan papers must have known about Marston’s research, if only through Stock and Land. “Most likely they were leaned on by the government”, Cross argues.

Cross writes: “The power of allegiance to the mother country and the cold war rhetoric combined with a press close to government conspired against Hedley. How fortunate for the Safety Committee that Marston’s bombshell missed its mark and that publication of his paper caused only the merest ripple in the Australian media. And how intriguing.”

The corruption of science and scientists

Cross says he wrote this story of “jealousy, hate and power in the hope that we may come to a better understanding of the tensions that lurk behind the bland face of ‘science rhetoric’ here in Australia”. He achieves that aim, but also tends to undermine his own arguments by overstating the uniqueness of the events surrounding the weapons tests.

For example, Cross claims that the saga surrounding Marston’s manuscript, and in particular the delaying tactics, represented what was “arguably, the worst case of politically motivated interference in Australian science”. And he says that Titterton’s attempt to publish a parallel paper in the same edition of the Australian Journal of Biological Sciences as Marston’s paper was “an affront to scientific protocol … such a blatant attempt at control of a scientist’s manuscript is an almost unheard-of breach of confidentiality.”

However, the manipulation of science and scientists (‘jiggery-pokery’ as Marston called it) by corporate and political elites is commonplace (see for example the analysis by Sharon Beder in her book Global Spin). Almost every dirty trick used by the nuclear cabal in the 1950s has been deployed in more recent controversies in Australia over uranium mining, reactors and radioactive waste dumping.

The planned new reactor at Lucas Heights is a case in point:
– the Coalition government talks up the planned new reactor as the largest single investment in a science facility in Australia’s history, yet the government did not even consult its own science advisers before making the decision to build a new reactor. In the case of the CSIRO, this was most likely because of CSIRO’s view in 1993 that “more productive research could be funded for the cost of a reactor”.
– a number of scientists from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) noted in a March 2000 letter to a Sutherland Shire Councillor that “ANSTO management appears to be endeavoring to muzzle staff comments external to the organisation (through the use of) Acknowledgment Undertaking (forms).”
– opponents of the new reactor have been threatened with legal action (by a Coalition government MP).
– American cyclotron scientist Manuel Lagunas-Solar has been repeatedly misrepresented by ANSTO and the government.
– American scientist Dan Hirsch has been subjected to inaccurate, personal attacks by ANSTO and by the Sydney Morning Herald, with limited right of reply.
– a senior government bureaucrat said on ABC radio on March 29, 1998 that the government decided to “starve the opponents of oxygen” in relation to the planned new reactor, to “play the game and … just keep them in the dark completely”.
– an ANSTO scientist has, under direction from ANSTO management, written a paper arguing the case for a new reactor, yet the very same scientist disagrees with the conclusions of his own paper! This incident also illustrates what might be called scientific flexibility: the ANSTO scientist says that every statement made in the paper is true (which it is), but nevertheless, taken as a whole, the paper totally misrepresents his own views.

In relation to ANSTO (and it’s predecessor the Australian Atomic Energy Commission), it’s also worth noting that:
– ANSTO has used its (minor) role in the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ as a (minor) justification for its plan to build a new reactor;
– ANSTO has been involved in selecting the CEO of the current ‘independent’ nuclear regulator ARPANSA, and the AAEC’s Philip Baxter was a member of the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee from 1955-57; and,
– most of the concern over the public health hazards arising from weapons tests in the 1950s centred on the bone-seeking radioisotope strontium-90; whereas now, ANSTO frequently (but falsely) argues that a new reactor is required to produce samarium-153, an isotope used to alleviate the pain associated with bone cancer.

The role of the ‘Supervising Scientist’ in the Northern Territory also fits the pattern of science-in-the-service-of-power. As did the Coalition government’s efforts to change the composition of the World Heritage Committee, to limit its activities, and to bully the Committee to prevent a world-heritage-in-danger listing for Kakadu National Park. Moreover, Democrats’ Senator Lyn Allison claimed in 1998 that the government was collecting a “dirt file” on scientists involved in a fact-finding mission to Jabiluka (environment minister Robert Hill refused to confirm or deny the claim).

A review of Fallout in the April 2, 2001 Melbourne Age concludes that, “The country will continue to pay the price, perhaps for centuries, for those acts of official stupidity by the Menzies government, which were aided and abetted by scientists who should have known better.” But the scientists knew precisely what was going on … British and Australian authorities were at pains to involve only those scientists who would play the game (this being one reason for Oliphant’s exclusion). And with the exception of Marston, they chose wisely.

‘Independent’ nuclear regulators

In the preface to Fallout, Cross notes that in March 2000, industry minister Nick Minchin declared Maralinga ‘safe’ after $108 million had been spent on a ‘clean-up’. Cross invites readers to compare Hedley Marston with nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson, who lost his job as a government adviser on the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ and has since become a vocal whistle-blower.

Both Marston and Parkinson have played key roles in exposing the scandals surrounding the weapons tests and the ‘clean-up’, respectively. But Parkinson has been far more influential than was Marston, if only because the media have been more receptive to Parkinson.

Many comparisons can be drawn with the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee and the current ‘independent’ nuclear regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA).

As with the Safety Committee, ARPANSA’s ‘independence’ is open to question. The head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) was formally involved in selecting the CEO of ARPANSA, and six ANSTO staff members work in the regulatory branch of ARPANSA.

Just as politicians were at pains to invoke the scientific authority of the Safety Committee in the 1950s, so too any mention of the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ (or the plans for a new reactor in Sydney or a radioactive waste dump in South Australia) is almost invariably accompanied with soothing remarks about the oversight of the ‘independent regulator’ ARPANSA.

As in the 1950s, there is a vast gap between the private and public faces of nuclear agencies. Privately, Geoff Williams, a senior ARPANSA officer, expressed his annoyance at a “host of indiscretions, short-cuts and cover-ups” associated with the ‘clean-up’. Publicly, however, ARPANSA CEO John Loy describes the ‘clean-up’ as “world’s best practice” even though more thorough clean-up options were considered but discarded in favour of burying contaminated materials under a few metres of soil. Parkinson wrote in the April 22, 2000 Canberra Times, “Is Dr Loy saying that a hole in the ground, without any treatment or lining is world best practice? That isn’t even world best practice for disposal of household garbage, let alone a long-lived hazardous substance such as plutonium.”

Just as the Safety Committee trivialised risks from the weapons tests, the current government and ARPANSA have made much of the consistency of the ‘clean-up’ with the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National Code of Practice for the Near Surface Disposal of Radioactive Waste. However, the national code was designed for low-level, short-lived wastes only, not for situations like the plutonium contamination at Maralinga.

“The Government has always made clear that the Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992) does not formally apply to this clean-up”, Minchin said in an April 17, 2000 press release. That was a lie. For example, a March 1, 2000 press release from Minchin said the ‘clean-up’ was “consistent with guidelines issued by the National Health and Medical Research Council” without stating that the NHMRC code does not formally apply to this clean-up.

Likewise, a letter from John Loy to Minchin on February 29, 2000 said, “ARPANSA also certifies that the burial trenches at Taranaki, TM 100/101 and Wewak have been constructed consistent with the national Code of Practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste” without stating that the NHMRC code did not apply to Maralinga. An independent regulator would expose government lies, not parrot them.

And if the clean-up failed to meet the national code, so much the better that the code was not meant to cover such an operation – leaked minutes from a Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) meeting in 1999 quote a senior ARPANSA officer saying that it was not necessary to meet the letter of the code since it was not meant to apply to situations such as Maralinga. (ABC Radio National, Background Briefing, April 16, 2000.)

Another point of comparison is the treatment of the Maralinga Tjarutja people – as racist under the Howard government as it was in the 1950s. As Parkinson notes, “A very disturbing feature of the Maralinga [‘clean-up’] project is the lack of openness about what was done. Even those who might be the future custodians of the land have not been kept truthfully informed on the project.”

The Adelaide Advertiser announced in 1956 that “X-Rays More Harm Than A-Tests”. Likewise, Minchin said in a May 1, 2000 statement that predicted exposure from residual contamination at Maralinga compares “favourably” with medical exposure – no mention that medical exposures are generally voluntary and beneficial. (And in 1997 the government argued that a spent fuel reprocessing plant at Lucas Heights would generate less radioactive emissions than existing radiopharmaceutical processing operations.)

Minchin said the government “didn’t make a move without expert advice” in relation to the Maralinga ‘clean-up’, but the “experts” were dancing to sensitive, political tunes every bit as much as the politicians and bureaucrats. For example, in 1998 the chair of MARTAC asked a bureaucrat from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) if the department would “welcome” advice to terminate in-situ vitrification of contaminated materials at Maralinga and to simply bury the contaminated materials instead.

The ignorance of scientists and regulators in relation to radiological hazards in the 1950s was alarming, but to some extent understandable given the novelty of the science. No such excuse can be made now, yet according to Parkinson one of the senior DISR bureaucrats involved in both the Maralinga ‘clean-up’ and the proposed waste dump did not know the difference between alpha and gamma radiation – this is equivalent to a school-teacher not knowing the alphabet.

Just as the Safety Committee stalled the publication of Marston’s research, successive governments have used delaying tactics to deal with environmental, public health and compensation issues arising from the weapons tests. Test veteran Avon Hudson told ABC radio on October 13, 2000 that, “They [will] stall for time until we are all finally dead and that means the problem will go away for them.”

In relation to the planned new reactor at Lucas Heights, Parkinson wrote in a September 2000 submission to a senate inquiry into the planned reactor, “[DISR’s] record in project management and their lack of understanding of radiation and other technical subjects, as demonstrated publicly in recent months, leaves very much to be desired. … The newly formed ARPANSA also has not performed particularly well in its first major assignment – the Maralinga project. Unless their performance as regulators improves, then the new reactor project will be a trail of compromises as is the case on the Maralinga project.”

Jim Green

National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia

jim.green@foe.org.au

The general attitude of white settlers towards Australian Aborigines was profoundly racist; Aboriginal society was considered one of the lowest forms of civilisation and doomed to extinction. Their land was considered empty and available for exploitation – ‘terra nullius’.

The testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s by the British government in territory which sustained Indigenous culture had the effect of aiding the policy of ‘assimilation’. It did this by denying the safe use of land.

In “Fallout – Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia” (Wakefield Press, 2001, p.32), Dr. Roger Cross writes: “Little mention was made of course about the effects the bomb tests might have on the Indigenous Australian inhabitants of the Maralinga area, a community that had experienced little contact with white Australia. In 1985 the McClelland Royal Commission would report how Alan Butement, Chief Scientist for the Department of Supply wrote to the native patrol officer for the area, rebuking him for the concerns he had expressed about the situation and chastising him for “apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations”. When a member of staff at Hedley Marston’s division queried the British Scientist Scott Russell on the fate of the Aborigines at Maralinga, the response was that they were a dying race and therefore dispensable.”

The British nuclear testing program was carried out with the full support of the Australian government. Nine nuclear weapon tests were carried out at Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia, and three tests were carried out on the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia.

Permission was not sought for the tests from affected Aboriginal groups such as the Pitjantjatjara, Tjarutja and Kokatha. The use of atomic weapons contaminated great tracts of traditional land, and transformed an independent and physically wide ranging people into a semi-static and dependent group – forced relocation was one of the traumas. The damage was radiological, psycho-social and cultural. This change was profoundly negative and to this day, much of the work of lifting the living conditions of Indigenous people result from the loss of traditional independence dating from the 1950s when the use of nuclear weapons forced Aboriginals into government- and mission-controlled enclaves. The size and nature of these substitute areas was such as to prevent the successful use of traditional living skills and de-culturalisation occurred.

Little or no attention was paid during the British nuclear testing program in Australia to the increased vulnerability of Aboriginal people to the radiological effects of the tests. That increased susceptibility was due to a range of factors including lack of clothing and footwear, a diet conducive to biological magnification of radioactivity, movement patterns, language barriers, and general health status. Conversely Aboriginal people generally lacked protections available to others such as reticulated water; hard permanent dwellings with dust proofing; remotely sourced food; food storage facilities which afforded some radiological protection; laundry/bathroom and drainage facilities.

The secrecy surrounding the nuclear testing program had the effect of ensuring the social isolation of groups, including affected Indigenous populations, compounded the suffering inflicted.

Studies of the health impacts of the weapons tests have excluded non-urban Aboriginal people (e.g. the study by Wise and Moroney, first presented to the Royal Commission, which states: “Two population groups are excluded from the calculations. They are the aboriginals living away from populations centres and personnel involved directly in nuclear test activities …” (Keith N. Wise and John R. Moroney, Australian Radiation Laboratory, May 1992, “Public Health Impact of Fallout from British Nuclear Weapons Tests in Australia, 1952 – 1957”, Dept. of Health, Housing and Community Services, ARL/TRI05 ISSN 0157-1400, p.2.)

List of British atomic weapons tests in Australia:

Operation Hurricane (Monte Bello Islands, Western Australia)
* 3 October, 1952 – 25 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Totem (Emu Field, South Australia)
* ‘Totem 1’ – 15 October, 1953 – 9.1 kilotons – plutonium
* ‘Totem 2’ – 27 October, 1953 – 7.1 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Mosaic (Monte Bello Islands, Western Australia)
‘G1’ – 16 May, 1956 – Trimouille Island – 15 kilotons – plutonium
‘G2’ – 19 June, 1956 – Alpha Island – 60 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Buffalo (Maralinga, South Australia)
‘One Tree’ – 27 September, 1956 – 12.9 kilotons – plutonium
‘Marcoo’ – 4 October, 1956 – 1.4 kilotons – plutonium
‘Kite’ – 11 October, 1956 – 2.9 kilotons – plutonium
‘Breakaway’ – 22 October, 1956 – 10.8 kilotons – plutonium

Operation Antler (Maralinga, South Australia)
‘Tadje’ – 14 September, 1957 – 0.9 kilotons – plutonium
‘Biak’ – 25 September, 1957 – 5.7 kilotons – plutonium
‘Taranaki’ – 9 October, 1957 – 26.6 kilotons – plutonium

Monte Bello Islands

While the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia were uninhabited, the nuclear tests conducted there spread radioactivity across large portions of mainland Australia. The Royal Commission (p.261) concluded: “The presence of Aborigines on the mainland near Monte Bello Islands and their extra vulnerability to the effect of fallout was not recognised by either [Atomic Weapons Research Establishment – UK] or the Safety Committee. It was a major oversight that the question of acceptable dose levels for Aborigines was recognised as a problem at Maralinga but was ignored in setting the fallout criteria for the Mosaic tests.”

Emu Field

“The Government used the Country for the Bomb. Some of us were living at Twelve Mile, just out of Coober Pedy. The smoke was funny and everything looked hazy. Everybody got sick. Other people were at Mabel Creek and many people got sick. Some people were living at Wallatinna. Other people got moved away. Whitefellas and all got sick. When we were young, no woman got breast cancer or any other kind of cancer. Cancer was unheard of. And no asthma either, we were people without sickness.”
— Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, <www.iratiwant.org>

At the time of the two ‘Totem’ nuclear tests at Emu Field in South Australia, the area was used, as the Royal Commission reported, for: “… hunting and gathering, for temporary settlements, for caretakership and spiritual renewal.” (p.152) A major test named Totem 1 was detonated on October 15th, 1953. The blast sent a radioactive cloud – which came to be known as the Black Mist – over 250 kms northwest to Wallatinna and down to Coober Pedy. The Totem I test is held responsible for a sudden outbreak of sickness and death experienced by Aboriginal communities, including members of the Kupa Piti Kunga Tjuta and their extended families. The Royal Commission found that the Totem 1 test was fired under wind conditions which a study had shown would produce unacceptable levels of fallout, and that the firing criteria did not take into account the existence of people at Wallatinna and Melbourne Hill down wind of the test site (p.151). In relation to the two Totem tests, the Royal Commission found that there was a failure at the Totem trials to consider adequately the distinctive lifestyle of Aborigines and their special vulnerability to radioactive fallout, that inadequate resources were allocated to guaranteeing the safety of Aborigines during the Totem nuclear tests, and that the Native Patrol Officer had an impossible task of locating and warning Aborigines, some of whom lived in traditional lifestyles and were located over more than 100,00 square kilometres (p.173).

No special consideration was given to the Aboriginal lifestyle. In an exact replica of Operation ‘Hurricane’, the authorities conveniently forgot that these people were largely or wholly unclothed. They cooked and ate in unsheltered locations and had a diet liable to biological magnification of radioactive contamination, for example, lizards such as goannas and snakes.

Maralinga

A number of Aboriginal people were moved from Ooldea to Yalata prior to the 1956-57 series of tests at Maralinga, and this included moving people away from their traditional lands. Yet movements by the Aboriginal population still occurred throughout the region at the time of the tests. It was later realised that a traditional Aboriginal route crossed through the Maralinga testing range.

In relation to the Buffalo series of tests in 1956, the Royal Commission found that regard for Aboriginal safety was characterised by “ignorance, incompetence and cynicism”, and that the site was chosen on the false premise that it was no longer used by the Traditional Owners – Aboriginal people continued to inhabit the Prohibited Zone for six years after the tests. The reporting of sightings of Aborigines was “discouraged and ignored”, the Royal Commission found. (p.323)

At the time of the tests it was well publicised that Indigenous People of the Maralinga lands were moved to the safety of mission stations and reserves by “Native Patrol Officers” who patrolled thousands of square kilometres of land to try to ensure Indigenous people were removed. Signs were erected in some places – written in English, which few of the effected Aborigines could understand. For the Aboriginal people who still walked the Western Desert, many living traditionally, radiation exposure caused sickness and death. There are tragic accounts of families sleeping in the bomb craters.

The British Government paid A$13.5 million compensation to the Maralinga Tjarutja in 1995. Other Indigenous victims – including members of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta – have not been compensated and received no apology.

Summary – British nuclear bomb tests in Australia

Flawed ‘clean-up’ of Maralinga

Call to clean up the Emu Field atomic test site (David Noonan, 2023)

Fallout from nuclear tests at Maralinga worse than previously thought (ABC, 2021)

Atomic fallout and the corruption of science

Human guinea-pigs in the British nuclear bomb tests in Australia

Body snatchers (illegal collection and testing of human tissues)

ARPANSA report on the body snatchers scandal, “Strontium-90 Testing Program 1957 – 1978 Use of Human Bone Tissue”

Maralinga − 60 years on (Jessie Boylan 2012 article)

Royal Commission 1983-84:

— Conclusions and recommendations (PDF)

— Volume 1 of the Royal Commission Report (PDF) (alternatively use this link)

— Volume 2 of the Royal Commission Report (PDF) (alternatively use this link)

Collection of articles by The Advertiser journalist Colin James (PDF) (for web-links to the same collection of articles from The Advertiser – click here.)

Jessie Boylan multimedia

Australian Nuclear Map – information, photos, videos

Paul Langley’s detailed research on the nuclear bomb tests in Australia

Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, Irati Wanti (‘The poison, stop it’)

Book: Roger Cross, “Fallout: Hedley Marston and the British Bomb Tests in Australia”, Wakefield Press, 2001.

Australian Nuclear Veterans Association web archives – click here or here.

BBC ‘Fallout at Maralinga‘

“Nuclear weapons proliferation in South Australia 1945-1965”

National Archives of Australia information

Brian Martin, Nuclear Knights – book about some of those most responsible for the bomb tests – online here or here.

Links to various websites and other literature

Reprocessing involves dissolving spent nuclear fuel in acid and separating the unused uranium (about 96% of the mass), plutonium (1%) and high level wastes (3%). Most commercial reprocessing takes place in the UK (Sellafield) and France (La Hague). There are smaller plants in India, Russia and Japan. Japan plans to begin large-scale reprocessing at the Rokkasho plant. (In addition, a number of countries have military reprocessing plants.)

Reprocessing is arguably the most dangerous and dirty phase of the nuclear fuel chain. Reprocessing generates large waste streams with no management solution and it separates weapons-useable plutonium from spent fuel.

Proponents of reprocessing give the following four justifications:

1. Reducing the volume and facilitating the management of high level radioactive waste.
However reprocessing does nothing to reduce radioactivity or toxicity, and the overall waste volume, including low and intermediate level waste, is increased by reprocessing. Steve Kidd from the World Nuclear Association states: “It is true that the current Purex reprocessing technology (used at Sellafield and La Hague) is less than satisfactory. Environmentally dirty, it produces significant quantities of lower level wastes.”

2. ‘Recycling’ uranium to reduce reliance on natural reserves.
However, only an improbably large expansion of nuclear power would result in any problems with uranium supply this century. A very large majority of the uranium separated from spent fuel at reprocessing plants is not reused, but is stockpiled. Uranium from reprocessing is used only in France and Russia and accounts for only 1% of global uranium usage. It contains isotopes such as uranium-232 which complicate its use as a reactor fuel.

3. Separating plutonium for use as nuclear fuel.
However there is very little demand for plutonium as a nuclear fuel. It is used in ‘MOX’ reactor fuel (mixed uranium-plutonium oxide), which accounts for 2−5% of worldwide nuclear fuel, and in a small number of fast neutron reactors.

4. Using plutonium as a fuel so that it can no longer be used in nuclear weapons.
However, reactors which can use plutonium as fuel can produce more plutonium than they consume. Moreover, since there is so little demand for plutonium as a reactor fuel, stockpiles of separated plutonium continually grow and now amount to over about 250 tonnes (enough for 25,000 nuclear weapons) with an annual increase of about five tonnes. Reprocessing has clearly worsened rather than reduced proliferation risks. Addressing the problem of growing stockpiles of separated plutonium could hardly be simpler – it only requires that reprocessing be slowed, suspended, or stopped altogether. That could hardly be simpler – but commercial, political and perhaps military imperatives trump common sense.

The main reason reprocessing proceeds is that reprocessing plants act as long-term, de facto storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel. Unfortunately this sets up a series of events which has been likened to the old woman who swallowed a fly – every solution is worse than the problem it was supposed to solve:

• The perceived need to do something about growing spent fuel stockpiles at reactor sites (not least to maintain or obtain reactor operating licences), coupled with the lack of repositories for permanent disposal, encourages nuclear utilities to send spent fuel to commercial reprocessing plants, which act as long-term, de facto storage sites.
• Eventually the spent fuel must be reprocessed, which brings with it serious proliferation, public health and environmental risks.
• Reprocessing has led to a large and growing stockpile of separated plutonium, which is an unacceptable and unnecessary proliferation risk.
• Reprocessing creates the ‘need’ to develop mixed uranium-plutonium fuel (MOX) or fast neutron reactors to make use of the plutonium separated by reprocessing.
• All of the above necessitates a global pattern of transportation of spent fuel, high level waste, separated plutonium and MOX, with the attendant risks of accidents, terrorist strikes and theft leading to the production of nuclear weapons.

None of this is logical or justifiable on non-proliferation, environmental, public health or economic grounds but it suits the short-term political and commercial objectives of those involved.

Australian governments have never once invoked their right to prevent reprocessing of spent fuel produced from Australian uranium, even when it leads to the stockpiling of separated plutonium as in Japan and some European countries.

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West Valley, NY: case study in reprocessing’s environmental devastation

http://www.beyondnuclear.org/reprocessing

December 2009

West Valley, New York is the only site in the U.S. to ever carry out commercial radioactive waste reprocessing. In six short years of operation, from 1966-1972, it massively contaminated its surrounding environment. A comprehensive 2008 report, “The Real Costs of Cleaning Up Nuclear Wastes: A Full Cost Accounting of Cleanup Options for the West Valley Nuclear Waste Site,” has documented that protecting the Great Lakes downstream will cost a whopping $10-27 BILLION! Additional background information on the history and current status of West Valley can be found at the website of Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

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MOX plutonium ships heading to Japan through Pacific: July-September 1999

Jim Green, August 1999

A shipment of mixed plutonium/uranium oxide (MOX) nuclear reactor fuel from Europe to Japan poses dangerous weapons proliferation, environmental and public health risks.

There have been several shipments of high-level radioactive waste, and one shipment of plutonium, from Europe to Japan in the 1990s. However the current shipment is the first transfer of MOX and it could be followed by as many as 80 MOX shipments over the next decade unless international opposition stops the trade.

An expanded MOX trade will spread weapons-useable plutonium more widely than ever before and raise tensions in the politically volatile north-east Asian region. The shipment currently travelling to Japan contains enough plutonium for about 60 nuclear weapons. Greenpeace predicts that as many as 40 tonnes of plutonium could be transferred to Japan over the next decade, enough for several thousand weapons.

The nuclear industry sometimes claims that extracting plutonium from MOX is technically complicated. However the US Department of Energy said in 1997 that “fresh MOX fuel remains a material in the most sensitive category because plutonium suitable for use in weapons could be separated from it relatively easily.” Similar statements have been made by the UK Environment Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The safety of the shipment has been seriously jeopardised by cost-cutting and secrecy. Problems include inadequate design, testing and construction of the transport containers, insufficient emergency planning, and inadequate liability coverage. The MOX will be used to fuel Japanese reactors which were not designed to handle this fuel, thus decreasing safety margins.

The MOX is being transported on two ships which left French and British ports between July 19 and July 22. They are expected to arrive in Japan in mid September. The ships will cross the Indian Ocean then pass through the Tasman Sea. The route was announced by Japanese, French, and British officials only after an international controversy. Specific details regarding the route have not been provided, nor is there a guarantee that the ships will not pass through waters under the jurisdiction of en-route nations.

The New Zealand and Irish governments have expressed opposition to the shipment because of safety and security concerns. Twenty five countries in the Caribbean region protested against the MOX shipment, which may be the reason the current shipment is not passing through the Panama Canal. The South African government says that it does not want the ships passing through its territorial waters.

The growing controversy mirrors the experience of 1992, when over 50 countries protested against a plutonium shipment from France to Japan.

Plutonium economy.

Current efforts to expand the use of MOX represent the latest attempt of the nuclear industry to establish a civil plutonium economy. Plutonium is virtually non-existent in nature but is produced in all nuclear reactors. Several countries operate reprocessing plants which separate plutonium, uranium and waste from spent reactor fuel. Historically the main use for plutonium has been nuclear weapons construction, and the main purpose of reprocessing has been to separate plutonium for weapons.

Parallel plans were developed to use plutonium (and thus reprocessing plants) for nuclear power. There was great hope that “fast breeder” power reactors – which use plutonium as fuel and produce more plutonium than they consume – would become widespread. This would justify the expansion of the reprocessing industry, thus generating profits and also supplying plutonium for weapons if necessary.

Surplus plutonium produced in fast breeders could be mixed with uranium and used as MOX fuel, thus addressing another concern in the post-war decades – that uranium supplies could dry up. Thanks to the plutonium economy, nuclear power would be too cheap to meter and everyone would live happily ever after.

However, fast breeder programs have been cancelled, or are in grave danger, in every country in which they have been pursued including Japan, the US, France, Germany, former Soviet states, the UK and France.

With the failure of fast breeder programs, the rationale for reprocessing spent reactor fuel has become very dubious. It makes no sense to reprocess spent fuel simply to extract (unused) uranium, because fresh uranium can be obtained more cheaply.

The failure of fast breeder programs should have signalled an end to the plutonium economy. But commercial, political and military interests have been established which depend on the survival and expansion of a plutonium fuel cycle. Thus the use of MOX in conventional power reactors was trumpeted.

MOX makes little economic sense. According to a report in The Economist (June 1993), MOX would be more expensive than uranium fuel even if the plutonium was free. A 1998 report by the US-based Nuclear Control Institute says that uranium fuel is 4-8 times cheaper than MOX.

However there are some short-term interests driving the current expansion of MOX trade, as well as a strong ideological factor – keeping alive the fading dream of a plutonium economy.

Consolidating a MOX fuel cycle will prop up the European reprocessing and MOX production industries. Large investments have been made in these industries in France, the UK and Belgium over the past decade. Reprocessing plants at Sellafield (Britain) and La Hague (France) are the biggest plutonium producers on the planet. Combined, they have over 100 tonnes of plutonium in storage. Both plants are government owned, and the establishment of MOX trade is of considerable importance to the British and French governments.

Currently, only a very small percentage of nuclear power reactors around the world use MOX fuel, with most using low-enriched uranium fuel which cannot easily be transformed into a weapons-useable form. Countries using MOX for at least some of their reactors include Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. The future demand of MOX in Germany and Switzerland is uncertain because of widespread opposition to reprocessing and nuclear power in general. Thus the Japanese plutonium program takes on added significance.

Japan already has a stockpile of several tonnes of plutonium, which was (ostensibly) acquired for its now-stalled breeder program. While Japan has not built nuclear weapons, it has the expertise, the industrial and technical infrastructure, and the fissile material, to do so within a period of months or perhaps only weeks. Japan also has the technology to deliver nuclear weapons. Some influential Japanese politicians – including former Cabinet ministers – have publicly advocated nuclear weapons production in Japan in recent years. No doubt these politicians are interested in the military implications of MOX transfers.

While Japan’s bomb lobby wants plutonium for bombs, the logic of other MOX supporters in Japan is more difficult to fathom. The use of MOX, and the troubled breeder program, provides an excuse to send spent fuel overseas for reprocessing. Much of Japan’s spent fuel is held at European reprocessing plants. Major reprocessing plants such as Sellafield have become de facto nuclear waste dumps. Sending spent fuel overseas pacifies public opposition to Japan’s nuclear power program and weakens opposition to plans to construct more reactors.

Regardless of the wishes of the Japanese nuclear industry, there is no certainty that its MOX program will go ahead due to serious technical problems and public opposition.

Australia’s complicity

Official reports show that thousands of tonnes of Australian natural uranium, enriched uranium, depleted uranium and plutonium are held by Japan (whether currently in Japan or in Europe).

In the early 1980s, the Australian government signed agreements permitting the separation of Japanese plutonium produced using Australian uranium at British and French reprocessing plants. The Australian government also agreed to shipments of spent fuel, high-level waste and plutonium between Europe and Japan.

In 1992, the Labor government consented to a shipment of plutonium from France to Japan. The government claimed that Japan would only take receipt of enough separated plutonium for use in its planned fast breeder program. Gareth Evans, then the foreign minister, said “the Government would not support the stockpiling of plutonium by Japan or any other non-nuclear weapon state.” In fact, far more plutonium was sent to Japan than has been used in breeder reactors, and several tonnes are now stockpiled.

The agreement between Australia and Japan was renewed in May 1998, without any public or parliamentary debate. Although the current shipment will not contain plutonium derived from Australian uranium, future shipments definitely will.

Allowing Japan to stockpile plutonium undermines claims that Australia is at the forefront of non-proliferation efforts. According to Greenpeace, “This (MOX) trade places a special burden on the South Pacific region which, thanks to Australia’s pro-nuclear lobbying and secret dealings will be viewed as the path of least resistance for most of the cargoes to travel through. The secretive nature of the Japanese plutonium trade – consented to in closed negotiations by Australian officials (as well as Canberra’s complicity in keeping the route secret from the regional community) exemplifies the undemocratic way in which the Australian government engages in nuclear matters.”

The 1998 agreement could still be reviewed. The department of foreign affairs says that if there are significant changes in Japan’s nuclear program, Australia could challenge the transfer of plutonium derived from Australian uranium. The risk of Japan developing nuclear weapons is itself ample reason to veto the transfers.

The Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs, and China’s nuclear weapons build-up, are providing ideological ammunition for Japan’s bomb lobby and this provides further reason for Australia to prohibit the separation and shipment of plutonium.

Challenging Japan’s plutonium trade would of course jeopardise future uranium sales; customer countries do not want strings attached. Australian governments – Liberal or Labor – have also been unwilling to challenge the passage of spent fuel, MOX, plutonium or high-level waste through the Tasman Sea and the South Pacific. Australian governments do not want to jeopardise the passage of US nuclear armed or powered warships through the region. Moreover, several shipments of nuclear waste from the Lucas Heights reactor in suburban Sydney have been sent overseas, and many more shipments are planned if a new reactor is built.

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Scandal erupts as plutonium ships reach Japan

Jim Green, September 1999

A scandal has erupted over the failure of British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) to carry out safety checks on nuclear fuel elements which it plans to ship to Japan later this year. Following revelations in the British newspaper The Independent, BNFL admitted that records relating to the testing of 11 batches of mixed uranium/plutonium oxide fuel (MOX) had been falsified. Later, BNFL revealed that there were at least twice as many cases of BNFL employees “saving time” by failing to carry out checks and using data from previous samples instead. Three BNFL employees have been suspended.

The scandal comes at an awkward time for BNFL because two ships carrying MOX have just completed a two-month journey from Europe to Japan. Some of this MOX was produced at BNFL’s Sellafield plant, while the rest was produced in France and Belgium.

In Japan, many are demanding thorough checks of the first shipment of MOX, unconvinced by BNFL’s claim that its investigation has cleared it of any irregularities.

On September 15, Fukui Shimbun, a Japanese nuclear safety official in Fukui Prefecture, warned that since an examination of the first shipment “cannot be carried out in Japan, it may be necessary to have the ships transport the fuel back to Europe”.

Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and Japanese safety authorities, have demanded assurances over the quality of the first shipment of MOX before allowing it to be used.

Relations are strained. The Kansai Electric Power Company, one of BNFL’s largest clients, flew investigators to the UK and launched its own inquiry into quality control at Sellafield. The British Nuclear Installations Inspectorate is also investigating the scandal.

BNFL is operating what it calls a “demonstration” MOX production plant at Sellafield. It hopes to expand its MOX production capacity to 120 tonnes per year, a significant increase over the current global capacity of 190 tonnes per year. Whether the current scandal will jeopardise BNFL’s planned expansion is not yet clear, but Tony Blair’s New Labour government has proven itself a staunch and uncritical supporter of the nuclear industry.

The French nuclear industry is also planning to expand its use of MOX and its role in the international plutonium trade. Last year, Dominique Voynet, environment minister and leader of the French Greens, agreed to sign two decrees authorising the use of MOX in four French reactors.

The current scandal mirrors a similar one in Japan last year. In December, a Japanese nuclear engineering company admitted falsifying data on the safety of materials supplied to BNFL to line canisters used to transport nuclear materials including spent reactor fuel and MOX. Four power utility companies announced suspension of the use of the canisters pending investigation into their safety.

International protest

One of the two ships carrying the first batch of MOX was expected to dock in Japan on September 22. A crowd of protesters gathered to greet it, but weather conditions prevented docking.

The plutonium shipments have generated a growing international controversy. Bones of contention include safety concerns, the failure to give prior warning to countries passed by the ships, and the inadequacy of international liability arrangements.

Among those to have lodged objections with the Japanese, French and British Governments are Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Mauritius, Fiji, the South Pacific Forum, South Korea and the Association of Caribbean States.

Public opposition in South Korea is believed to have been responsible for a decision not to take one of the MOX-laden ships through the straits between Korea and Japan. Long-standing opposition from Caribbean states is believed to have ruled out shipping MOX through the Panama Canal, with the Indian Ocean / Tasman Sea route being preferred instead.

Weapons proliferation

MOX trade poses enormous risks in relation to weapons proliferation. The first shipment to Japan contains enough plutonium for about 60 nuclear weapons, and there are plans for dozens more shipments in the coming years unless international opposition can stop the trade.

Confidential documents obtained by Greenpeace reveal that, since the early 1990s, the US government has been warned by its embassy in Tokyo that Japan’s plutonium program heightens the risk of weapons proliferation in north-east Asia.

A cable from an embassy official to then US secretary of state Warren Christopher in 1993 posed the questions, “Can Japan expect that if it embarks on a massive plutonium recycling program that Korea and other nations would not press ahead with reprocessing programs? Would not the perception of Japan being awash in plutonium and possessing leading edge rocket technology create anxiety in the region?”

These are precisely the questions that anti-nuclear and environmental activists have been asking for years, only to be ignored or lied to.

US embassy officials have also questioned the economic logic of Japan’s plutonium program and speculated that it might be driven primarily by military aspirations. Such speculation has been fuelled a number of times over the years by senior Japanese politicians arguing for a nuclear weapons program. For example, in early August a Japanese Diet (parliament) member from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party suggested that Japan should build nuclear bombs.

However there are major political obstacles facing Japan’s nuclear bomb lobby. The majority opinion within the political and military elite is that Japan now has the best of both worlds: it can truthfully claim not to have built nuclear bombs, while at the same time it has the expertise, equipment and materials to build and deliver nuclear bombs within a space of months, perhaps just weeks.

As a senior nuclear adviser to the Japanese government said in the August 12 edition of Nucleonics Week, Japan is a “virtual weapons state”. (A similar logic lies behind the Australian government’s plan to replace the nuclear research reactor in Sydney, although Australia will remain far behind Japan in terms of nuclear expertise, equipment and materials even with a new reactor.)

Efforts by South Korea and North Korea to pursue nuclear programs which would involve the acquisition of plutonium, or developing the capacity to separate plutonium from spent fuel, have been fiercely resisted by Western governments for decades. However, the plutonium industry, threatened with a collapse in European demand, is now seeking to secure contracts with South Korea in defiance of long standing Western policy to prevent Seoul from obtaining direct-use nuclear weapons material.

Throw in the North Korean nuclear program, and the tension between China and Taiwan, and it is clear that north-east Asia will be a volatile nuclear hot-spot in the next century.

Shaun Burnie, from Greenpeace International, said, “The plutonium powder keg is already smouldering in north-east Asia, and unless the international community, including Clinton, abandon their “selective proliferation policy” it may become an inferno. No country, no matter what their supposed peaceful intentions, should have access to plutonium. Japan should act to halt this slide to nuclear confrontation in Asia and end its unjustified and dangerous plutonium program.”

Desperate for a fig-leaf of ideological legitimacy, governments and companies involved in the plutonium trade often spout the lie that “reactor-grade” plutonium, such as that contained in MOX, cannot be used for nuclear weapons. This is contradicted by successful weapons tests using reactor-grade plutonium.

The ability to use reactor-grade plutonium for weapons production has been admitted by the Australian Safeguards Office, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the US Department of Energy. To deconstruct the relevant nukespeak, “reactor-grade” plutonium is “weapons-useable” even though higher-purity “weapons-grade” plutonium is better for the purpose.

Australian complicity

Australian governments, past and present, are complicit in the plutonium trade. The Howard government has admitted that some of the plutonium to be fabricated into MOX fuel elements and shipped to Japan in the coming months and years was produced by the irradiation of Australian uranium in Japanese power reactors. Liberal and Labor governments have given approval for the trade of Australian-obligated plutonium between Europe and Japan.

The Australian government’s complicity reflects its pandering to uranium mining companies. This was hinted at by the Department of Foreign Affairs last year when it announced the government’s extension of approval for plutonium transfers: “The European Union is an important provider of nuclear fuel services for countries purchasing Australian uranium and Japan is a major market for Australian uranium exports.”

Also relevant is the love affair between the Howard government and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. ANSTO has a stockpile of nuclear waste it wants to ship to the US and the UK; thus it would be the height of hypocrisy to be protesting against the nuclear shipments of other countries and withdrawing consent for the trade of Australian-obligated plutonium. A leaked memo from the Australian delegation to the 1993 South Pacific Forum explicitly linked Australia’s acquiescence to nuclear shipments passing through the region with Australia’s plans to export its own spent nuclear fuel.

The Howard government cannot state the truth – that it has turned a blind eye to the manifold dangers of the plutonium trade in order to support the domestic nuclear industry. Thus the government parrots the fiction that reactor-grade plutonium cannot be used for weapons. The government also downplays the safety risks of the plutonium trade and will continue to do so despite the failure to carry out safety checks and the falsification of records in Japan last year and in the UK this year.

As Jean McSorley from Greenpeace International argued in the July 1996 edition of Chain Reaction, “There are those naive, cynical or ignorant enough to think Australia’s role in the nuclear industry enhances its international standing. That’s not true. This country should stand alongside the weapons states and others who have contaminated the planet, and be charged with aiding and abetting criminal activities.”

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Pacific islanders protest plutonium shipments

Jim Green, August 1999

Pacific islanders are organising to try to stop the passage of plutonium reactor fuel from Europe to Japan through south Pacific waters. Two ships carrying mixed uranium/plutonium “MOX” fuel will pass through the Tasman Sea in late August or early September, then through the Exclusive Economic Zones of Pacific island nations. The Fiji based Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC), which is the Secretariat of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement, says that Japan, France and Britain are refusing to discuss compensation in the event of an accident, and have failed to conduct detailed environmental risk assessments.

Losena Salabula, from the PCRC, said “We believe that South Pacific governments should work together to end all nuclear shipments through our region. Currently, these shipments of plutonium fuel are not banned by the Rarotonga Treaty for a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, or the 1995 Waigani Convention on hazardous wastes. We call on the sixteen member governments of the South Pacific Forum to convene a review conference of the Rarotonga Treaty, to strengthen its provisions against nuclear shipments and nuclear waste dumping on land. We also believe that parties to the Waigani Convention should strengthen its provisions, to place pressure on Japan, Britain and France to halt these shipments”, Salabula said.

The 1985 Rarotonga Treaty banned the testing, production or deployment of nuclear weapons, and the dumping of nuclear waste, in the south Pacific. The Treaty allows for the establishment of a consultative committee for the purpose of “consultation and co-operation on any matter arising in relation to this Treaty or for reviewing its operation”. A consultative committee must be convened “at the request of any Party”. Thus it would be possible for any Pacific island government to ask for the Committee to be convened to address the topic of plutonium fuel shipments to Japan.

The PCRC is also calling for the Waigani Convention – also known as the Convention to Ban the Importation into Forum Island Countries of Hazardous and Radioactive Wastes – to be strengthened to stop transboundary shipments of plutonium.

Salabula said, “In September, the United Nations will be holding a special session on Small Island Developing States. Japan, Britain and France will be shipping plutonium through our waters at the same time. This shows their contempt for the clear wish of Pacific island people – we want to be nuclear-free.”

Action could be taken at this year’s South Pacific Forum meeting in Palau. However Noel Levi, secretary general of the South Pacific Forum Secretariat, said the Secretariat had been unable to convince or compel France, Japan or the UK to begin discussions on a liability regime to compensate the region in the event that an accident impacts on tourism, fisheries and the environment.

The one South Pacific Forum member which habitually turns a blind eye to nuclear shipments through the Pacific is Australia. A leaked memo from the Australian delegation to the South Pacific Forum meeting in October 1993 revealed that the Labor government was lobbying to prevent a ban on the transport of nuclear waste through the region. Australian governments have shipped nuclear waste from the Lucas Heights reactor overseas in the past and plan to do so again in future.

In a point scoring exercise which went wrong, Labor shadow ministers Laurie Brereton and Nick Bolkus released a statement on July 25 expressing concerns about the environmental risks of “high level nuclear waste shipments through the South Pacific region.” In fact it is MOX fuel, not waste, that is being shipped to Japan. Predictably, Brereton and Bolkus did not condemn the shipments, merely calling on the Howard government to commission a scientific review of the environmental risks. The Labor government gave permission for a 1992 shipment of plutonium from Europe to Japan, and it arranged a shipment of spent fuel from the Lucas Heights reactor to Scotland which took place in 1996.

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Your worst fears

Rob Edwards

New Scientist, Vol 170, issue 2293, page 4

June 3, 2001

Once terrorists have the nuclear fuel, building a bomb is child’s play.

TERRORISTS could easily make a crude atomic bomb from MOX fuel produced at British Nuclear Fuels’ new plant in north-west England, according to a confidential report submitted to the British government and seen by New Scientist.

The report comes as the state-owned company is trying to get the government’s go-ahead to make MOX, a mixture of plutonium and uranium oxide, for reactor operators in Europe and Japan.

Although the MOX plant, at Sellafield in Cumbria, was completed in 1996, the government has postponed authorising its start-up because of doubts over its economic viability. Last week, as a fourth consultation exercise on the MOX plant ended, Friends of the Earth lodged papers at the High Court in London calling for a judicial review of the consultation, accusing the British government of skewing the process in favour of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). The environmental group alleges that the £462 million invested in the plant so far has been disregarded in calculating its financial prospects, and that the results of an independent audit have been withheld from the public.

But now the confidential report submitted to the government highlights another potential problem for the plant. Written by Frank Barnaby, a physicist who worked at the nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston, Berkshire, in the 1950s and later headed the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it spells out exactly how easy it is to make MOX fuel into a bomb.

Barnaby says that terrorists intent on mass destruction would need no more technical know-how than that used to make the Lockerbie bomb. The expertise required is less than the equivalent skill used in 1995 by the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, to prepare sarin nerve gas for release into the Tokyo subway, he says.

It would be “sheer irresponsibility” for the government to allow the new plant to open, Barnaby warns, as the theft of MOX fuel pellets would then become a “terrifying possibility”. His report, which was commissioned by the Oxford Research Group, an independent body of scientists studying nuclear issues, comes in the wake of mounting concern about the poor security arrangements for radioactive materials worldwide (New Scientist, 26 May, p 10).

Barnaby reveals three ways of chemically separating the plutonium dioxide from the uranium dioxide in MOX fuel. One, involving lanthanum nitrate as a carrier, was used in 1941 by the atomic pioneer Glenn Seaborg at the University of Chicago. The other two methods-one of which is currently used at the University of Kiev in Ukraine-depend on reactions with resins. The chemistry is less sophisticated than that required for the illegal manufacture of designer drugs, he says. All the details terrorists need are in the published literature or on the Internet, says Barnaby.

A primitive bomb could be made with 35 kilograms of plutonium dioxide, or terrorists could use hydrofluoric acid to precipitate out the pure metal, Barnaby says. Only 13 kilograms of pure metal would be needed to create an explosion with a yield of 100 tonnes of TNT-50 times the size of the largest terrorist bomb to date, in Oklahoma City six years ago.

BNFL points out, however, that MOX fuel would be difficult to steal because it travels under armed guard. The security arrangements “are mature, comprehensive and robust”, says a company spokeswoman. “We are 100 per cent confident in the physical protection measures we have.”

The company points out that turning plutonium into MOX fuel and burning it in reactors could reduce the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation by cutting plutonium stockpiles. Some plutonium also has to be returned to foreign customers because they own it. The risk of MOX fuel falling into the hands of terrorists is “minimal”, BNFL insists.

An atomic explosion in a city centre is “everyone’s worst nightmare”, says Frans Berkhout, a nuclear expert from SPRU (formerly the Science Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex, Brighton. But although turning fresh MOX fuel into a bomb is “theoretically possible”, he thinks that in practice terrorists might find cheaper and easier ways of causing mass destruction.

Victor Gilinsky is a physicist who has served on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and worked for the US Atomic Energy Commission.

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A call to resist the nuclear revival

By Victor Gilinsky, 27 January 2009, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

https://thebulletin.org/call-resist-nuclear-revival-0

Article Highlights

* The international community has forgotten the nuclear age’s early warning that occasional inspection is not an adequate safeguard.

* Current efforts to encourage the global spread of nuclear energy are dangerously shortsighted and will result in weapons proliferation.

* International security must be the top priority in global nuclear energy policy, meaning the unbridled promotion of nuclear energy must stop.

When formulating its nuclear energy policy, the new Obama administration will have to face the reality that advances in technology, combined with politics and ideology, have made it much harder to prevent nuclear energy use from contributing to the spread of the Bomb. To avoid a future Hobbesian nuclear jungle, the United States and other world governments will need to agree on tougher nuclear controls.

The 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report–the basis for the U.S. proposal to the United Nations on international control of atomic energy–stated the problem clearly: “A system of inspection superimposed on an otherwise uncontrolled exploitation of atomic energy by national governments will not be an adequate safeguard. . . . If nations or their citizens carry on intrinsically dangerous [nuclear] activities it seems to us that the chances for safeguarding the future are hopeless.”

Yet only a few years later, eager to exploit the political and economic potential of its nuclear technology, the United States and other countries adopted that very approach.

The notion that occasional inspection was an adequate deterrent against nuclear wrongdoing was then enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As an inducement for states to agree not to make bombs and to accept inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the NPT acknowledged their “inalienable” right to all “peaceful” nuclear technology, which effectively meant the uncontrolled exploitation of nuclear energy that the 1946 report warned about.

The stubborn and central fact is that plutonium and highly enriched uranium can be used in bombs more quickly than inspectors can function and other countries can respond to thwart bomb making. So where these materials are available, there aren’t reliable safeguards to back up “peaceful use” promises. Unfortunately, the diplomats who clustered around the NPT brushed aside questions about the effectiveness of safeguards in their drive to increase NPT membership. Meanwhile, political leaders, even highly intelligent ones, had only the vaguest grasp of the technical issues at hand. That’s still mostly true, so while the Acheson-Lilienthal Report’s conclusions are now more relevant than ever, the basis of the “NPT regime” remains fundamentally the same.

There were attempts after the NPT went into force to more closely adhere its application to its original purpose, most notably after the 1974 Indian nuclear explosion jolted the nuclear exporters’ confidence in recipients’ “peaceful use” pledges. India had spurned the NPT, but it had promised to use a Canadian-supplied reactor and the reactor’s U.S.-supplied heavy water only for peaceful uses. When challenged, India replied with a straight face that its Bomb was peaceful.

In response, the major exporting countries formed what became the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), and agreed later that year on additional controls beyond the NPT. The main concern then was that imported reprocessing plants would give countries access to plutonium for bombs.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford announced that the United States wouldn’t support reprocessing until “the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation.” He added: “Avoidance of proliferation must take precedence over economic interests.” The nuclear industry and the U.S. nuclear bureaucracy bitterly opposed Ford’s policy even though the reprocessing restriction actually saved money and thus offered a practical way to keep nuclear energy use from spilling over into bomb making. Two years later, under the Carter administration, Washington tightened its export laws to require full-scope IAEA inspection of recipients.

The Bush administration, with Democratic congressional support, drove a truck through all these measures to bolster the NPT. The prime example: The U.S.-India agreement, approved by Congress last October, waived U.S. export restrictions on India, which has fought the NPT regime for 40 years. A related U.S.-sponsored NSG decision gave India a waiver allowing access to the international nuclear trade–and specifically uranium fuel that India lacks– without submitting to the NPT’s inspection requirements. The irony wasn’t lost on the Indian government that it had succeeded–without giving up anything in its drive for more bombs–in steamrolling the very criteria that were put in place in response to its initial pursuit of the Bomb. The agreement is in my view a violation of the NPT’s Article I prohibition on assisting another state’s bomb making.

To complete the rout of 30 years of U.S. anti-proliferation policy, President George W. Bush stated in New Delhi, “I don’t see how you can advocate nuclear power . . . without advocating [for] technological development of reprocessing.” The nuclear bureaucracies, the national laboratories, and the reprocessors who had never given up trying to reverse the Ford-Carter bans found a receptive audience in Bush. He approved a futuristic reprocessing and recycle program, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), to “solve” the waste problem and thereby, in the former administration’s view, open the door to greatly expanded nuclear use.

GNEP also includes a sop to anti-proliferation–an international fuel-leasing and fuel-assurance proposal as a way of inducing most countries to avoid acquiring their own fuel-cycle plants. GNEP’s exotic reprocessing and recycle technology isn’t going anywhere. (It hasn’t even gotten out of the lab and would be horrendously expensive if it ever did. In any case, it would actually complicate waste management for hundreds of years by increasing the number of waste streams.)

In the meantime, however, the international ballyhooing of GNEP’s fuel leasing schemes by the Energy and State departments has been encouraging national fuel-cycle plants. Countries fear a new division of states into suppliers and consumers is in the offing and don’t want to be caught on the wrong side. As for fuel assurances, this is a solution in search of a problem, as existing commercial contracts provide adequate assurances. The only country to suffer even a momentary pause in uranium fuel shipments pursuant to a contract was India after it exploded a Bomb and refused to accept IAEA inspections as required by the 1978 U.S. export law.

In any case, the diversion problem doesn’t just concern commercial fuel facilities. The general advance of technology has allowed for the spread of centrifuge manufacturing capabilities, making it easier for states to get into enrichment. (A lesson taught to us by A. Q. Khan.) The centrifuge process differs from its predecessor–gaseous diffusion–in that it allows small-scale enrichment operation and uses little power. Reprocessing always lent itself to small-scale operation. And small, clandestine centrifuge enrichment or reprocessing plants are difficult to find.

The essential point is that a facility that is very small in commercial terms can be very large in military terms. It could boost the enrichment of the fresh fuel intended for a light water reactor, or reprocess the reactor’s spent fuel, to provide militarily significant quantities of nuclear explosives in short order. This would involve cheating, but some NPT member states (Iraq and North Korea, for sure) have already cheated. In short, the conventional wisdom that light water reactors aren’t a problem without the presence of commercial-scale enrichment facilities or reprocessing facilities is wrong. The light water reactor is more “proliferation-resistant” than other reactor types, but not by much.

We’re now told that the world is entering a nuclear “renaissance” that will lead to much greater global use of nuclear energy. The economics don’t favor this–the cost of building new nuclear power plants is going through the roof, at least in the United States. Therefore, nuclear construction would have to be supported by hefty government subsidies. The publicly provided rationale for such subsidies is the need to limit global warming, although it’s difficult to imagine installing enough nuclear power plants to make a dent in the problem.

In any case, for many countries, nuclear power decisions are primarily political. It wouldn’t take many new countries building one or two reactors each to create serious security worries, especially as some of those most interested in nuclear power are in turbulent regions. It should be clear by now that the consequent international security issues don’t concern the nuclear bureaucracies and the nuclear vendors, who care only about expanding nuclear energy use. They will walk us off the cliff if we let them.

In addition to the foregoing narrowing of safety margins between nuclear energy technologies and weapons, there have been unfavorable changes on the weapons side. After a lessening in their importance after the Cold War ended, nuclear weapons are again on the upswing. The news is full of stories about them: North Korea won’t give them up; Iran looks as if it wants them; Israel threatens to bomb Iran to stop Tehran from producing them and actually bombs a secret Syrian reactor presumably intended for weapons; the United States wants to station anti-ballistic missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic; in response, Russia tells those countries they could be nuclear targets; Pakistan’s instability provokes worries about its nuclear weapons; India seeks a nuclear missile submarine force; the five recognized weapons states (the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China) want to modernize their nuclear forces; and a just-released report from the Defense Secretary’s Task Force on Nuclear Weapons Management says U.S. nuclear forces should stay in Europe because they are “a pillar of NATO unity.”

There’s a troubling disconnect between this nuclear shadowboxing and any awareness of the devastating possibility of nuclear war. Just because the weapons are supposed to be for deterrence doesn’t mean they won’t be used. Doesn’t anyone remember the nuclear fears of the 1960s? The nuclear world’s self-delusions resemble those of the pre-meltdown world of finance, which a former treasury secretary characterized as “too much greed and not enough fear.”

One thing is clear: Nuclear weapons make politicians and government officials feel more important, confirming T. S. Elliot’s remark that most of the troubles in the world come from people wanting to be important. And some see the entry level as a domestic nuclear energy program.

The fundamental constraint against effectively protecting against nuclear energy use leading to bombs is the near-universal assumption that we can afford only so much protection as will allow full exploitation of nuclear energy. In international affairs, nuclear energy trumps just about everything. Even so-called arms controllers fall over themselves trying to establish their bona fides by supporting nuclear energy development and devising painless proposals that grandfather everything that’s already in place.

Consider the recommendations* from a September 2008 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ conference on the future of nuclear energy: extending loan guarantees to new U.S. plants; providing more support for the IAEA; paying more attention to physical protection of fissile materials; reducing (but not eliminating!) nuclear weapons; and “working with the IAEA and ongoing international efforts to explore nondiscriminatory fuel leasing and fuel services approaches.” It’s hard to think of more inoffensive and ineffectual advice.

*<www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/the-future-of-nuclear-energy-policy-recommendations>

It’s time to take a more serious view. Security should come first–not as an afterthought. We should support as much nuclear power as is consistent with international security; not as much security as the spread of nuclear power will allow. At a minimum, that means an end to promoting and subsidizing nuclear power all over the world. It may mean holding up nuclear energy expansion until, as Ford said of reprocessing, “The world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation,” or we have a more secure technology for using it. In the conduct of nuclear energy activities generally, we need a common set of rules all countries can live by and, as Ford also did with respect to reprocessing in 1976, we need to apply the same rules to ourselves.

There is more: It’s difficult to see getting international support for dramatic changes in the way we use nuclear energy unless we extend the notion of common standards to the weapons side and take seriously the NPT Article VI commitment to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal to zero. This isn’t the place to argue the proposition of abolishing nuclear weapons, which obviously raises many questions beyond the context of nuclear energy. Let me only say that while it may seem unrealistic to head to zero, it’s also unrealistic to think we can continue indefinitely on the current path.

A physicist, Victor Gilinsky is an independent consultant, most recently advising Nevada on matters related to the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. His expertise spans a broad range of energy issues. From 1975 to 1984, he served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, having been nominated by President Gerald Ford and renominated by President Jimmy Carter. Earlier in his career he worked at Rand Corporation; he was also an assistant director for policy and program review at the Atomic Energy Commission.

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NUCLEAR POWER AND WEAPONS: A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD ISSUE

Victor Gilinsky, former commissioner of the NRC prepared this for a conference in London co-hosted by NPEC and the Legatum Institute.

Nov 9, 2011

http://www.npolicy.org/article.php?aid=1114&tid=30

The argument has gone on for decades over the connection between nuclear energy for power and nuclear energy for weapons. It was obvious from the beginning that the two overlapped. The 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report said they were “in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent.” The Report was flawed in a number of ways, and its proposal for international control of nuclear energy failed, but it contained the powerful insight that gaining the benefits of the new energy source without spreading the Bomb entailed strict international rules backed up by military force. “No system of inspection,” the Report concluded, “could afford any reasonable security against the diversion of such materials to the purposes of war.”

A few years later the United States, discarded that insight and reversed course to launch Atoms for Peace to spread nuclear technology worldwide. Aside from occasional modest adjustment, we have been on that Atoms for Peace course ever since.

We have also continued—to the present—the argument over how dangerous nuclear power was from the point of view of international security, and how much control over it was necessary. Those focused on the benefits lined up on the “Atoms for Peace” side, and those focused on security lined up on the other, arguing for stricter controls, and so they have stayed. Here is how the arguments played out:

· Promises and inspections. The first difference concerned the post-Atoms for Peace optimistic assumption that “peaceful uses” promises and periodic international inspections would be sufficient to make sure that nuclear technology would not be used for weapons. This was undermined by the India’s 1974 bomb which used materials covered by such promises, and by more recent cheating by NPT members.

· Commercial plutonium not suitable for bombs. Of the two major nuclear explosives, plutonium was the first proliferation concern as power reactors produced it in large quantities, and plutonium separation by reprocessing threatened to make the material widely available. A shift to plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactors was the goal of all nuclear program. “Breeders” because they effectively produced more fuel than they burned. It’s essential to grasp this point to understand the hold that this idea had, and continues to have, on the nuclear community. The first argument made to protect plutonium use was that the plutonium that comes out of commercial reactors—which were mostly LWRs—was not suitable for weapons and so is of little concern. This is incorrect and was countered in 1976 by international briefings by US weapons labs.

· Commercial plutonium can be protected from weapons use. In 1976 US President Gerald Ford, trying to strike a reasonable balance between energy and security, urged that nuclear power should proceed without reprocessing spent fuel to extract plutonium until there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation. Since then plutonium adherents have labeled proliferation dangers of nuclear power, and even reprocessing, as exaggerated. It was argued the plutonium could be made safe enough by various schemes, the latest being to always keep it mixed with uranium. This would provide a very low level of protection against national diversion.

· In any case it’s easy to separate plutonium in a “quick and dirty” plant so there is no point in stopping commercial reprocessing. Pres. Ford’s, and later Pres. Carter’s, nuclear industry critics went further. They designed a small reprocessing plant that a country with minimal industrial base could build quickly and secretly. The point was that even if power reactor plutonium could be used for bombs it wasn’t going to do any good to ban commercial reprocessing, because a country with nuclear reactors could quickly build a small clandestine reprocessing plant, using essentially off-the-shelf components, and use it to produce militarily significant numbers of warheads. But this also undermined the Ford-Carter assumption (that continues in present policy)that LWRs with no commercial reprocessing are a safe proposition. If a country with LWRs but no commercial reprocessing could secretly build a small “quick and dirty” plant to reprocess LWR spent fuel then—contrary to conventional wisdom—it could rapidly separate enough plutonium from spent fuel for nuclear weapons.

· Small centrifuge enrichment operations can be set up with no connection to nuclear power programs so there is no point in curtailing commercial nuclear power programs. The relatively recent wide distribution of gas centrifuge enrichment technology adds to proliferation concerns, in fact has become the prime concern. While a country could build such a plant apart from any nuclear power program, the presence of nuclear power plants would be advantageous. It would obviously provide a useful cloak to mask some of the clandestine activities, provide a source of trained personnel, but most importantly it could provide a source of low enriched uranium fuel. The use of such feed material would reduce (either in size or duration) the enrichment effort to produce HEU by as much as a factor of five. This provides another reason, in addition to the concern about small clandestine reprocessing, why LWRs by themselves are not necessarily a safe proposition from the point of view of proliferation.

· There are administrative ways to deal with these problems without constraining nuclear power technology—increased IAEA inspection, expanded national intelligence, and providing “fuel guarantees” and grouping worrisome fuel cycle activities in “multi-national centers.” Increased inspection and national intelligence would be useful, but it isn’t unclear that they could scale up to cope with a worldwide expansion of nuclear power—an unlikely eventuality but nevertheless a goal of US policy and that of other countries who are committed to a nuclear “renaissance,” and a number of countries in volatile regions of Asia and Africa have expressed interest. It took years to find a number of secret nuclear facilities (the latest being the Syrian reactor).Fuel guarantees and multinational centers have been talked about for decades and have gotten nowhere and are unlikely to do so in the future. Continued talk about these has the effect of legitimizing use of plutonium fuel.

· The ultimate argument for not restricting nuclear power is that nuclear power has nothing to do with proliferation. Past nuclear weapons programs did not start from nuclear power programs, or have any connection with nuclear weapons programs, and future ones would not, either, because it would be cheaper to have separate nuclear weapons programs. The basic assumptions here are questionable. For example, the 2006 US-India agreement explicitly allows India to operate several of its nuclear power plants as part of its weapons complex. Another example: The US Department of Energy uses TVA power reactors to produce tritium for warheads. (When the arrangement drew criticism the DOE assistant secretary said the difference between civilian and weapons applications was only “psychological.”) What really matters, however, is not history, but opportunity. If a country is going to cheat—and we know that countries that were members of the NPT have cheated—it will want to limit the period of maximum vulnerability from the time its bomb program is evident or might be discovered to when it has bombs in its armory. If the most readily available source of nuclear explosives will be in the commercial sector, as it is likely will be if we continue to drift as we are doing, then that is likely where bomb makers will go.

· The final argument made by the nuclear community is that even if nuclear power contributes to proliferation, it will not matter very much. There is not likely to be a significant increase in the number of nuclear weapons states, and that this is not likely to change things very much. States will continue to be deterred from attacking each other, and those who joined the nuclear weapons ranks will mostly find their weapons a liability. One has to hope that this Panglossian view is right because we are continuing to spread nuclear capabilities. We may also, by spreading capabilities that can be turned to weapon, be setting up the conditions for a major breakdown of international security.

Up to now we have allowed, over and over, the interest in gaining the benefits of nuclear power to trump bomb concerns. A partial reason for this is that the bomb concerns have not been clearly spelled out or have been submerged in arguments, on the one hand, that the concerns were exaggerated, or on the other that there was nothing that could be done about them in the context of nuclear power programs. We need to rethink the possible consequences of proliferation, and to reexamine what measures related to nuclear power make sense if nonproliferation objectives took precedence over economic benefits. At a minimum it would mean not pursuing nuclear projects unless they provided net economic benefits. That would be an important first step in righting the balance.

Reactor-grade plutonium and nuclear weapons: exploding the myths

From Nuclear Monitor #862, June 2018, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor

Many Nuclear Monitor readers will have heard the argument before: reactor-grade plutonium (RGPu) produced in the normal course of operation of a reactor cannot be used for weapons production and thus claims about the connections between peaceful and military nuclear programs amount to anti-nuclear scuttlebutt.

The premise is false − RGPu can be used in weapons ‒ and in any case the connections between peaceful and military nuclear programs are manifold.

The debate over the weapons-usability of RGPu has been going on for decades and has been covered in Nuclear Monitor (e.g. #787, 6 June 2014). It has essentially been solved: there is no doubt that RGPu can be used in weapons ‒ yet some nuclear industry insiders and lobbyists persist with the fiction that it cannot.

Gregory S. Jones has written a 170-page on the book on the topic, published by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and available online. Jones is a defense policy analyst with 44 years experience. He was part of the research team whose findings prompted the US government in 1976 to reveal, for the first time, the weapon usability of reactor-grade plutonium.

Jones’ book ought to be the last word on the matter; but of course the nuclear lobby will keep lying. For example, Jones’ detective work has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that a much-debated 1962 US weapon test did indeed use RGPu. That research was published in 2013 yet it has been largely ignored and many still claim the 1962 test used weapon-grade or fuel-grade plutonium.

Likewise, one prominent advocate of the nuclear industry’s line of argument claims that a British weapon test in South Australia in 1953 used RPGu and it must have been unsuccessful (or at least underwhelming) since the UK subsequently used weapon grade plutonium in its bombs. But in fact there is compelling evidence the test used weapon grade plutonium.

The book covers the technical debates in detail and Jones explains the issues in simple terms. Take for example the most glaringly stupid aspect of the pro-nuclear position ‒ even if we accepted the fiction that RGPu cannot be used in weapons, reactors can nonetheless produce weapon-grade or near-weapon-grade plutonium simply by shortening the irradiation time. Jones writes:

“In late 2012, Iran abruptly discharged all of the fuel from its Bushehr PWR. After some months the fuel was reinserted, but the reason for this discharge was never explained. As I have written elsewhere, Iran (or any country with a LWR) has the option of producing near weapon-grade plutonium by simply discharging the fuel in the outermost part of the reactor core after just one irradiation cycle instead of the normal three. The country could cite safety concerns as the reason for the early discharge. Since countries such as Iran plan to produce their own reactor fuel, it would not be hard for them to deliberately introduce flaws into the fuel that they produce so that early discharge would be required.

“It is sometimes said that to use a power reactor in this manner would be uneconomical but there is no prohibition against operating a nuclear power reactor in an uneconomical fashion. After all, it is universally acknowledged that the use of plutonium containing fuels in LWRs (mixed oxide fuel, MOX) is uneconomic but the practice continues in countries such as France and Japan. Therefore, even if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were to detect the production of low burnup fuel at a nuclear power reactor, it would have no basis for taking any action to prevent it.”

The list of chapters gives some indication of the breadth of the book:

1. Why Countries Might Choose Reactor-Grade Plutonium for Their First Weapon
2. A Short History of Reactor-Grade Plutonium and Why the Nuclear Industry Is Wrong to Downplay Its Dangers
3. The Different Kinds of Plutonium
4. Predetonation and Reactor-Grade Plutonium: No Impediment to Powerful, Reliable Nuclear Weapons
5. Heat from Reactor-Grade Plutonium: An Outdated Worry
6. Radiation and Critical Mass: No Barriers to Reactor-Grade Plutonium Use in Nuclear Weapons
7. How Sweden and Pakistan Planned and India May Be Planning to Use Reactor-Grade Plutonium to Make Weapons
8. Did the U.S. and the British Test Reactor-Grade Plutonium in Nuclear Weapons?
9. Conclusions
10. Appendix: How Much Pu-240 Has the U.S. Used in Nuclear Weapons: A History

Jones’ book concludes:

“All things being equal, weapon-grade plutonium is preferred over reactor-grade plutonium for the production of nuclear weapons. However, today, unlike the 1940s and 1950s, all things are not equal. A non-nuclear weapon state would find it difficult to build a plutonium production reactor without being subjected to enormous international pressure and, as Syria found out in 2007, the reactor could be bombed before it even began operation. In contrast, nuclear power reactors are readily available and, as part of the continuing legacy of the myth of denatured plutonium, half a dozen non-nuclear weapon states have large quantities of separated plutonium. Japan currently has several metric tons of plutonium in the form of pure plutonium nitrate solution or pure plutonium dioxide. In 13 years, after the Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action expires, Iran will be permitted to reprocess spent fuel to obtain pure plutonium nitrate.

“For countries today, the choice is not between weapon-grade plutonium and reactor-grade plutonium for nuclear weapons but rather between reactor-grade plutonium and no nuclear weapons at all. In the past, both Sweden and Pakistan at one time based their nuclear weapon programs on reactor-grade plutonium when weapon-grade plutonium was unavailable. That neither country would eventually produce reactor-grade based nuclear weapons does not change these facts. In the case of Pakistan, its failure to produce nuclear weapons using reactor-grade plutonium had nothing to do with the properties of such weapons. Rather, the United States recognized the dangers of reactor-grade plutonium and applied pressure to France to block the sale of the reprocessing plant needed to produce separated reactor-grade plutonium. Today, India may have deployed nuclear weapons using reactor-grade plutonium.

“It has been claimed that nuclear weapons manufactured using reactor-grade plutonium would be “unreliable,” “unpredictable,” “bulky,” and “hazardous to bomb makers.” None of this is true. The entire 270 metric ton current world stockpile of separated plutonium can be used to produce nuclear weapons by simply using a reduced amount of plutonium that is only 60% of a critical mass and coating the core with a half a centimeter of uranium. Employing early 1950s U.S. unboosted implosion technology and modern high explosives, these weapons would have the same predetonation probability as that of the same type of weapon using weapon-grade plutonium and a near critical core. The weapons would be the same exact size and weight as ones using weapon-grade plutonium, and they would require no special cooling. The gamma radiation from the core would be significantly less than that of an unshielded weapon-grade plutonium core. The only difference would be that while the weapon-grade plutonium weapon would produce a yield of 20 kilotons, the reactor-grade plutonium weapon would produce a yield of only 5 kilotons, though its destructive area would still be about 40% that of the 20 kiloton weapon. Further, boosting technology appears to be becoming more readily available to early nuclear weapon states. Boosted weapons produce the same yield regardless of whether weapon-grade or reactor-grade plutonium is
used.

“Many claims about so-called denatured plutonium relate to reactor-grade plutonium produced by spiking reactor fuel with either neptunium or americium. However, this spiking has not been done nor is it likely to ever be done since this would greatly increase the costs and technical difficulty of using plutonium as nuclear reactor fuel. Even then, the plutonium could be used to produce nuclear weapons though in this case some special effort would be needed to cool the core by expanding the size of the core to improve heat dissipation and using thermal bridges to conduct the heat away from the core.

“The obvious solution to the nuclear weapon dangers posed by reactor-grade plutonium is to deny non-nuclear weapons states easy access to this material by banning all reprocessing and plutonium recycling, including unirradiated MOX fuel, from such countries. This was the conclusion of the analysis that I participated in at Pan Heuristics over 40 years ago. Our conclusion led to the Carter Administration to end commercial reprocessing in the United States and to try to prevent it in non-nuclear weapon states as well. The intervening years have only reinforced the wisdom of this recommendation. In the 1970s, those in the nuclear industry objected that such a policy would retard the growth of nuclear power which they believed was destined to be a major if not the main source of electricity generation. The nuclear industry expected that uranium resources would be insufficient to support such a large nuclear industry and only plutonium fuel in breeder reactors could power the large number of reactors that they expected.

“Today there are no commercial breeder reactors and none are in sight. Nuclear power did not grow to become anywhere as important as was predicted and uranium resources have proven to be no constraint on nuclear power. The use of plutonium based reactor fuels is universally acknowledged to be uneconomic. Nuclear energy faces stiff competition from natural gas and renewable energy sources.

“Though plutonium reprocessing in nuclear weapon states poses little proliferation risk, it is clearly uneconomic and unnecessary given the 270 metric ton stockpile of separated plutonium that already exists. Reprocessing should be ended in these countries as well to prevent this unnecessary plutonium stockpile from growing even larger.”

Gregory S. Jones, April 2018, ‘Reactor-Grade Plutonium and Nuclear Weapons: Exploding the Myths’, Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, www.npolicy.org/thebook.php?bid=37

Full book (PDF):

http://npolicy.org/books/Reactor-Grade_Plutonium_and_Nuclear_Weapons/Greg%20Jones_Reactor-grade%20plutonium%20web.pdf

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Generating Electrical Power – And Atomic Bombs’

Useful paper by physicist Alan Roberts: ‘Generating Electrical Power – And Atomic Bombs’, EnergyScience Coalition Briefing Paper #17, http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP17%20DualUse.pdf

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Can ‘reactor grade’ plutonium be used in nuclear weapons?

Jim Green
National nuclear campaigner – Friends of the Earth, Australia
jim.green@foe.org.au
Last updated: September 10, 2007.

Reactor grade plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons, albeit the case that weapons manufacture using reactor grade plutonium is more difficult and dangerous compared to weapon grade plutonium. In addition to the potential to use plutonium produced in a normal power reactor operating cycle, there is the option of using civil power or research reactors to irradiate uranium for a much shorter period of time to produce plutonium ideally suited to weapons manufacture.

A standard nuclear power reactor (1000 MWe LWR) produces about 290 kilograms of plutonium each year. Hundreds of tonnes of plutonium have been produced in power reactors (and to a lesser extent research reactors), hence the importance of the debate over the use of reactor grade plutonium in weapons.

Plutonium grades

For weapons manufacture, the ideal plutonium contains a very high proportion of plutonium-239. As neutron irradiation of uranium-238 proceeds, the greater the quantity of isotopes such as plutonium-240, plutonium-241, plutonium-242 and americium-241, and the greater the quantity of plutonium-238 formed (indirectly) from uranium-235. These unwanted isotopes make it more difficult and dangerous to produce nuclear weapons.

Definitions of plutonium usually refer to the level of the unwanted plutonium-240 isotope:
* Weapon grade plutonium contains less than 7% plutonium-240. (A sub-category – super grade plutonium – contains 2-3% plutonium-240 or less.)
* Fuel grade plutonium contains 7-18% plutonium-240
* Reactor grade plutonium contains over 18% plutonium-240.

Although somewhat imprecise, it is also useful to distinguish low burn-up plutonium (high in plutonium-239, including weapon grade plutonium and some or all fuel grade plutonium) from high burn-up plutonium (including reactor grade plutonium and possibly some fuel grade plutonium).

According to the Uranium Information Centre (2002), plutonium in spent fuel removed from a commercial power reactor (burn-up of 42 GWd/t) consists of about 55% Pu-239, 23% Pu-240, 12% Pu-241 and lesser quantities of the other isotopes, including 2% of Pu-238 which is the main source of heat and radioactivity. Elsewhere, the Uranium Information Centre (2004) states that plutonium contained in spent fuel elements is typically about 60-70% Pu-239. Carlson et al. (1997) from the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office note that current commercial light- and heavy-water reactors contains around 50-65% Pu-239.

Weapon grade plutonium and fuel grade plutonium from power reactors

Nuclear power reactors can of course be operated on a much shorter than usual irradiation cycle in order to produce large quantities of weapon grade and/or fuel grade plutonium for use in weapons. It is sometimes argued that short irradiation times would adversely effect the commercial operation of a power reactor, but that would probably be of minimal concern to a would-be proliferator.

During a normal reactor operating cycle (in which fuel typically remains in the reactor for 3-4 years), a large majority of the plutonium formed is reactor grade. However, the grade of the plutonium varies depending on the position of the particular fuel elements in the reactor. Carlson et al. (1997) note that: “Even though fuel assemblies are moved around during refuelling, some parts of fuel rods will have a plutonium isotope composition closer to that of [weapon grade plutonium].”

Weapon grade plutonium can be inadvertently produced in power reactors. Carlson et al. (1997) cite the example of leaking fuel rods in a reactor in the US in the 1970s, leading the utility to discharge the entire initial reactor core containing a few hundred kilograms of plutonium with 89-95% Pu-239.

Fuel grade plutonium is produced in some nuclear reactors. It is often produced in tritium production reactors, and can also be produced in power reactors in initial core loads and in damaged fuel discharged from the reactor earlier than normal (Carlson et al., 1997).

Carlson et al. (1997) note the normal operation of on-load refuelling reactors (eg certain gas-graphite and heavy water reactors) can result in some low burn-up plutonium.

The development of fast breeder technology has the potential to result in large-scale production of weapon grade plutonium (Carlson et al., 1997).

Carlson et al. (1997) note that at least five tonnes of civil plutonium under IAEA safeguards is in the upper range of fuel grade plutonium or weapon grade plutonium.

Reactor grade plutonium

With the exception of a few contrarians (discussed below), there is general agreement that reactor grade plutonium can be used to produce weapons, though the process is more difficult and dangerous than the use of weapon grade plutonium (see Gorwitz, 1998 for discussion and references).

The difficulties associated with the use of reactor grade plutonium are as follows.

If the starting point is spent reactor fuel, the hazards of managing that spent fuel must be addressed and there must be the capacity to separate plutonium from spent fuel. Spent fuel from power reactors running on a normal operating cycle will be considerably more radioactive and much hotter than low burn-up spent fuel. Thus the high burn-up spent fuel (and the separated reactor grade plutonium) are more hazardous – though it is not difficult to envisage scenarios whereby proliferators place little emphasis on worker safety. It may also be more time consuming and expensive to separate reactor grade plutonium than separation from low burn-up spent fuel.

Weapons with reactor grade plutonium are likely to be inferior in relation to reliability and yield when compared to weapon grade plutonium. Emission of fission neutrons from plutonium-240 may begin the chain reaction too early to achieve full explosive yield. However, devastating nuclear weapons could still be produced. Radiation and heat levels could diminish reliability through their effects on weapons components such as high explosives and electronics.

According to Leventhal and Dolley (1999), the high rate of neutron generation from plutonium-240 can be turned to advantage as it “eliminates the need to include a neutron initiator in the weapon, considerably simplifying the task of designing and producing such a weapon”.

A greater quantity of reactor grade plutonium may be required to produce a weapon of similar yield, or conversely there will be a lower yield for reactor grade plutonium compared to a similar amount of weapon grade plutonium.

Storage life would be adversely affected by the difficulties associated with reactor grade plutonium.

The majority view

A strong majority of informed opinion holds that reactor grade plutonium can indeed be used in nuclear weapons despite the above-mentioned problems.

A report from the US Department of Energy (1997) puts the following view:

“Virtually any combination of plutonium isotopes – the different forms of an element having different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei – can be used to make a nuclear weapon. …
The only isotopic mix of plutonium which cannot realistically be used for nuclear weapons is nearly pure plutonium-238, which generates so much heat that the weapon would not be stable. …
At the lowest level of sophistication, a potential proliferating state or subnational group using designs and technologies no more sophisticated than those used in first-generation nuclear weapons could build a nuclear weapon from reactor-grade plutonium that would have an assured, reliable yield of one or a few kilotons (and a probable yield significantly higher than that). At the other end of the spectrum, advanced nuclear weapon states such as the United States and Russia, using modern designs, could produce weapons from reactor-grade plutonium having reliable explosive yields, weight, and other characteristics generally comparable to those of weapons made from weapons-grade plutonium. …
“Proliferating states using designs of intermediate sophistication could produce weapons with assured yields substantially higher than the kiloton-range possible with a simple, first-generation nuclear device. …
“The disadvantage of reactor-grade plutonium is not so much in the effectiveness of the nuclear weapons that can be made from it as in the increased complexity in designing, fabricating, and handling them. The possibility that either a state or a sub-national group would choose to use reactor-grade plutonium, should sufficient stocks of weapon-grade plutonium not be readily available, cannot be discounted. In short, reactor-grade plutonium is weapons-usable, whether by unsophisticated proliferators or by advanced nuclear weapon states.”

According to Hans Blix, then IAEA Director General: “On the basis of advice provided to it by its Member States and by the Standing Advisory Group on Safeguards Implementation (SAGSI), the Agency considers high burn-up reactor-grade plutonium and in general plutonium of any isotopic composition with the exception of plutonium containing more than 80 percent Pu-238 to be capable of use in a nuclear explosive device. There is no debate on the matter in the Agency’s Department of Safeguards.” (Blix, 1990; see also Anon., 1990).

The IAEA Department of Safeguards has stated that “even highly burned reactor-grade plutonium can be used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons capable of very substantial explosive yields.” (Shea and Chitumbo, 1993.)

With the exception of plutonium comprising 80% or more of the isotope plutonium-238, all plutonium is defined by the IAEA as a “direct use” material, that is, “nuclear material that can be used for the manufacture of nuclear explosives components without transmutation or further enrichment”, and is subject to equal levels of safeguards.

An expert committee drawn from the major US nuclear laboratories concludes its report by noting: “Although weapons-grade plutonium is preferable for the development and fabrication of nuclear weapons and nuclear explosive devices, reactor grade plutonium can be used.” (Hinton et al., 1996.)

According to Robert Seldon (1976), of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory: “All plutonium can be used directly in nuclear explosives. The concept of … plutonium which is not suitable for explosives is fallacious. A high content of the plutonium 240 isotope (reactor-grade plutonium) is a complication, but not a preventative.”

According to J. Carson Mark (1993), former director of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory: “Reactor-grade plutonium with any level of irradiation is a potentially explosive material. The difficulties of developing an effective design of the most straightforward type are not appreciably greater with reactor-grade plutonium than with those that have to be met for the use of weapons-grade plutonium.”

According to Matthew Bunn (1997), chair of the US National Academy of Sciences’ analysis of options for the disposal of plutonium removed from nuclear weapons: “For an unsophisticated proliferator, making a crude bomb with a reliable, assured yield of a kiloton or more – and hence a destructive radius about one-third to one-half that of the Hiroshima bomb – from reactor-grade plutonium would require no more sophistication than making a bomb from weapon-grade plutonium. And major weapon states like the United States and Russia could, if they chose to do so, make bombs with reactor-grade plutonium with yield, weight, and reliability characteristics similar to those made from weapon-grade plutonium. That they have not chosen to do so in the past has to do with convenience and a desire to avoid radiation doses to workers and military personnel, not the difficulty of accomplishing the job. Indeed, one Russian weapon-designer who has focused on this issue in detail criticized the information declassified by the US Department of Energy for failing to point out that in some respects if would actually be easier for an unsophisticated proliferator to make a bomb from reactor-grade plutonium (as no neutron generator would be required).”

According to Prof. Marvin Miller, from the MIT Defense and Arms Control Studies Program: “[W]ith an amount on the order of 10 kilograms, it is now possible for a small group, conceivably even a single ‘nuclear unibomber’ working alone, to ‘reinvent’ a simplified version of the Trinity bomb in which the use of reactor-grade rather than weapon-grade plutonium is an advantage.” (Quoted in Dolley, 1997.)

According to the Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, US Department of Energy: “There is clear scientific evidence behind the assertion that nuclear weapons can be made from weapons-grade and reactor-grade plutonium.” (Quoted in Dolley, 1997.)

According to Steve Fetter (1999) from Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and Cooperation, “All nuclear fuel cycles involve fuels that contain weapon-usable materials that can be obtained through a relatively straightforward chemical separation process. … In fact, any group that could make a nuclear explosive with weapon-grade plutonium would be able to make an effective device with reactor-grade plutonium. … The main alternative to the once-through cycle involves the separation and recycling of the plutonium and uranium in the spent fuel. Not only is separation and recycle more expensive, it increases greatly the opportunities for theft and diversion of plutonium.”

Nuclear tests using below weapon grade plutonium

The US government has acknowledged that a successful test using ‘reactor grade’ plutonium was carried out at the Nevada Test Site in 1962 (US Department of Energy, 1994). The information was declassified in July 1977. The yield of the blast was less than 20 kilotons.

The US Department of Energy (1994) states: “The test confirmed that reactor-grade plutonium could be used to make a nuclear explosive. … The United States maintains an extensive nuclear test data base and predictive capabilities. This information, combined with the results of this low yield test, reveals that weapons can be constructed with reactor-grade plutonium.”

The US Department of Energy (1994) makes the connection to current debates over reprocessing, stating that: “The release of additional information was deemed important to enhance public awareness of nuclear proliferation issues associated with reactor-grade plutonium that can be separated during reprocessing of spent commercial reactor fuel.”

The exact isotopic composition of the plutonium used in the 1962 test remains classified. It has been suggested (e.g. by Carlson et al., 1997) that because of changing classification systems, the plutonium used in the 1962 test may have been fuel grade plutonium using current classifications. De Volpi (1996) is sceptical that the plutonium used in 1962 the test would be classed as reactor grade using current classifications, but states that it was below weapon grade, i.e. it was fuel grade plutonium.

Hore-Lacey from the industry-funded Uranium Information Centre contends that the isotopic composition of the plutonium used in the 1962 test “has not been disclosed, but it was evidently about 90% Pu-239”. However, there is no compelling evidence to judge whether the test used reactor grade plutonium or fuel grade plutonium.

Regardless of the debate over the quality of the plutonium used in the 1962 test, and the more general debate over the suitability of reactor grade plutonium for weapons, it is worth noting again that civil power and research reactors can certainly be used to produce weapon grade or fuel grade plutonium simply by limiting the irradiation time.

India Today reported in 1998 that one or more of the 1998 tests in India used reactor grade plutonium (Anon., 1998).

(In Lorna Arnold’s ‘official’ history of the British bomb tests in Australia, titled “A very special relationship”, and in other literature such as De Volpi (1996), it is stated that one of the two Totem nuclear tests at Emu Field in South Australia in 1953 used below-weapon-grade plutonium. However, measurements of Pu/Am ratios at the bomb sites by Australian nuclear physicists do not support the claim and the British have since stated that the plan to use below-weapon-grade plutonium was abandoned because it was not available in time for the test. The Pu/Am data is presented in P.A. Burns et al., Health Physics 67, 1994, pp.226-232.)

Contrary views

The industry-funded Uranium Information Centre (2002) notes that a significant proportion of Pu-240 would make a weapon “hazardous to the bomb makers, as well as unreliable and unpredictable”, that plutonium for weapons is produced in dedicated production reactors usually fuelled with natural uranium, and that: “This, coupled with the application of international safeguards, effectively rules out the use of commercial nuclear power plants.”

In the same paper, the Uranium Information Centre (2002) asserts that: “While of a different order of magnitude to the fission occurring within a nuclear reactor, Pu-240 has a relatively high rate of spontaneous fission with consequent neutron emissions. This makes reactor-grade plutonium entirely unsuitable for use in a bomb.” The UIC refers to the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (1998-99) in support of that claim, though the ASNO material does not support such a strong claim.

According to Hore-Lacey (2003) from the UIC: “Due to spontaneous fission of Pu-240, only a very low level of it is tolerable in material for making weapons. Design and construction of nuclear explosives based on normal reactor-grade plutonium would be difficult and unreliable, and has not so far been done.”

The UIC (2004) states: “The only use for “reactor grade” plutonium is as a nuclear fuel, after it is separated from the high-level wastes by reprocessing. It is not and has never been used for weapons, due to the relatively high rate of spontaneous fission and radiation from the heavier isotopes such as Pu-240 making any such attempted use fraught with great uncertainties.”

Some of the above statements for the UIC imply that it is impossible to use reactor grade plutonium in weapons, but the available evidence does not support that argument. The assertion that reactor grade plutonium has never been used in weapons is, at best, questionable.

The Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO) also makes the dubious claim that there has been no “practical demonstration” of the use of reactor grade plutonium in nuclear weapons. (ASNO, 1998-99.)

Implications

The potentially catastrophic implications of nuclear weapons proliferation demands that a conservative approach be adopted to the question of reactor grade plutonium. In other words, for the purposes of public policy it should be assumed that reactor grade plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons and that the difficulties and dangers of so doing would pose only a minimal deterrent. There are of course many related areas where the importance of a conservative position is accepted – in relation to the health effects of low-level radiation, for example.

Carlson et al. (1997), from the so-called Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, state: “The situation which arose with the DPRK highlights the fact that production of separated weapons-grade material by a non-nuclear-weapon State should not be accepted as a normal activity. Even for nuclear-weapon States, the proposal for a convention on the cut-off of production of fissile material for weapons purposes has implications in this regard. A proscription on the production – or separation – of plutonium at or near weapons-grade would be an important confidence-building measure in support of the disarmament and non-proliferation regime.”

Applying the conservative principle, ASNO’s arguments ought to be extended to include reactor grade plutonium. Its production should be minimised (e.g. with a phase-out of nuclear power). Separation of any plutonium from irradiated materials ought to proscribed immediately.

References

Anon., November 12, 1990, “Blix Says IAEA Does Not Dispute Utility of Reactor-Grade Pu for Weapons,” Nuclear Fuel, p.8.

Anon., October 10, 1998, “The H-Bomb”, India Today.

Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, 1998-99, Annual Report, pp.55-59. <www.uic.com.au/nip18.htm>

Blix, H., November 1, 1990, Letter to the Nuclear Control Institute, Washington DC.

Bunn, M., June 1997, paper presented at International Atomic Energy Agency Conference, Vienna.

Carlson, J., J. Bardsley, V. Bragin and J. Hill (Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office), “Plutonium isotopics – non-proliferation and safeguards issues”, Paper presented to the IAEA Symposium on International Safeguards, Vienna, Austria, 13-17 October, 1997, <www.asno.dfat.gov.au/O_9705.html>

Carson Mark, J., 1993, “Explosive Properties of Reactor-Grade Plutonium”, <ccnr.org/Findings_plute.html>.

De Volpi, Alex, October 1996, “A Cover-up of Nuclear-Test Information”, APS Forum on Physics and Society, Vol. 25, No. 4.
<www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/1996/october/aoct96.cfm#a2>

Dolley, Steven, March 28, 1997, Using warhead plutonium as reactor fuel does not make it unusable in nuclear bombs, <www.nci.org/i/ib32897c.htm>.

Fetter, Steve, 1999, “Climate Change and the Transformation of World Energy Supply”, Stanford University – Centre for International Security and Cooperation Report, <cisac.stanford.edu/publications/10228>.

Gorwitz, Mark, 1996, “The Plutonium Special Isotope Separation Program: An Open Literature Analysis”.

Gorwitz, Mark, 1998, “Foreign Assistance to Iran’s Nuclear and Missile Programs”, <www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/1998/iran-fa.htm>. See Appendix A and references.

Hinton, J.P., October 1996, “Proliferation Vulnerability”, Red Team Report. Sandia National Laboratories Publication, SAND 97-8203, <www.ccnr.org/plute_sandia.html>.

Hore-Lacey, Ian, 2003, Nuclear Electricity, Seventh Edition, Chapter 7, published by Uranium Information Centre Ltd and World Nuclear Association, <www.uic.com.au/ne.htm>.

Leventhal, Paul, and Steven Dolley, (Nuclear Control Institute), 1999, “Understanding Japan’s Nuclear Transports: The Plutonium Context”, Presented to the Conference on Carriage of Ultrahazardous Radioactive Cargo by Sea: Implications and Responses, <www.nci.org/k-m/mmi.htm>.

Selden, R. W., 1976, Reactor Plutonium and Nuclear Explosives, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California.

Shea, T.E. and K. Chitumbo, “Safeguarding Sensitive Nuclear Materials: Reinforced Approaches”, IAEA Bulletin, #3, 1993, p.23.

Uranium Information Centre, 2002, “Plutonium”, Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper 18, <www.uic.com.au/nip18.htm>.

Uranium Information Centre, October 2004, “Safeguards to Prevent Nuclear Proliferation”, Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper 5, <www.uic.com.au/nip05.htm>. (Accessed May 1, 2005.)

US Department Energy, June 1994, Office of the Press Secretary, “Additional Information Concerning Underground Nuclear Weapon Test of Reactor-Grade Plutonium”, DOE Facts (1994) 186-7. Reproduced on the US Office of Scientific and Technical Information website, <www.osti.gov/html/osti/opennet/document/press/pc29.html>. Also available at: <www.ccnr.org/plute_bomb.html>.

US Department of Energy, 1997, Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, January, “Final Nonproliferation and Arms Control Assessment of Weapons-Usable Fissile Material Storage and Excess Plutonium Disposition Alternatives”, Washington, DC: DOE, DOE/NN-0007, pp.37-39. <www.ccnr.org/plute.html>.

Thorium power has a protactinium problem

By Eva C. Uribe

August 6, 2018

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Eva C. Uribe is an affiliate and former Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Thorium power has a protactinium problem

In 1980, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) observed that protactinium, a chemical element generated in thorium reactors, could be separated and allowed to decay to isotopically pure uranium 233—suitable material for making nuclear weapons. The IAEA report, titled “Advanced Fuel Cycle and Reactor Concepts,” concluded that the proliferation resistance of thorium fuel cycles “would be equivalent to” the uranium/plutonium fuel cycles of conventional civilian nuclear reactors, assuming both included spent fuel reprocessing to isolate fissile material.

Decades later, the story changed. “Th[orium]-based fuels and fuel cycles have intrinsic proliferation resistance,” according to the IAEA in 2005. Mainstream media have repeated this view ever since, often without caveat. Several scholars have recognized the inherent proliferation risk of protactinium separations in the thorium fuel cycle, but the perception that thorium reactors cannot be used to make weapons persists. While technology has advanced, the fundamental radiochemistry that governs nuclear fuel reprocessing remains unchanged. Thus, this shift in perspective is puzzling and reflects a failure to recognize the importance of protactinium radiochemistry in thorium fuel cycles.

…

Protactinium separations provide a pathway for obtaining highly attractive weapons-grade uranium 233 from thorium fuel cycles. The difficulties of safeguarding commercial spent fuel reprocessing are significant for any type of fuel cycle, and thorium is no exception. Reprocessing creates unique safeguard challenges, particularly in India, which is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

There is little to be gained by calling thorium fuel cycles intrinsically proliferation-resistant. The best way to realize nuclear power from thorium fuel cycles is to acknowledge their unique proliferation vulnerabilities, and to adequately safeguard them against theft and misuse.

Read the full article at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website.

Thorium ‒ a better fuel for nuclear technology

Excerpt from: Dr. Rainer Moormann, ‘Thorium ‒ a better fuel for nuclear technology?’, Nuclear Monitor #858, 1 March 2018.

Claim 3: Thorium use has hardly any proliferation risk

The proliferation problem of Th / U-233 needs a differentiated analysis ‒ general answers are easily misleading. First of all, one has to assess the weapon capability of U-233. Criteria for good suitability are a low critical mass and a low rate of spontaneous fission. The critical mass of U-233 is only 40% of that of U-235, the critical mass of plutonium-239 is around 15% smaller than for U-233. A relatively easy to construct nuclear explosive needs around 20 to 25 kg U-233. The spontaneous fission rate is important, because the neutrons from spontaneous fission act as a starter of the chain reaction; for an efficient nuclear explosion, the fissile material needs to have a super-criticality of at least 2.5 (criticality is the amount of new fissions produced by the neutrons of each fission.)

When, because of spontaneous fissions, a noticeable chain reaction already starts during the initial conventional explosion trigger mechanism in the criticality phase between 1 and 2.5, undesired weak nuclear explosions would end the super-criticality before a significant part of the fissile material has reacted. This largely depends on how fast the criticality phase of 1 to 2.5 is passed. Weapon plutonium (largely Pu-239) and moreover reactor plutonium have – different from the mentioned uranium fission materials U-235 and U-233 – a high spontaneous fission rate, which excludes their use in easy to build bombs.

More specifically, plutonium cannot be caused to explode in a so-called gun-type fission weapon, but both uranium isotopes can. Plutonium needs the far more complex implosion bomb design, which we will not go into further here. A gun-type fission weapon was used in Hiroshima – a cannon barrel set-up, in which a fission projectile is shot into a fission block of a suitable form so that they together form a highly super-critical arrangement (see the picture in sheet 7 in reference #1). Here, the criticality phase from 1 to 2.5 is in the order of magnitude of milliseconds – a relatively long time, in which a plutonium explosive would destroy itself with weak nuclear explosions caused by spontaneous fission. One cannot find such uranium gun-type fission weapons in modern weapon arsenals any longer (South Africa’s apartheid regime built 7 gun-type fission weapons using uranium-235): their efficiency (at most a few percent) is rather low, they are bulky (the Hiroshima bomb: 3.6 metric tons, 3.2 meters long), inflexible, and not really suitable for carriers like intercontinental rockets.

On the other hand, gun-type designs are highly reliable and relatively easy to build. Also, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reckons that larger terror groups would be capable of constructing a nuclear explosive on the basis of the gun-type fission design provided they got hold of a sufficient amount of suitable fissile material.1 Bombs with a force of at most 2 to 2.5 times that of the Hiroshima bomb (13 kt TNT) are conceivable. For that reason, the USA and Russia have tried intensively for decades to repatriate their world-wide delivered highly enriched uranium (HEU).

A draw-back of U-233 in weapon technology is that – when it is produced only for energy generation purposes – it is contaminated with maximally 250 parts per million (ppm) U-232 (half-life 70 years).2 That does not impair the nuclear explosion capability, but the uranium-232 turns in the thorium decay chain, which means ‒ as mentioned above ‒ emission of the highly penetrating radiation of Tl-208. A strongly radiating bomb is undesirable in a military environment – from the point of view of handling, and because the radiation intervenes with the bomb’s electronics. In the USA, there exists a limit of 50 ppm U-232 above which U-233 is no longer considered suitable for weapons.

Nevertheless, U-232 does not really diminish all proliferation problems around U-233. First of all, simple gun-type designs do not need any electronics; furthermore, radiation safety arguments during bomb construction will hardly play a role for terrorist organisations that use suicide bombers. Besides that, Tl-208 only appears in the end of the decay chain of U-232: freshly produced or purified U-233/U-232 will radiate little for weeks and is easier to handle.2 It is also possible to suppress the build-up of uranium-232 to a large extent, when during the breeding process of U-233 fast neutrons with energies larger than 0.5 MeV are filtered out (for instance by arranging the thorium in the reactor behind a moderating layer) and thorium is used from ore that contains as little uranium as possible.

A very elegant way to harvest highly pure U-233 is offered by the proposed molten salt reactors with integrated reprocessing (MSR): During the breeding of U-233 from thorium, the intermediate protactinium-233 (Pa-233) is produced, which has a half-life of around one month. When this intermediate is isolated – as is intended in some molten salt reactors – and let decay outside the reactor, pure U-233 is obtained that is optimally suited for nuclear weapons.

An advantage of U-233 in comparison with Pu-239 in military use is that under neutron irradiation during the production in the reactor, it tends to turn a lot less into nuclides that negatively influence the explosion capability. U-233 can (like U-235) be made unsuitable for use in weapons by adding U-238: When depleted uranium is already mixed with thorium during the feed-in into the reactor, the resulting mix of nuclides is virtually unusable for weapons. However, for MSRs with integrated reprocessing this is not a sufficient remedy. One would have to prevent separation of protactinium-233.9

The conclusion has to be that the use of thorium contains severe proliferation risks. These are less in the risk that highly developed states would find it easier to lay their hands on high-tech weapons, than that the bar for the construction of simple but highly effective nuclear explosives for terror organisations or unstable states will be a lot lower.

…

In my opinion, the proliferation aspect is a vital issue. Here we would see a severe deterioration of the current situation, because the barriers to the construction of feasible nuclear explosives by, for instance, terror groups would be seriously lowered. This aspect deserves more attention. We can hope that the IAEA, the USA and Russia would oppose uncontrolled propagation of thorium technology, when they would see its introduction thwarting their decades-long efforts to reduce the proliferation risk by repatriation of HEU.

On the other hand, the current thorium hype, partially carried by a fanaticism based on limited knowledge, could lead in a populist environment to incalculable developments. For that reason, I think it important that the environment and peace movements should insist that thorium technology without sufficient proliferation control should be outlawed in the same way as currently is the case with efforts to phase out the use of HEU. As a minimum requirement, thorium technology without U-233 denaturation with U-238 should be banned, and online reprocessing in molten salt reactors should be banned.

Thor-bores and uro-sceptics: thorium’s friendly fire

Excerpt from: Jim Green, 9 April 2015, Nuclear Monitor #801, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/801/thor-bores-and-uro-sceptics-thoriums-friendly-fire

Many Nuclear Monitor readers will be familiar with the tiresome rhetoric of thorium enthusiasts − let’s call them thor-bores. Their arguments have little merit but they refuse to go away. Here’s a thor-bore in full flight − a science journalist who should know better:

“Thorium is a superior nuclear fuel to uranium in almost every conceivable way … If there is such a thing as green nuclear power, thorium is it. … For one, a thorium-powered nuclear reactor can never undergo a meltdown. It just can’t. … Thorium is also thoroughly useless for making nuclear weapons. … But wait, there’s more. Thorium doesn’t only produce less waste, it can be used to consume existing waste.”¹

…

Weapons proliferation

Claims that thorium reactors would be proliferation-resistant or proliferation-proof do not stand up to scrutiny.¹¹ Irradiation of thorium-232 produces uranium-233, which can be and has been used in nuclear weapons.

The World Nuclear Association states:

“The USA produced about 2 tonnes of U-233 from thorium during the ‘Cold War’, at various levels of chemical and isotopic purity, in plutonium production reactors. It is possible to use U-233 in a nuclear weapon, and in 1955 the USA detonated a device with a plutonium-U-233 composite pit, in Operation Teapot. The explosive yield was less than anticipated, at 22 kilotons. In 1998 India detonated a very small device based on U-233 called Shakti V.”²

According to Assoc. Prof. Nigel Marks, both the US and the USSR tested uranium-233 bombs in 1955.⁶

Uranium-233 is contaminated with uranium-232 but there are ways around that problem. Kang and von Hippel note:

“[J]ust as it is possible to produce weapon-grade plutonium in low-burnup fuel, it is also practical to use heavy-water reactors to produce U-233 containing only a few ppm of U-232 if the thorium is segregated in “target” channels and discharged a few times more frequently than the natural-uranium “driver” fuel.”¹²

John Carlson discusses the proliferation risks associated with thorium:

“The thorium fuel cycle has similarities to the fast neutron fuel cycle – it depends on breeding fissile material (U-233) in the reactor, and reprocessing to recover this fissile material for recycle. …

“Proponents argue that the thorium fuel cycle is proliferation resistant because it does not produce plutonium. Proponents claim that it is not practicable to use U-233 for nuclear weapons.

“There is no doubt that use of U-233 for nuclear weapons would present significant technical difficulties, due to the high gamma radiation and heat output arising from decay of U-232 which is unavoidably produced with U-233. Heat levels would become excessive within a few weeks, degrading the high explosive and electronic components of a weapon and making use of U‑233 impracticable for stockpiled weapons. However, it would be possible to develop strategies to deal with these drawbacks, e.g. designing weapons where the fissile “pit” (the core of the nuclear weapon) is not inserted until required, and where ongoing production and treatment of U-233 allows for pits to be continually replaced. This might not be practical for a large arsenal, but could certainly be done on a small scale.

“In addition, there are other considerations. A thorium reactor requires initial core fuel – LEU or plutonium – until it reaches the point where it is producing sufficient U-233 for self-sustainability, so the cycle is not entirely free of issues applying to the uranium fuel cycle (i.e. requirement for enrichment or reprocessing). Further, while the thorium cycle can be self-sustaining on produced U‑233, it is much more efficient if the U-233 is supplemented by additional “driver” fuel, such as LEU or plutonium. For example, India, which has spent some decades developing a comprehensive thorium fuel cycle concept, is proposing production of weapons grade plutonium in fast breeder reactors specifically for use as driver fuel for thorium reactors. This approach has obvious problems in terms of proliferation and terrorism risks.

“A concept for a liquid fuel thorium reactor is under consideration (in which the thorium/uranium fuel would be dissolved in molten fluoride salts), which would avoid the need for reprocessing to separate U-233. If it proceeds, this concept would have non-proliferation advantages.

“Finally, it cannot be excluded that a thorium reactor – as in the case of other reactors – could be used for plutonium production through irradiation of uranium targets.

“Arguments that the thorium fuel cycle is inherently proliferation resistant are overstated. In some circumstances the thorium cycle could involve significant proliferation risks.”¹³

Sometimes thor-bores posit conspiracy theories. Former International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Hans Blix said “it is almost impossible to make a bomb out of thorium” and thorium is being held back by the “vested interests” of the uranium-based nuclear industry.¹⁴

But Julian Kelly from Thor Energy, a Norwegian company developing and testing thorium-plutonium fuels for use in commercial light water reactors, states:

“Conspiracy theories about funding denials for thorium work are for the entertainment sector. A greater risk is that there will be a classic R&D bubble [that] divides R&D effort and investment into fragmented camps and feifdoms.”⁴

References:

1. Tim Dean, 16 March 2011, ‘The greener nuclear alternative’, www.abc.net.au/unleashed/45178.html

2. www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Thorium/

3. UK National Nuclear Laboratory Ltd., 5 March 2012, ‘Comparison of thorium and uranium fuel cycles’, www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/meeting-energy-demand/nuclear/6300-comparison-fuel-cycles.pdf

4. Stephen Harris, 9 Jan 2014, ‘Your questions answered: thorium-powered nuclear’, www.theengineer.co.uk/energy-and-environment/in-depth/your-questions-answered-thorium-powered-nuclear/1017776.article

5. George Dracoulis, 5 Aug 2011, ‘Thorium is no silver bullet when it comes to nuclear energy, but it could play a role’, http://theconversation.com/thorium-is-no-silver-bullet-when-it-comes-to-nuclear-energy-but-it-could-play-a-role-1842

6. Nigel Marks, 2 March 2015, ‘Should Australia consider thorium nuclear power?’, http://theconversation.com/should-australia-consider-thorium-nuclear-power-37850

7. Idaho National Laboratory, Sept 2009, ‘AFCI Options Study’, INL/EXT-10-17639, www.inl.gov/technicalpublications/Documents/4480296.pdf

8. John Carlson, 2014, submission to Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, Parliament of Australia, www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=79a1a29e-5691-4299-8923-06e633780d4b&subId=301365

9. Oliver Tickell, August/September 2012, ‘Thorium: Not ‘green’, not ‘viable’, and not likely’, www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/nuclearnews/NuClearNewsNo43.pdf

10. George Dracoulis, 19 Dec 2011, ‘Thoughts from a thorium ‘symposium”, http://theconversation.com/thoughts-from-a-thorium-symposium-4545

11. https://nuclear.foe.org.au/thorium-and-wmd-proliferation-risks-2/

12. Jungmin Kang and Frank N. von Hippel, 2001, “U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel”, Science & Global Security, Volume 9, pp.1-32, www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/9_1kang.pdf

13. John Carlson, 2009, ‘Introduction to the Concept of Proliferation Resistance’, http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/foe/legacy_url/863/Carlson_20ASNO_20ICNND_20Prolif_20Resistance.doc

14. Herman Trabish, 10 Dec 2013, ‘Thorium Reactors: Nuclear Redemption or Nuclear Hazard?’, http://theenergycollective.com/hermantrabish/314771/thorium-reactors-nuclear-redemption-or-nuclear-hazard

15. Pia Akerman, 7 Oct 2013, ‘Ex-Shell boss issues nuclear call’, The Australian, www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/ex-shell-boss-issues-nuclear-call/story-e6frg6xf-1226733858032

Thorium and nuclear weapons

Jim Green

Thorium fuel cycles are promoted on the grounds that they pose less of a proliferation risk compared to conventional reactors. However, whether there is any significant non-proliferation advantage depends on the design of the various thorium-based systems. No thorium system would negate proliferation risks altogether.

Neutron bombardment of thorium (indirectly) produces uranium-233, a fissile material which can be used in nuclear weapons (1 Significant Quantity of U-233 = 8kg).

The USA has successfully tested weapon/s using uranium-233 cores. India may be interested in the military potential of thorium/uranium-233 in addition to civil applications. India is refusing to allow safeguards to apply to its entire ‘advanced’ thorium/plutonium fuel cycle, stongly suggesting a military dimension.

The possible use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium to initiate a thorium-232/uranium-233 reaction, or proposed systems using thorium in conjunction with HEU or plutonium as fuel, present risks of diversion of HEU or plutonium for weapons production as well as providing a rationale for the ongoing operation of dual-use enrichment and reprocessing plants.

Thorium fuelled reactors could also be used to irradiate uranium to produce weapon grade plutonium.

Kang and von Hippel conclude that “the proliferation resistance of thorium fuel cycles depends very much upon how they are implemented”. For example, the co-production of uranium-232 complicates weapons production but, as Kang and von Hippel note, “just as it is possible to produce weapon-grade plutonium in low-burnup fuel, it is also practical to use heavy-water reactors to produce U-233 containing only a few ppm of U-232 if the thorium is segregated in “target” channels and discharged a few times more frequently than the natural-uranium “driver” fuel.” (Kang, Jungmin, and Frank N. von Hippel, 2001, “U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel”, Science & Global Security, Volume 9, pp 1-32, <www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/9_1kang.pdf>.)

One proposed system is an Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) in which an accelerator produces a proton beam which is targeted at target nuclei (e.g. lead, bismuth) to produce neutrons. The neutrons can be directed to a subcritical reactor containing thorium. ADS systems could reduce but not negate the proliferation risks.

Excerpt from: Thorium Fuel: No Panacea for Nuclear Power

By Michele Boyd and Arjun Makhijani

http://www.ieer.org/fctsheet/thorium2009factsheet.pdf

A Fact Sheet Produced by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

Thorium is not actually a “fuel” because it is not fissile and therefore cannot be used to start or sustain a nuclear chain reaction. A fissile material, such as uranium-235 (U-235) or plutonium-239 (which is made in reactors from uranium-238), is required to kick-start the reaction. The enriched uranium fuel or plutonium fuel also maintains the chain reaction until enough of the thorium target material has been converted into fissile uranium-233 (U-233) to take over much or most of the job.

The use of enriched uranium or plutonium in thorium fuel has proliferation implications. Although U-235 is found in nature, it is only 0.7% of natural uranium, so the proportion of U-235 must be industrially increased to make “enriched uranium” for use in reactors. Highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium are nuclear weapons materials.

In addition, U-233 is as effective as plutonium-239 for making nuclear bombs. In most proposed thorium fuel cycles, reprocessing is required to separate out the U-233 for use in fresh fuel. This means that, like uranium fuel with reprocessing, bomb-making material is separated out, making it vulnerable to theft or diversion. Some proposed thorium fuel cycles even require 20% enriched uranium in order to get the chain reaction started in existing reactors using thorium fuel. It takes

90% enrichment to make weapons-usable uranium, but very little work is needed to move from 20% enrichment to 90% enrichment.

It has been claimed that thorium fuel cycles with reprocessing would be much less of a proliferation risk because the thorium can be mixed with uranium-238. In this case, fissile uranium-233 is also mixed with non-fissile uranium-238. The claim is that if the U-238 content is high enough, the mixture cannot be used to make bombs without a complex uranium enrichment plant. This is misleading. More uranium-238 does dilute the uranium-233, but it also results in the production of more plutonium-239 as the reactor operates. So the proliferation problem remains – either bomb-usable uranium-233 or bomb-usable plutonium is created and can be separated out. Even if the mixture of U-238 and U-233 contains so much U-238 that it cannot be used for making weapons, the U-233 proportion can be increased by enrichment – the same process used to enrich natural uranium in U-235. The enrichment of U-233 is easier than the enrichment of U-235 because U-233 is much lighter than U-235 relative to U-238 (five atomic weight units lighter compared to three).

There is just no way to avoid proliferation problems associated with thorium fuel cycles that involve reprocessing. Thorium fuel cycles without reprocessing would offer the same temptation to reprocess as today’s once-through uranium fuel cycles.

Excerpt from: ICNND Research Paper No. 8, Revised

John Carlson, Director General, Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, 3 June 2009, ‘Introduction to the Concept of Proliferation Resistance’, www.icnnd.org/

For reasons unknown the paper appears to have been removed from the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament website but here is a link to the paper (Word file)

In principle, another route for avoiding the need for enrichment is the thorium fuel cycle, but as will be discussed in section 5.C, a thorium reactor requires enriched uranium or plutonium for the initial operating cycles, and current thorium reactor types also require reprocessing.  Although reprocessing is for recovery of uranium-233 rather than plutonium, U-233 can also be used in nuclear weapons.  A liquid fuel reactor concept is being considered which would avoid the need for U-233 separation.

5.C Thorium fuel cycle

The thorium fuel cycle has similarities to the fast neutron fuel cycle – it depends on breeding fissile material (U-233) in the reactor, and reprocessing to recover this fissile material for recycle.

Thorium is not a fissile material, so cannot be used as reactor fuel.  The basis of the thorium fuel cycle is irradiation of the fertile thorium isotope, Th-232, to produce the fissile material U-233 through neutron capture (rather like production of plutonium from U‑238).  The thorium fuel cycle requires separation – i.e. reprocessing – of U-233 produced in the fuel, and the recycle of U‑233 as fresh fuel.

Proponents argue that the thorium fuel cycle is proliferation resistant because it does not produce plutonium.  Proponents claim that it is not practicable to use U-233 for nuclear weapons.

There is no doubt that use of U-233 for nuclear weapons would present significant technical difficulties, due to the high gamma radiation and heat output arising from decay of U-232 which is unavoidably produced with U-233.  Heat levels would become excessive within a few weeks, degrading the high explosive and electronic components of a weapon and making use of U‑233 impracticable for stockpiled weapons.  However, it would be possible to develop strategies to deal with these drawbacks, e.g. designing weapons where the fissile “pit” (the core of the nuclear nuclear weapon) is not inserted until required, and where ongoing production and treatment of U-233 allows for pits to be continually replaced.  This might not be practical for a large arsenal, but could certainly be done on a small scale.

In addition, there are other considerations.  A thorium reactor requires initial core fuel – LEU or plutonium – until it reaches the point where it is producing sufficient U-233 for self-sustainability, so the cycle is not entirely free of issues applying to the uranium fuel cycle (i.e. requirement for enrichment or reprocessing).  Further, while the thorium cycle can be self-sustaining on produced U‑233, it is much more efficient if the U-233 is supplemented by additional “driver” fuel, such as LEU or plutonium.  For example, India, which has spent some decades developing a comprehensive thorium fuel cycle concept, is proposing production of weapons grade plutonium in fast breeder reactors specifically for use as driver fuel for thorium reactors.  This approach has obvious problems in terms of proliferation and terrorism risks.

A concept for a liquid fuel thorium reactor is under consideration (in which the thorium/uranium fuel would be dissolved in molten fluoride salts), which would avoid the need for reprocessing to separate U-233.  If it proceeds, this concept would have non-proliferation advantages.

Finally, it cannot be excluded that a thorium reactor – as in the case of other reactors – could be used for plutonium production through irradiation of uranium targets.

Summary   Arguments that the thorium fuel cycle is inherently proliferation resistant are overstated.  In some circumstances the thorium cycle could involve significant proliferation risks.

Comparison of thorium and uranium fuel cycles

UK National Nuclear Laboratory Ltd.

A report prepared for and on behalf of Department of Energy and Climate Change

Issue 5, 5 March 2012

http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/meeting-energy-demand/nuclear/6300-comparison-fuel-cycles.pdf

Here is the Exec Summary and an extract about proliferation risks.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The UK National Nuclear Laboratory has been contracted by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to review and assess the relevance to the UK of the advanced reactor systems currently being developed internationally. Part of the task specification relates to comparison of the thorium and uranium fuel cycles. Worldwide, there has for a long time been a sustained interest in the thorium fuel cycle and presently there are several major research initiatives which are either focused specifically on the thorium fuel cycle or on systems which use thorium as the fertile seed instead of U-238. Currently in the UK, the thorium fuel cycle is not an option that is being pursued commercially and it is important for DECC to understand why this is the case and whether there is a valid argument for adopting a different position in the future.

NNL has recently published a position paper on thorium [1] which attempts to take a balanced view of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the thorium fuel cycle. Thorium has theoretical advantages regarding sustainability, reducing radiotoxicity and reducing proliferation risk. NNL’s position paper finds that while there is some justification for these benefits, they are often over stated.

The value of using thorium fuel for plutonium disposition would need to be assessed against high level issues concerning the importance of maintaining high standards of safety, security and protection against proliferation, as well as meeting other essential strategic goals related to maintaining flexibility in the fuel cycle, optimising waste arisings and economic competitiveness. It is important that the UK should be very clear as to what the overall objectives should be and the timescales for achieving these objectives.

Overall, the conclusion is reached that the thorium fuel cycle at best has only limited relevance to the UK as a possible alternative plutonium disposition strategy and as a possible strategic option in the very long term for any follow-up reactor construction programme after LWR new build. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that world-wide there remains interest in thorium fuel cycles and as this is not likely to diminish in the near future. It may therefore be judicious for the UK to maintain a low level of engagement in thorium fuel cycle R&D by involvement in international collaborative research activities. This will enable the UK to keep up with developments, comment from a position of knowledge and to some extent influence the direction of research. Participation will also ensure that the UK is more ready to respond if changes in technology or market forces bring the thorium fuel cycle more to the fore.

It should be noted that this paper is not intended to provide an exhaustive review and assessment of potential advanced reactor technologies in order for DECC or other UK interested parties to immediately down select reactor options. The study and the approach developed was deliberately limited in its assessment of reactor options primarily due to time and in particular budget constraints. As such, only a limited cross section of reactor technologies were assessed and no design variants were assessed either e.g. prismatic or pebble VHTR options.

The UK NNL would like to also recognise and thank all of the external reviewers for their time taken to review the study and for their comments on the paper. As with any such review process, not all of the comments were able to be included in the final version of the report either due to opposing views not simply between the authors and the reviewers, but also between the reviewers themselves. Nevertheless, every comment was considered and included where appropriate.

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Section 3.5

Measures to increase the inherent proliferation resistance of the reprocessing fuel, such as avoiding the separation of pure plutonium oxide are considered desirable in designing new reactors and associated fuel cycle facilities. However, reducing proliferation risk is not a factor in strategic decision making for utilities and is unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future. Therefore, there currently is no incentive for utilities to seek alternatives to U-Pu fuel.

Section 4.5. Proliferation risk

The absence of plutonium is in the thorium fuel cycle is claimed to reduce the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, though Reference [1] questions whether is this is completely valid, given that there were a number of U-233 nuclear tests (the “Teapot tests”) in the US in the 1950s. U-233 is in many respects very well suited for weapons use, because it has a low critical mass, a low spontaneous neutron source and low heat output. It has been stated [eg Wikipedia entry on U-233] that because U-233 has a higher spontaneous neutron source than Pu-239, then this makes it more of a technical challenge. However, this is erroneous, because even in weapons grade plutonium the main neutron source is from Pu-240. A further consideration is that the U-233 produced in thorium fuel is isotopically very pure, with only trace quantities of U-232 and U-234 produced. Although the U-232 presents problems with radiological protection during fuel fabrication, the fissile quality does not degrade with irradiation. Therefore, if it is accepted that U-233 is weapons useable, this remains the case at all burnups and there is no degradation in weapons attractiveness with burnup, unlike the U-Pu cycle.

The presence of trace amounts of U-232 is beneficial in that it provides a significant gamma dose field that would complicate weapons fabrication and this has been claimed to make U-233 proliferation resistant. However, there are mitigating strategies can be conceived and the U-232 dose rate cannot be regarded as a completely effective barrier to proliferation. As such, U-233 should be considered weapons usable in the same way as HEU and plutonium. This is also the position taken by the IAEA, which under the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials [16] categorises U-233 in the same way as plutonium. Under the IAEA classification, 2 kg or more of U-233 or plutonium are designated as Category I Nuclear Material and as such are subject to appropriate controls. By way of comparison, the mass of U-235 for Category I material is 5 kg. Attempts to lower the fissile content of uranium by adding U-238 are considered to offer only weak protection, as the U-233 could be separated relatively easily in a centrifuge cascade in the same way that U-235 is separated from U-238 in the standard uranium fuel cycle.

The overall conclusion is that while there may be some justification for the thorium fuel cycle posing a reduced proliferation risk, the justification is not very strong and, as noted in Section 3.5, this is not a major factor for utilities. Regardless of the details, those safeguards and security measures in place for the U-Pu cycle will have to remain in place for the thorium fuel cycle and there is no overall benefit.

Further reading on thorium and weapons proliferation

Feiveson, Harold, 2001, “The Search for Proliferation-Resistant Nuclear Power”, The Journal of the Federation of American Scientists, September/October 2001, Volume 54, Number 5, www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n5/nuclear.htm

Friedman, John S., 1997, “More power to thorium?”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 53, No.5, September/October.

Kang, Jungmin, and Frank N. von Hippel, 2001, “U-232 and the Proliferation-Resistance of U-233 in Spent Fuel”, Science & Global Security, Volume 9, pp 1-32, www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/pdf/9_1kang.pdf

Thorium

On the proliferation risks associated with thorium please use this link:

https://nuclear.foe.org.au/thorium-and-wmd-proliferation-risks-2/

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Nuclear Weapons and ‘Generation 4’ Reactors

Jim Green – Friends of the Earth Australia.

A version of this article was published in FoE Australia’s magazine Chain Reaction, August 2009.

‘Integral fast reactors’ and other ‘fourth generation’ nuclear power concepts have been gaining attention, in part because of comments by US climate scientist James Hansen. While not a card-carrying convert, Hansen argues for more research: “We need hard-headed evaluation of how to get rid of long-lived nuclear waste and minimize dangers of proliferation and nuclear accidents. Fourth generation nuclear power seems to have the potential to solve the waste problem and minimize the others.”

Others are less circumspect, with one advocate of integral fast reactors promoting them as the “holy grail” in the fight against global warming. There are two main problems with these arguments. Firstly, nuclear power could at most make a modest contribution to climate change abatement, mainly because it is used almost exclusively for electricity generation which accounts for about one-quarter of global greenhouse emissions. Doubling global nuclear power output (at the expense of coal) would reduce greenhouse emissions by about 5%. Building six nuclear power reactors in Australia (at the expense of coal) would reduce Australia’s emissions by just 4%.

The second major problem with the nuclear ‘solution’ to climate change is that all nuclear power concepts (including ‘fourth generation’ concepts) fail to address the single greatest problem with nuclear power − its repeatedly-demonstrated connection to the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Not just any old WMDs but nuclear weapons − the most destructive, indiscriminate and immoral of all weapons.

Integral fast reactors

Integral fast reactors (IFRs) are reactors proposed to be fuelled with a metallic alloy of uranium and plutonium, with liquid sodium as the coolant. ‘Fast’ because they would use unmoderated neutrons as with other plutonium-fuelled fast neutron reactors (e.g. breeders). ‘Integral’ because they would operate in conjunction with on-site ‘pyroprocessing’ to separate plutonium and other long-lived radioisotopes and to re-irradiate (both as an additional energy source and to convert long-lived waste products into shorter-lived, less problematic wastes).

IFRs would breed their own fuel (plutonium-239) from uranium-238 contained in abundant stockpiles of depleted uranium. Thus there would be less global demand for uranium mining with its attendant problems, and less demand for uranium enrichment plants which can be used to produce low-enriched uranium for power reactors or highly enriched uranium for weapons. Drawing down depleted uranium stockpiles would be welcome because of the public health and environmental problems they pose and because one of the few alternative uses for depleted uranium − hardening munitions − is objectionable.

Pyroprocessing technology would be used − it would not separate pure plutonium suitable for direct use in nuclear weapons, but would keep the plutonium mixed with other long-lived radioisotopes such that it would be very difficult or impossible to use directly in nuclear weapons. Recycling plutonium generates energy and gets rid of the plutonium with its attendant proliferation risks. These advantages could potentially be achieved with conventional reprocessing and plutonium use in MOX (uranium/plutonium oxide) reactors or fast neutron reactors. IFR offers one further potential advantage − transmutation of long-lived waste radioisotopes to convert them into shorter-lived waste products.

In short, IFRs could produce lots of greenhouse-friendly energy and while they’re at it they can ‘eat’ nuclear waste and convert fissile materials, which might otherwise find their way into nuclear weapons, into useful energy. Too good to be true? Sadly, yes. Nuclear engineer Dave Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists writes: “The IFR looks good on paper. So good, in fact, that we should leave it on paper. For it only gets ugly in moving from blueprint to backyard.”

Complete IFR systems don’t exist. Fast neutron reactors exist but experience is limited and they have had a troubled history. The pyroprocessing and waste transmutation technologies intended to operate as part of IFR systems are some distance from being mature. But even if the technologies were fully developed and successfully integrated, IFRs would still fail a crucial test − they can too easily be used to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

IFRs and nuclear weapons

George Stanford, who worked on an IFR R&D program in the US, notes that proliferators “could do [with IFRs] what they could do with any other reactor − operate it on a special cycle to produce good quality weapons material.”

As with conventional reactors, IFRs can be used to produce weapon grade plutonium in the fuel (using a shorter-than-usual irradiation time) or by irradiating a uranium or depleted uranium ‘blanket’ or targets. Conventional PUREX reprocessing can be used to separate the plutonium. Another option is to separate reactor grade plutonium from IFR fuel and to use that in weapons instead of weapon grade plutonium.

The debate isn’t helped by the muddle-headed inaccuracies of some IFR advocates, including some who should know better. For example, Prof. Barry Brook from Adelaide University says: “IFRs cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium. The integral fast reactor is a systems design with a sodium-cooled reactor with metal fuels and pyroprocessing on-site. To produce weapons-grade plutonium you would have to build an IFR+HSHVHSORF (highly specialised, highly visible, heavily shielded off-site reprocessing facility). You would also need to run your IFR on a short cycle.” Or to paraphrase: IFRs can’t produce weapon grade plutonium, IFRs can produce weapon grade plutonium. Go figure.

Presumably Brook’s point is that IFR-produced plutonium cannot be separated on-site from irradiated materials (fuel/blanket/targets); it would need to be separated from irradiated materials at a separate reprocessing plant. If so, it is a banal point which also applies to conventional reactors, and it remains the case that IFRs can certainly produce weapon grade plutonium.

Brooks’ HSHVHSORFs are conventional PUREX plants − technology which is well within the reach of most or all nation states. Existing reprocessing plants would suffice for low-burn-up IFR-irradiated materials while more elaborate shielding might be required to safely process materials irradiated for a longer period. IFR advocate Tom Blees notes that: “IFRs are certainly not the panacea that removes all threat of proliferation, and extracting plutonium from it would require the same sort of techniques as extracting it from spent fuel from light water reactors.”

IFR advocates propose using them to draw down global stockpiles of fissile material, whether derived from nuclear research, power or WMD programs. However, IFRs have no need for outside sources of fissile material beyond their initial fuel load. Whether they are used to irradiate outside sources of fissile material to any significant extent would depend on a confluence of commercial, political and military interests. History shows that non-proliferation objectives receive low priority. Conventional reprocessing with the use of separated plutonium as fuel (in breeders or MOX reactors) has the same potential to drawn down fissile material stockpiles, but has increased rather than decreased proliferation risks. Very little plutonium has been used as reactor fuel in breeders or MOX reactors. But the separation of plutonium from spent fuel continues and stockpiles of separated ‘civil’ plutonium − which can be used directly in weapons − are increasing by about five tonnes annually and amount to over 270 tonnes, enough for 27,000 nuclear weapons.

IFR advocates demonstrate little or no understanding of the realpolitik imposed by the commercial, political and military interests responsible for, amongst other things, unnecessarily creating this problem of 270+ tonnes of separated civil plutonium and failing to take the simplest steps to address the problem − namely, suspending reprocessing or reducing the rate of reprocessing such that plutonium stockpiles are drawn down rather than continually increasing.

The proposed use of IFRs to irradiate fissile materials produced elsewhere faces the familiar problem that countries with the greatest interest in WMD production will be the least likely to forfeit fissile material stockpiles and vice versa. Whatever benefits arise from the potential consumption of outside sources of fissile material must be weighed against the problem that IFRs could themselves be used to produce fissile material for weapons. WMD proliferators won’t use IFRs to draw down stockpiles of their own fissile material let alone anyone else’s − they are more likely to use them to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Some IFR proponents propose initially deploying IFR technology in nuclear weapons states and weapons-capable states, but every other proposal for selective deployment of dual-use nuclear technology has been rejected by countries that would be excluded.

Safeguards

Some IFR advocates downplay the proliferation risks by arguing that fissile material is more easily produced in research reactors. But producing fissile material for weapons in IFRs would not be difficult. Extracting irradiated material from an IFR may be challenging though not from those IFRs which have been designed to produce the initial fuel load for other IFRs (and are thus designed to facilitate the insertion and extraction of uranium targets).

The main challenge would be to circumvent safeguards. Proponents of IFR acknowledge the need for a rigorous safeguards system to detect and deter the use of IFRs to produce fissile material for weapons. And they generally accept that the existing safeguards system is inadequate − so much so that the former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, has noted that the IAEA’s basic rights of inspection are “fairly limited”, that the safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities” and “clearly needs reinforcement”, that efforts to improve the system have been “half-hearted”, and that the safeguards system operates on a “shoestring budget … comparable to that of a local police department”.

Blees argues for a radically strengthened safeguards system including the establishment of an international strike force on full standby to attend promptly to any detected attempts to misuse IFRs or to divert nuclear materials. But there’s no evidence of IFR advocates getting off their backsides to engage in the laborious work of trying to bring about improvements in safeguards. Evidently they do not accept the argument that proponents of dual-use technology have a responsibility to engage in that laborious work. Nor do they see strengthened safeguards as a prerequisite for the widespread deployment of IFRs. Yet, when pressed, IFR advocates point to safeguards which exist only in their imaginations: we needn’t worry about IFRs and WMD proliferation, for example, because Blees’ international strike force will take care of that. Such arguments are circular and disingenuous.

IFR advocates imagine that a strong commitment to nuclear non-proliferation will shape the development and deployment of IFR technology, but in practice it could easily fall prey to the interests responsible for turning attractive theories into the fiasco of ever-growing stockpiles of separated civil plutonium. Under the Bush administration, proposals for advanced, ‘proliferation-resistant’ reprocessing under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership gave way to a plan to expand conventional reprocessing while working on R&D into advanced reprocessing. A similar fate could easily befall proposals to run fast neutron reactors in conjunction with ‘proliferation-resistant’ reprocessing.

IFR proponents want to avoid the risks associated with widespread transportation of nuclear and fissile materials by co-locating a pyroprocessing facility with every IFR reactor plant − but nuclear utilities might prefer the cost savings associated with centralised processing.

As another example of the potential for attractive theories to turn into problematic outcomes, the fissile material required for the initial IFR fuel loading would ideally come from civil and military stockpiles or from other IFRs − but that fissile material requirement could be used to justify the ongoing operation of enrichment and PUREX reprocessing plants and to justify the construction of new ones.

In his book ‘Prescription for the Planet’, Blees argues that: “Privatized nuclear power should be outlawed worldwide, with complete international control of not only the entire fuel cycle but also the engineering, construction, and operation of all nuclear power plants. Only in this way will safety and proliferation issues be satisfactorily dealt with. Anything short of that opens up a Pandora’s box of inevitable problems.” He goes further, arguing for a “nonprofit global energy consortium” to control nuclear power: “The shadowy threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism virtually requires us to either internationalize or ban nuclear power.”

But there’s little or no discussion among IFR advocates about how to bring about these fundamental changes, nor any sense that proponents of IFRs and other dual-use technology ought to be part of that struggle, and these fundamental changes are not seen as a prerequisite for the deployment of IFRs.

It would be silly to oppose nuclear power reactors in a hypothetical world where rigorous safeguards ensured that they would not be used to produce fissile material for weapons, where no expense was spared to minimise the short- and long-term environmental and public health hazards, where genuinely independent regulators provided strict oversight, and where the corrupting effects of the profit motive and nationalism had been eliminated. In other words, it would be silly to oppose nuclear power if all the rational reasons for that opposition were satisfactorily addressed. But that tells us nothing about the real world.

Other ‘fourth generation’ reactor types

IFRs and other plutonium-based nuclear power concepts fail the WMD proliferation test, i.e. they can too easily be used to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Conventional reactors also fail the test because they produce plutonium and because they legitimise the operation of enrichment plants and reprocessing plants.

The use of thorium as a nuclear fuel doesn’t solve the WMD proliferation problem. Irradiation of thorium (indirectly) produces uranium-233, a fissile material which can be used in nuclear weapons. The US has successfully tested weapons using uranium-233 (and France may have too). India’s thorium program must have a WMD component − as evidenced by India’s refusal to allow IAEA safeguards to apply to its thorium program. Thorium fuelled reactors could also be used to irradiate uranium to produce weapon grade plutonium. The possible use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium to initiate a thorium-232/uranium-233 reaction, or proposed systems using thorium in conjunction with HEU or plutonium as fuel, present further risks of diversion of HEU or plutonium for weapons production as well as providing a rationale for the ongoing operation of dual-use enrichment and reprocessing plants.

Some proponents of nuclear fusion power falsely claim that it would pose no risk of contributing to weapons proliferation. In fact, there are several risks, the most important of which is the use of fusion reactors to irradiate uranium to produce plutonium or to irradiate thorium-232 to produce uranium-233.

Fusion power has yet to generate a single Watt of useful electricity but it has already contributed to proliferation problems. According to Khidhir Hamza, a senior nuclear scientist involved in Iraq’s weapons program in the 1980s: “Iraq took full advantage of the IAEA’s recommendation in the mid 1980s to start a plasma physics program for “peaceful” fusion research. We thought that buying a plasma focus device … would provide an excellent cover for buying and learning about fast electronics technology, which could be used to trigger atomic bombs.”

All existing and proposed nuclear power concepts pose WMD proliferation risks. History gives us some indication of the scale of the problem. Over 20 countries have used their ‘peaceful’ nuclear facilities for some level of weapons research and five countries developed nuclear weapons under cover of a civil program.

Former US Vice President Al Gore has summed up the problem of heavy reliance on nuclear power for climate change abatement: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”

Make-believe nuclear reactors

In addition to dishonest or ill-informed claims that ‘fourth generation’ nuclear power will satisfactorily address WMD proliferation concerns, its proponents also claim that it will be safe, cheap, simple, flexible etc.

Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute has summarised the differences between real and make-believe nuclear reactors:

“An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off the shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

“On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.

“Every new type of reactor in history has been costlier, slower, and harder than projected. …

“In short, the notion that different or smaller reactors plus wholly new fuel cycles (and, usually, new competitive conditions and political systems) could overcome nuclear energy’s inherent problems is not just decades too late, but fundamentally a fantasy. Fantasies are all right, but people should pay for their own. Investors in and advocates of small-reactor innovations will be disappointed. But in due course, the aging advocates of the half-century-old reactor concepts that never made it to market will retire and die, their credulous young devotees will relearn painful lessons lately forgotten, and the whole nuclear business will complete its slow death of an incurable attack of market forces.”

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More information on IFRs is posted at https://nuclear.foe.org.au/power/

See also relevant papers posted at: www.energyscience.org.au

A debate on IFRs is posted at

http://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifrUCSresponse.pdf

Amory Lovins’ article, ‘New nuclear reactors, same old story’, is posted at www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid601.php

More information on second, third and fourth generation reactors:

Hirsch, Helmut, Oda Becker, Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt, April 2005, “Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century”, Report prepared for Greenpeace International, www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards

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James Hansen’s Generation IV nuclear fallacies and fantasies

Jim Green, Nuclear Monitor #849, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/849/james-hansens-generation-iv-nuclear-fallacies-and-fantasies

The two young co-founders of nuclear engineering start-up Transatomic Power were embarrassed earlier this year when their claims about their molten salt reactor design were debunked, forcing some major retractions.¹

The claims of MIT nuclear engineering graduate students – Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie – were trumpeted in MIT’s Technology Review under the headline, ‘What if we could build a nuclear reactor that costs half as much, consumes nuclear waste, and will never melt down?’²

The Technology Review puff-piece said Dewan “introduced new materials and a new shape that allowed her to increase power output by 30 times. As a result, the reactor is now so compact that a version large enough for a power plant can be built in a factory and shipped by rail to a plant site, which is potentially cheaper than the current practice of building nuclear reactors on site. The reactor also makes more efficient use of the energy in nuclear fuel. It can consume about one ton of nuclear waste a year, leaving just four kilograms behind. Dewan’s name for the technology: the Waste-Annihilating Molten-Salt Reactor.”²

A February 2017 article in MIT’s Technology Review ‒ this one far more critical ‒ said: “Those lofty claims helped it raise millions in venture capital, secure a series of glowing media profiles (including in this publication), and draw a rock-star lineup of technical advisors.”¹

MIT physics professor Kord Smith debunked a number of Transatomic’s key claims. Smith says he asked Transatomic to run a test which, he says, confirmed that “their claims were completely untrue.”¹

Transatomic’s claim that the ‘Waste-Annihilating Molten-Salt Reactor’ could “generate up to 75 times more electricity per ton of mined uranium than a light-water reactor” was severely downgraded to “more than twice.”¹ And the company abandoned its waste-to-fuel claims and now says that a reactor based on the current design would not use waste as fuel and thus would “not reduce existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel”.¹

Hansen’s Generation IV propaganda

Kennedy Maize wrote about Transatomic’s troubles in Power Magazine: “[T]his was another case of technology hubris, an all-to-common malady in energy, where hyperbolic claims are frequent and technology journalists all too credulous.”³ Pro-nuclear commentator Dan Yurman said that “other start-ups with audacious claims are likely to receive similar levels of scrutiny” and that it “may have the effect of putting other nuclear energy entrepreneurs on notice that they too may get the same enhanced levels of analysis of their claims.”⁴

Well, yes, others making false claims about Generation IV reactor concepts might receive similar levels of scrutiny … or they might not. Arguably the greatest sin of the Transatomic founders was not that they inadvertently spread misinformation, but that they are young, and in Dewan’s case, female. Aging men seem to have a free pass to peddle as much misinformation as they like without the public shaming that the Transatomic founders have been subjected to. A case in point is climate scientist James Hansen. We’ve repeatedly drawn attention to Hansen’s nuclear misinformation in Nuclear Monitor^5-9 ‒ but you’d struggle to find any critical commentary outside the environmental and anti-nuclear literature.

Hansen states that a total requirement of 115 new reactor start-ups per year to 2050 would be required to replace fossil fuel electricity generation ‒ a total of about 4,000 reactors.¹⁰ Let’s assume that Generation IV reactors do the heavy lifting, and let’s generously assume that mass production of Generation IV reactors begins in 2030. That would necessitate about 200 reactor start-ups per year from 2030 to 2050 ‒ or four every week. Good luck with that.

Moreover, the assumption that mass production of Generation IV reactors might begin in or around 2030 is unrealistic. A report by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety − a government authority under the Ministries of Defense, the Environment, Industry, Research, and Health − states: “There is still much R&D to be done to develop the Generation IV nuclear reactors, as well as for the fuel cycle and the associated waste management which depends on the system chosen.”¹¹

Likewise, a US Government Accountability Office report on the status of small modular reactors (SMRs) and other ‘advanced’ reactor concepts in the US concluded: “Both light water SMRs and advanced reactors face additional challenges related to the time, cost, and uncertainty associated with developing, certifying or licensing, and deploying new reactor technology, with advanced reactor designs generally facing greater challenges than light water SMR designs. It is a multi-decade process, with costs up to $1 billion to $2 billion, to design and certify or license the reactor design, and there is an additional construction cost of several billion dollars more per power plant.”¹²

An analysis recently published in the peer-reviewed literature found that the US government has wasted billions of dollars on Generation IV R&D with little to show for it.¹³ Lead researcher Dr Ahmed Abdulla, from the University of California, said that “despite repeated commitments to non-light water reactors, and substantial investments … (more than $2 billion of public money), no such design is remotely ready for deployment today.”¹⁴

Weapons

In a nutshell, Hansen and other propagandists claim that some Generation IV reactors are a triple threat: they can convert weapons-usable (fissile) material and long-lived nuclear waste into low-carbon electricity. Let’s take the weapons and waste issues in turn.

Hansen says Generation IV reactors can be made “more resistant to weapons proliferation than today’s reactors”¹⁵ and “modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks”.¹⁶ But are new reactors being made more resistant to weapons proliferation and are they reducing proliferation risks? In a word: No. Fast neutron reactors have been used for weapons production in the past (e.g. by France¹⁷) and will likely be used for weapons production in future (e.g. by India).

India plans to produce weapons-grade plutonium in fast breeder reactors for use as driver fuel in thorium reactors.¹⁸ Compared to conventional uranium reactors, India’s plan is far worse on both proliferation and security grounds. To make matters worse, India refuses to place its fast breeder / thorium program under IAEA safeguards.¹⁹

Hansen claims that thorium-based fuel cycles are “inherently proliferation-resistant”.²⁰ That’s garbage ‒ thorium has been used to produce fissile material (uranium-233) for nuclear weapons tests.²¹ Again, India’s plans provide a striking real-world refutation of Hansen’s dangerous misinformation.

Hansen states that if “designed properly”, fast neutron reactors would generate “nothing suitable for weapons”.²⁰ What does that even mean? Are we meant to ignore actual and potential links between Generation IV nuclear technology and WMD proliferation on the grounds that the reactors weren’t built “properly”? And if we take Hansen’s statement literally, no reactors produce material suitable for weapons ‒ the fissile material must always be separated from irradiated materials ‒ in which case all reactors can be said to be “designed properly”. Hooray.

Hansen claims that integral fast reactors (IFR) ‒ a non-existent variant of fast neutron reactors ‒ “could be inherently free from the risk of proliferation”.²² That’s another dangerous falsehood.²³ Dr George Stanford, who worked on an IFR R&D program in the US, notes that proliferators “could do [with IFRs] what they could do with any other reactor − operate it on a special cycle to produce good quality weapons material.”²⁴

Hansen acknowledges that “nuclear does pose unique safety and proliferation concerns that must be addressed with strong and binding international standards and safeguards.”¹⁰ There’s no doubting that the safeguards systems needs strengthening.²⁵ In articles and speeches during his tenure as the Director General of the IAEA from 1997‒2009, Dr Mohamed ElBaradei said that the Agency’s basic rights of inspection are “fairly limited”, that the safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities” and “clearly needs reinforcement”, that efforts to improve the system were “half-hearted”, and that the safeguards system operated on a “shoestring budget … comparable to that of a local police department”.

Hansen says he was converted to the cause of Generation IV nuclear technology by Tom Blees, whose 2008 book ‘Prescription for the Planet’ argues the case for IFRs.²⁶ But Hansen evidently missed those sections of the book where Blees argues for radically strengthened safeguards including the creation of an international strike-force on full standby to attend promptly to any detected attempts to misuse or to divert nuclear materials. Blees also argues that “privatized nuclear power should be outlawed worldwide” and that nuclear power must either be internationalized or banned to deal with the “shadowy threat of nuclear proliferation”.²⁶

So what is James Hansen doing about the WMD proliferation problem and the demonstrably inadequate nuclear safeguards system? This is one of the great ironies of Hansen’s nuclear advocacy ‒ he does absolutely nothing other than making demonstrably false claims about the potential of Generation IV concepts to solve the problems, and repeatedly slagging off at organizations with a strong track record of campaigning for improvements to the safeguards system.²⁷

Waste

Hansen claims that “modern nuclear technology can … solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently.”¹⁶ He elaborates: “Nuclear “waste”: it is not waste, it is fuel for 4th generation reactors! Current (‘slow’) nuclear reactors are lightwater reactors that ‘burn’ less than 1% of the energy in the original uranium ore, leaving a waste pile that is radioactive for more than 10,000 years. The 4th generation reactors can ‘burn’ this waste, as well as excess nuclear weapons material, leaving a much smaller waste pile with radioactive half-life measured in decades rather than millennia, thus minimizing the nuclear waste problem. The economic value of current nuclear waste, if used as a fuel for 4th generation reactors, is trillions of dollars.”²⁸

But even if IFRs ‒ Hansen’s favored Generation IV concept ‒ worked as hoped, they would still leave residual actinides, and long-lived fission products, and long-lived intermediate-level waste in the form of reactor and reprocessing components … all of it requiring deep geological disposal. UC Berkeley nuclear engineer Prof. Per Peterson notes in an article published by the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute: “Even integral fast reactors (IFRs), which recycle most of their waste, leave behind materials that have been contaminated by transuranic elements and so cannot avoid the need to develop deep geologic disposal.”²⁹

So if IFRs don’t obviate the need for deep geological repositories, what problem do they solve? They don’t solve the WMD proliferation problem associated with nuclear power. They would make more efficient use of finite uranium … but uranium is plentiful.

In theory, IFRs would gobble up nuclear waste and convert it into low-carbon electricity. In practice, the IFR R&D program in Idaho has left a legacy of troublesome waste. This saga is detailed in a recent article³¹ and a longer report³² by the Union of Concerned Scientists’ senior scientist Ed Lyman (see the following article in this issue of Nuclear Monitor). Lyman states that attempts to treat IFR spent fuel with pyroprocessing have not made management and disposal of the spent fuel simpler and safer, they have “created an even bigger mess”.³¹

Japan is about to get first-hand experience of the waste legacy associated with Generation IV reactors in light of the decision to decommission the Monju fast spectrum reactor. Decommissioning Monju has a hefty price-tag ‒ far more than for conventional light-water reactors. According to a 2012 estimate by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, decommissioning Monju will cost an estimated ¥300 billion (US$2.74bn; €2.33bn).³⁰ That estimate includes ¥20 billion to remove spent fuel from the reactor ‒ but no allowance is made for the cost of disposing of the spent fuel, and in any case Japan has no deep geological repository to dispose of the waste.

Generation IV economics

Hansen claimed in 2012 that IFRs could generate electricity “at a cost per kW less than coal.”^33,34 He was closer to the mark in 2008 when he said of IFRs: “I do not have the expertise or insight to evaluate the cost and technology readiness estimates” of IFR advocate Tom Blees and the “overwhelming impression that I get … is that Blees is a great optimist.”³⁵

The US Government Accountability Office’s 2015 report noted that technical challenges facing SMRs and advanced reactors may result in higher-cost reactors than anticipated, making them less competitive with large light-water reactors or power plants using other fuels.³⁶

A 2015 pro-nuclear puff-piece by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) arrived at the disingenuous conclusion that nuclear power is “an attractive low-carbon technology in the absence of cost overruns and with low financing costs”.³⁷ But the IEA/NEA report made no effort to spin the economics of Generation IV nuclear concepts, stating that “generation IV technologies aim to be at least as competitive as generation III technologies … though the additional complexity of these designs, the need to develop a specific supply chain for these reactors and the development of the associated fuel cycles will make this a challenging task.”³⁷

The late Michael Mariotte commented on the IEA/NEA report: “So, at best the Generation IV reactors are aiming to be as competitive as the current − and economically failing − Generation III reactors. And even realizing that inadequate goal will be “challenging.” The report might as well have recommended to Generation IV developers not to bother.”³⁸

Of course, Hansen isn’t the only person peddling misinformation about Generation IV economics. A recent report states that the “cost estimates from some advanced reactor companies ‒ if accurate ‒ suggest that these technologies could revolutionize the way we think about the cost, availability, and environmental consequences of energy generation.”³⁹ To estimate the costs of Generation IV nuclear concepts, the researchers simply asked companies involved in R&D projects to supply the information!

The researchers did at least have the decency to qualify their findings: “There is inherent and significant uncertainty in projecting NOAK [nth-of-a-kind] costs from a group of companies that have not yet built a single commercial-scale demonstration reactor, let alone a first commercial plant. Without a commercial-scale plant as a reference, it is difficult to reliably estimate the costs of building out the manufacturing capacity needed to achieve the NOAK costs being reported; many questions still remain unanswered ‒ what scale of investments will be needed to launch the supply chain; what type of capacity building will be needed for the supply chain, and so forth.”³⁹

Hansen has doubled down on his nuclear advocacy, undeterred by the Fukushima disaster; undeterred by the economic disasters of nuclear power in the US, the UK, France, Finland and elsewhere; and undeterred by the spectacular growth of renewables and the spectacular cost reductions. He needs to take his own advice. Peter Bradford, adjunct professor at Vermont Law School and a former US Nuclear Regulatory Commission member, said in response to a 2015 letter¹⁰ co-authored by Hansen:⁴⁰

“The Hansen letter contains these remarkably unself-aware sentences:

‘To solve the climate problem, policy must be based on facts and not on prejudice.’

‘The climate issue is too important for us to delude ourselves with wishful thinking.’

‘The future of our planet and our descendants depends on basing decisions on facts, and letting go of long held biases when it comes to nuclear power.’

Amen, brother.”

References:

1. 1. James Temple, 24 Feb 2017, ‘Nuclear Energy Startup Transatomic Backtracks on Key Promises’, www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-startup-transatomic-backtracks-on-key-promises/
   2. Kevin Bullis, 2013, ‘What if we could build a nuclear reactor that costs half as much, consumes nuclear waste, and will never melt down?’, www.technologyreview.com/lists/innovators-under-35/2013/pioneer/leslie-dewan/
   3. Kennedy Maize, 8 March 2017, ‘Molten Salt Reactor Claims Melt Down Under Scrutiny’, www.powermag.com/blog/molten-salt-reactor-claims-melt-down-under-scrutiny/
   4. Dan Yurman, 26 Feb 2017, ‘An Up & Down Week for Developers of Advanced Reactors’, https://neutronbytes.com/2017/02/26/an-up-down-week-for-developers-of-advanced-reactors/
   5. Nuclear Monitor #814, 18 Nov 2015, ‘James Hansen’s nuclear fantasies’, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/814/james-hansens-nuclear-fantasies
   6. Nuclear Monitor #776, 24 Jan 2014, ‘Environmentalists urge Hansen to rethink nuclear’, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/776/nuclear-news
   7. Michael Mariotte, 21 April 2016, ‘How low can they go? Hansen, Shellenberger shilling for Exelon’, Nuclear Monitor #822, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/822/how-low-can-they-go-hansen-shellenberger-shilling-exelon
   8. M.V. Ramana, 3 Dec 2015, ‘Betting on the wrong horse: Fast reactors and climate change’, Nuclear Monitor #815, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/815/betting-wrong-horse-fast-reactors-and-climate-change
   9. Michael Mariotte, 9 Jan 2014, ‘The grassroots response to Dr. James Hansen’s call for more nukes’, http://safeenergy.org/2014/01/09/the-grassroots-response-to-Dr.-James-Hansens-call-for-more-nukes/
   10. James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, 4 Dec 2015, ‘Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change’, www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/03/nuclear-power-paves-the-only-viable-path-forward-on-climate-change
   11. IRSN, 2015, ‘Review of Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems’, www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20150427_Generation-IV-nuclear-energy-systems-safety-potential-overview.aspx Direct download: www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Documents/IRSN_Report-GenIV_04-2015.pdf
   12. U.S. Government Accountability Office, July 2015, ‘Nuclear Reactors: Status and challenges in development and deployment of new commercial concepts’, GAO-15-652, www.gao.gov/assets/680/671686.pdf
   13. A. Abdulla et al., 10 Aug 2017, ‘A retrospective analysis of funding and focus in US advanced fission innovation’, http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7f10/meta;jsessionid=71D13DABD51435540783FCC24BCE831B.c2.iopscience.cld.iop.org
   14. 9 Aug 2017, ‘Analysis highlights failings in US’s advanced nuclear program’, https://phys.org/news/2017-08-analysis-highlights-advanced-nuclear.html
   15. James Hansen, 7 June 2014, ‘Scientists can help in planet’s carbon cut’, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-06/07/content_17570035.htm
   16. K. Caldeira, K. Emanuel, J. Hansen, and T. Wigley, 3 Nov 2013, ‘Top climate change scientists’ letter to policy influencers’, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html
   17. See pp.44-45 in Mycle Schneider, 2009, ‘Fast Breeder Reactors in France’, Science and Global Security, 17:36–53, www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/archive/17-1-Schneider-FBR-France.pdf
   18. John Carlson, 2014, submission to Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, Parliament of Australia, www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=79a1a29e-5691-4299-8923-06e633780d4b&subId=301365
   19. John Carlson, 2015, first supplementary submission to Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, Parliament of Australia, www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=cd70cb45-f71e-4d95-a2f5-dab0f986c0a3&subId=301365
   20. P. Kharecha et al., 2010, ‘Options for near-term phaseout of CO2 emissions from coal use in the United States’, Environmental Science & Technology, 44, 4050-4062, http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es903884a
   21. Nuclear Monitor #801, 9 April 2015, ‘Thor-bores and uro-sceptics: thorium’s friendly fire’, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/801/thor-bores-and-uro-sceptics-thoriums-friendly-fire
   22. Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen, March 2013, ‘Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power’, Environment, Science and Technology, http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es3051197
   23. https://nuclear.foe.org.au/nuclear-weapons-and-generation-4-reactors/
   24. George Stanford, 18 Sept 2010, ‘IFR FaD 7 – Q&A on Integral Fast Reactors’, http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/18/ifr-fad-7/
   25. See section 2.12, pp.100ff, in Friends of the Earth et al., 2015, ‘Submission to the SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission’, https://nuclear.foe.org.au/wp-content/uploads/NFCRC-submission-FoEA-ACF-CCSA-FINAL-AUGUST-2015.pdf
   26. Tom Blees, 2008, ‘Prescription for the Planet’, www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf
   27. https://nuclear.foe.org.au/safeguards/
   28. James Hansen, 2011, ‘Baby Lauren and the Kool-Aid’, www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf
   29. Breakthrough Institute, 5 May 2014, ‘Cheap Nuclear’, http://theenergycollective.com/breakthroughinstitut/376966/cheap-nuclear
   30. Reiji Yoshida, 21 Sept 2016, ‘Japan to scrap troubled ¥1 trillion Monju fast-breeder reactor’, www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/21/national/japans-cabinet-hold-meeting-decide-fate-monju-reactor/
   31. Ed Lyman / Union of Concerned Scientists, 12 Aug 2017, ‘The Pyroprocessing Files’, http://allthingsnuclear.org/elyman/the-pyroprocessing-files
   32. Edwin Lyman, 2017, ‘External Assessment of the U.S. Sodium-Bonded Spent Fuel Treatment Program’, https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/nuclear-power/Pyroprocessing/IAEA-CN-245-492%2Blyman%2Bfinal.pdf
   33. Mark Halper, 20 July 2012, ‘Richard Branson urges Obama to back next-generation nuclear technology’, www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/20/richard-branson-obama-nuclear-technology
   34. 27 Dec 2012, ‘Have you heard the one about the Entrepreneur, the Climate Scientist and the Nuclear Engineer?’, http://prismsuk.blogspot.com.au/2012/
   35. James Hansen, 2008, ‘Trip Report – Nuclear Power’, http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080804_TripReport.pdf
   36. U.S. Government Accountability Office, July 2015, ‘Nuclear Reactors: Status and challenges in development and deployment of new commercial concepts’, GAO-15-652, www.gao.gov/assets/680/671686.pdf
   37. International Energy Agency (IEA) and OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), 2015, ‘Projected Costs of Generating Electricity’, www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/ElecCost2015.pdf
   38. Michael Mariotte, ‘Nuclear advocates fight back with wishful thinking’, Nuclear Monitor #810, 9 Sept 2015, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/810/nuclear-advocates-fight-back-wishful-thinking
   39. Energy Innovation Reform Project Report Prepared by the Energy Options Network, 2017, ‘What Will Advanced Nuclear Power Plants Cost? A Standardized Cost Analysis of Advanced Nuclear Technologies in Commercial Development’, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Advanced-Nuclear-Reactors-Cost-Study.pdf
   40. Peter A. Bradford, 17 Dec 2015, ‘The experts on nuclear power and climate change’, http://thebulletin.org/experts-nuclear-power-and-climate-change8996

---

Fusion scientist debunks fusion power

26 April 2017, Nuclear Monitor #842, 26/04/2017, www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/842/fusion-scientist-debunks-fusion-power

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a detailed critique of fusion power written by Dr Daniel Jassby, a former principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab with 25 years experience working in areas of plasma physics and neutron production related to fusion energy.1

Here is a summary of his main arguments.

Jassby writes:

“[U]nlike what happens in solar fusion ‒ which uses ordinary hydrogen ‒ Earth-bound fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have byproducts that are anything but harmless: Energetic neutron streams comprise 80 percent of the fusion energy output of deuterium-tritium reactions and 35 percent of deuterium-deuterium reactions.

“Now, an energy source consisting of 80 percent energetic neutron streams may be the perfect neutron source, but it’s truly bizarre that it would ever be hailed as the ideal electrical energy source. In fact, these neutron streams lead directly to four regrettable problems with nuclear energy: radiation damage to structures; radioactive waste; the need for biological shielding; and the potential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239 ‒ thus adding to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, not lessening it, as fusion proponents would have it.

“In addition, if fusion reactors are indeed feasible ‒ as assumed here ‒ they would share some of the other serious problems that plague fission reactors, including tritium release, daunting coolant demands, and high operating costs. There will also be additional drawbacks that are unique to fusion devices: the use of fuel (tritium) that is not found in nature and must be replenished by the reactor itself; and unavoidable on-site power drains that drastically reduce the electric power available for sale.”

All of these problems are endemic to any type of magnetic confinement fusion or inertial confinement fusion reactor that is fueled with deuterium-tritium or deuterium alone. The deuterium-tritium reaction is favored by fusion developers. Jassby notes that tritium consumed in fusion can theoretically be fully regenerated in order to sustain the nuclear reactions, by using a lithium blanket, but full regeneration is not possible in practice for reasons explained in his article.

Jassby writes: “To make up for the inevitable shortfalls in recovering unburned tritium for use as fuel in a fusion reactor, fission reactors must continue to be used to produce sufficient supplies of tritium ‒ a situation which implies a perpetual dependence on fission reactors, with all their safety and nuclear proliferation problems. Because external tritium production is enormously expensive, it is likely instead that only fusion reactors fueled solely with deuterium can ever be practical from the viewpoint of fuel supply. This circumstance aggravates the problem of nuclear proliferation …”

Weapons proliferation

Fusion reactors could be used to produce plutonium-239 for weapons “simply by placing natural or depleted uranium oxide at any location where neutrons of any energy are flying about” in the reactor interior or appendages to the reaction vessel.

Tritium breeding is not required in systems based on deuterium-deuterium reactions, so all the fusion neutrons are available for any use including the production of plutonium-239 for weapons ‒ hence Jassby’s comment about deuterium-deuterium systems posing greater proliferation risks than deuterium-tritium systems. He writes: “In effect, the reactor transforms electrical input power into “free-agent” neutrons and tritium, so that a fusion reactor fueled with deuterium-only can be a singularly dangerous tool for nuclear proliferation.”

Further, tritium itself is a proliferation risk ‒ it is used to enhance the efficiency and yield of fission bombs and the fission stages of hydrogen bombs in a process known as “boosting”, and tritium is also used in the external neutron initiators for such weapons. “A reactor fueled with deuterium-tritium or deuterium-only will have an inventory of many kilograms of tritium, providing opportunities for diversion for use in nuclear weapons,” Jassby writes.

It isn’t mentioned in Jassby’s article, but fusion has already contributed to proliferation problems even though it has yet to generate a single Watt of useful electricity. According to Khidhir Hamza, a senior nuclear scientist involved in Iraq’s weapons program in the 1980s: “Iraq took full advantage of the IAEA’s recommendation in the mid 1980s to start a plasma physics program for “peaceful” fusion research. We thought that buying a plasma focus device … would provide an excellent cover for buying and learning about fast electronics technology, which could be used to trigger atomic bombs.”2

Other problems

Another problem is the “huge” parasitic power consumption of fusion systems ‒ “they consume a good chunk of the very power that they produce … on a scale unknown to any other source of electrical power.” There are two classes of parasitic power drain ‒ a host of essential auxiliary systems that must be maintained continuously even when the fusion plasma is dormant (of the order of 75‒100 MW), and power needed to control the fusion plasma in magnetic confinement fusion systems or to ignite fuel capsules in pulsed inertial confinement fusion systems (at least 6% of the fusion power generated). Thus a 300 MWt / 120 MWe system barely supplies on-site needs and thus fusion reactors would need to be much larger to overcome this problem of parasitic power consumption.

The neutron radiation damage in the solid vessel wall of a fusion reactor is expected to be worse than in fission reactors because of the higher neutron energies, potentially putting the integrity of the reaction vessel in peril.

Fusion fuel assemblies will be transformed into tons of radioactive waste to be removed annually from each reactor. Structural components would need to be replaced periodically thus generating “huge masses of highly radioactive material that must eventually be transported offsite for burial”, and non-structural components inside the reaction vessel and in the blanket will also become highly radioactive by neutron activation.

Molten lithium presents a fire and explosion hazard, introducing a drawback common to liquid-metal cooled fission reactors.

Tritium leakage is another problem. Jassby writes: “Corrosion in the heat exchange system, or a breach in the reactor vacuum ducts could result in the release of radioactive tritium into the atmosphere or local water resources. Tritium exchanges with hydrogen to produce tritiated water, which is biologically hazardous. Most fission reactors contain trivial amounts of tritium (less than 1 gram) compared with the kilograms in putative fusion reactors. But the release of even tiny amounts of radioactive tritium from fission reactors into groundwater causes public consternation. Thwarting tritium permeation through certain classes of solids remains an unsolved problem.”

Water consumption is another problem. Jassby writes: “In addition, there are the problems of coolant demands and poor water efficiency. A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps. … In fact, a fusion reactor would have the lowest water efficiency of any type of thermal power plant, whether fossil or nuclear. With drought conditions intensifying in sundry regions of the world, many countries could not physically sustain large fusion reactors.”

Due to all of the aforementioned problems, and others, “any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs.” Whereas fission reactors typically require around 500 employees, fusion reactors would require closer to 1,000 employees. Jassby states that it “is inconceivable that the total operating costs of a fusion reactor will be less than that of a fission reactor”.

Jassby concludes:

“To sum up, fusion reactors face some unique problems: a lack of natural fuel supply (tritium), and large and irreducible electrical energy drains to offset. Because 80 percent of the energy in any reactor fueled by deuterium and tritium appears in the form of neutron streams, it is inescapable that such reactors share many of the drawbacks of fission reactors ‒ including the production of large masses of radioactive waste and serious radiation damage to reactor components. …

“If reactors can be made to operate using only deuterium fuel, then the tritium replenishment issue vanishes and neutron radiation damage is alleviated. But the other drawbacks remain—and reactors requiring only deuterium fueling will have greatly enhanced nuclear weapons proliferation potential.”

“These impediments ‒ together with colossal capital outlay and several additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors ‒ will make fusion reactors more demanding to construct and operate, or reach economic practicality, than any other type of electrical energy generator.

“The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of “unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.” Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters, but to the contrary: It’s something to be shunned.”

References:
1. Daniel Jassby, 19 April 2017, ‘Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%E2%80%99re-cracked-be10699
2. Khidhir Hamza, Sep/Oct 1998, ‘Inside Saddam’s Secret Nuclear Program’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 54, No. 5, www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/bas-hamza-iraqnuke-10-98.htm

This paper was written c.2002, apologies for dead web-links.

Overview
Enrichment
Nuclear power and weapons
Indirect links between power and weapons
Plutonium grades
Alternative reactor types and alternative fuel cycles
Safeguards
More information
References

OVERVIEW

This webpage discusses the numerous methods by which civil nuclear programs can – and do – contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, with emphasis on the links between nuclear power and weapons.

According to Ian Hore-Lacy from the Uranium Information Centre (2000): “Happily, proliferation is only a fraction of what had been feared when the NPT was set up, and none of the problem arises from the civil nuclear cycle.” Sadly, Hore-Lacy’s statement could hardly be further from the truth.

Ostensibly civil nuclear materials and facilities can be used in support of nuclear weapons programs in many ways:
* Production of plutonium in reactors followed by separation of plutonium from irradiated material in reprocessing facilities (or smaller facilities, sometimes called hot cells).
* Production of radionuclides other than plutonium for use in weapons, e.g. tritium, used to initiate or boost nuclear weapons.
* Diversion of fresh highly enriched uranium (HEU) research reactor fuel or extraction of HEU from spent fuel.
* Nuclear weapons-related research.
* Development of expertise for parallel or later use in a weapons program.
* Justifying the acquisition of other facilities capable of being used in support of a nuclear weapons program, such as enrichment or reprocessing facilities.
* Establishment or strengthening of a political constituency for nuclear weapons production (a ‘bomb lobby’).

These are not just hypothetical risks. On the contrary, the use of civil facilities and materials in nuclear weapons research or systematic weapons programs has been commonplace (Nuclear Weapon Archive, n.d.; Institute for Science and International Security, n.d.). It has occurred in the following countries: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, North Korea, Norway, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia. A few other countries could arguably be added to the list e.g. Burma’s suspected nuclear program, or Canada (because of its use of research reactors to produce plutonium for US and British nuclear weapons).

Overall, civil nuclear facilities and materials have been used for weapons R&D in about one third of all the countries with a nuclear industry of any significance, i.e. with power and/or research reactors. The Institute for Science and International Security (n.d.) collates information on nuclear programs and concludes that about 30 countries have sought nuclear weapons and ten succeeded – a similar strike rate of about one in three.

In a number of the countries in which civil materials and facilities have been used in support of military objectives, the weapons-related work was short-lived and fell short of the determined pursuit of nuclear weapons. However, civil programs provided the basis for the full-scale production of nuclear weapons in Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and North Korea. In other cases – with Iraq from the 1970s until 1991 being the most striking example – substantial progress had been made towards a weapons capability under cover of a civil program before the weapons program was terminated.

Civil and military nuclear programs also overlap to a greater or lesser degree in the five ‘declared’ weapons states – the US, the UK, Russia, China and France.

ENRICHMENT   

There are three methods of using the cover of a civil nuclear program for the acquisition of HEU for weapons production:
* Diversion of imported HEU. An example was the (abandoned) ‘crash program’ in Iraq in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon using imported HEU. The US alone has exported over 25 tonnes of HEU.
* Extraction of HEU from spent research reactor fuel. HEU has been used in many research reactors but power reactors use low enriched uranium or in some cases natural uranium.
* A nuclear power program or a uranium mining and export industry can be used to justify the development of enrichment facilities.

The acquisition of enrichment technology and expertise – ostensibly for civil programs – enabled South Africa and Pakistan to produce HEU which has been used for their HEU weapons arsenals.

The nuclear black market centred around the ‘father’ of the Pakistani bomb Abdul Qadeer Khan involved the transfer of enrichment know-how and/or facilities to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

An expansion of nuclear power would most likely result in the spread (horizontal proliferation) of enrichment technologies, justified by requirements and markets for low-enriched uranium for power reactors but also capable of being used to produce HEU for weapons.

Technical developments in the field of enrichment technology – such as the development of laser enrichment technology by the Silex company at Lucas Heights in Australia – could worsen the situation. Silex will potentially provide proliferators with an ideal enrichment capability as it is expected to have relatively low capital cost and low power consumption, and it is based on relatively simple and practical separation modules. (Greenpeace, 2004; Boureston and Ferguson, 2005.)

An Australian Strategic Policy Institute report released in August 2006 notes that an enrichment industry would give Australia “a potential ‘break-out’ capability whether that was our intention or not” and that this point is “unlikely to be missed by other countries, especially those in Australia’s region.” (Davies, 2006.)

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard drew a parallel between exporting unprocessed uranium and unprocessed wool and argued for value-adding processing in both cases. But there is a differerence between uranium and wool. The Lucas Heights nuclear agency once embarked on a secret uranium enrichment program; there was never a secret knitting program.

NUCLEAR POWER AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS

John Carlson (2000) from the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office states that “… in some of the countries having nuclear weapons, nuclear power remains insignificant or non-existent.” Carlson’s attempt to absolve civil nuclear programs from the proliferation problem ignores the well-documented use of civil nuclear facilities and materials in weapons programs as well as the important political ‘cover’ civil programs provide for military programs. It also ignores the more specific links between nuclear power and weapons proliferation.

Of the ten states known to have produced nuclear weapons:
* eight have nuclear power reactors.
* North Korea has no operating power reactors but an ‘Experimental Power Reactor’ is believed to have been the source of the fissile material (plutonium) used in the October 2006 nuclear bomb test, and North Korea has power reactors partly constructed under the Joint Framework Agreement.
* Israel has no power reactors, though the pretence of an interest in the development of nuclear power helped to justify nuclear transfers to Israel.

Power reactors are certainly used in support of India’s nuclear weapons program. This has long been suspected (Albright and Hibbs, 1992) and is no longer in doubt since India is refusing to subject numerous power reactors to safeguards under the US/India nuclear agreement.

The US has used a power reactor to produce tritium for use in nuclear weapons (in the 1990s)

The 1962 test of sub-weapon-grade plutonium by the US may have used plutonium from a power reactor.

Pakistan may be using power reactor/s in support of its nuclear weapons program.

North Korea’s October 2006 weapon test used plutonium from an ‘Experimental Power Reactor’.

Former Australian Prime Minister John Gorton certainly had military ambitions for the power reactor he pushed to have constructed at Jervis bay in NSW in the late 1960s – he later admitted that the agenda was to produce both electricity as well as plutonium for potential use in weapons.

According to Matthew Bunn, in France, “material for the weapons program [was] sometimes produced in power reactors”.

So there are a handful of cases of nuclear power reactors being used directly in support of weapons production. But the indirect links between nuclear power and weapons – discussed below – are by far the larger part of the problem.

The nuclear industry and its supporters claim that reprocessing is a ‘sensitive’ nuclear technology but power reactors are not. But of course they are part of the same problem. The existence of a reprocessing plant poses no proliferation risk in the absence of reactor-irradiated nuclear materials. Reactors pose no proliferation risk in the absence a reprocessing facility to separate fissile material from irradiated materials. Put reactors and reprocessing together and you have the capacity to produce and separate plutonium.

In short, the attempt to distance nuclear power programs from weapons proliferation is disingenuous. While currently-serving politicians and bureaucrats (and others) are prone to obfuscation on this point, several retired politicians have noted the link between power and weapons:
* Former US Vice President Al Gore said in 2006: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.” (<www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/05/09/roberts>)
* Former US President Bill Clinton said in 2006: “The push to bring back nuclear power as an antidote to global warming is a big problem. If you build more nuclear power plants we have toxic waste at least, bomb-making at worse.” (Clinton Global Initiative, September 2006.)
* Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating said in 2006: “Any country with a nuclear power program “ipso facto ends up with a nuclear weapons capability”. (AAP, October 16, 2006.)

INDIRECT LINKS BETWEEN POWER AND WEAPONS

Nuclear power reactors per sé need not be directly involved in weapons research/production in order for a nuclear power program to provide cover and support for a weapons program.

The claim that power reactors have not become entangled in weapons programs ignores the pool of expertise required to run a nuclear power program and the actual and potential use of that expertise in military programs. For example, it is no coincidence that the five declared nuclear weapons states – the USA, Russia, China, France and the UK – all have nuclear power reactors and they account for 57% of global nuclear power output (203/370 gigawatts as at September 2006). Specific examples of power-weapons links – such as the use of a power reactor to produce tritium for weapons in the US – are of less importance than the broad pattern of civil programs providing a large pool of nuclear expertise from which military programs can draw.

The nuclear weapons programs in South Africa and Pakistan were clearly outgrowths of their power programs although enrichment plants, not power reactors, produced the fissile material for use in weapons.

Claims made about power reactors also ignore the fact that research and training reactors, ostensibly acquired in support of a power program or for other civil purposes, have been the plutonium source in India and Israel. Small volumes of plutonium have been produced in ‘civil’ research reactors then separated from irradiated materials in a number of countries suspected of or known to be interested in the development of a nuclear weapons capability –  including Iraq, Iran, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Yugoslavia, and possibly Romania. Pakistan announced in 1998 that a powerful ‘research’ reactor had begun operation at Khusab; if so, the reactor can produce unsafeguarded plutonium. (The links between research reactor programs and nuclear weapons are addressed in detail in Green, 2002.)

So nuclear power programs can facilitate weapons programs and weapons production even if power reactors per se are not used to produce fissile material for weapons.

Furthermore, nuclear power programs can facilitate weapons programs and weapons production even if power reactors are not actually built. Iraq provides a clear illustration of this point. While Iraq’s nuclear research program provided much cover for the weapons program, stated interest in developing nuclear power was also significant. According to Khidhir Hamza (1998), a senior nuclear scientist involved in Iraq’s weapons program: “Acquiring nuclear technology within the IAEA safeguards system was the first step in establishing the infrastructure necessary to develop nuclear weapons. In 1973, we decided to acquire a 40-megawatt research reactor, a fuel manufacturing plant, and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities, all under cover of acquiring the expertise needed to eventually build and operate nuclear power plants and produce and recycle nuclear fuel. Our hidden agenda was to clandestinely develop the expertise and infrastructure needed to produce weapon-grade plutonium.”

Carlson (2000) says: “If we look to the history of nuclear weapons development, we can see that those countries with nuclear weapons developed them before they developed nuclear power programs.” However, ostensibly civil nuclear programs clearly preceded and facilitated the successful development of nuclear weapons in India, Pakistan, and in the former nuclear weapons state South Africa.

Carlson (2006) states: “I have pointed out on numerous occasions that nuclear power as such is not a proliferation problem – rather the problem is with the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technologies …” The claim is false, no matter how many times Carlson makes it:
* Power reactors have been used directly in weapons programs.
* Power programs have facilitated and provided cover for weapons programs even without direct use of power reactor/s in the weapons program.
* And power reactors produce large volumes of weapons-useable plutonium and can be operated on a short irradiation cycle to produce large volumes of weapon-grade plutonium.

PLUTONIUM GRADES

No-one disputes that ‘reactor-grade’ plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons but there is debate about the difficulty of so doing, and the likely cost in terms of reliability and yield.

Moreover, there is no dispute that power reactors can produce weapon-grade plutonium. This could hardly be simpler – all that needs to be done is to shorten the irradiation time, thereby maximising the production of plutonium-239 relative to other, unwanted plutonium isotopes. Indeed low burn-up, weapon-grade plutonium is produced in the normal course of operation of a power reactor, although in the normal course of operation it becomes fuel-grade then reactor-grade plutonium.

(The issue of plutonium grades is discussed in detail in the paper posted at: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/plutonium-grades-and-nuclear-weapons-2/.)

Power reactors have been responsible for the production of a vast quantity of weapons-useable plutonium. Adding to the proliferation risk is the growing stockpile of separated plutonium, as reprocessing outstrips the use of plutonium in MOX (mixed oxide fuel containing plutonium and uranium).

A typical power reactor (1000 MWe) produces about 300 kilograms of plutonium each year. Total global production of plutonium in power reactors is about 70 tonnes per year. As at the end of 2003, power reactors had produced an estimated 1,600 tonnes of plutonium (Institute for Science and International Security, 2004).

Using the above figures, and assuming that 10 kilograms of (reactor-grade) plutonium is required to produce a weapon with a destructive power comparable to that of the plutonium weapon dropped on Nagasaki in 1945:
* The plutonium produced in a single reactor each year is sufficient for 30 weapons.
* Total global plutonium production in power reactors each year is sufficient to produce 7,000 weapons.
* Total accumulated ‘civil’ plutonium is sufficient for 160,000 weapons.

The production of vast amounts of plutonium in power reactors is problem enough, but the problem is greatly exacerbated by the separation of plutonium in reprocessing plants. Whereas separation of plutonium from spent fuel requires a reprocessing capability and is potentially hazardous because of the radioactivity of spent fuel, the use of separated plutonium for weapons production is far less complicated.

The problem is further exacerbated by ongoing plutonium separation in excess of its limited re-use in MOX. According to the Uranium Information Centre (2002), only about one third of separated plutonium has been used in MOX over the last 30 years. Thus the stockpile of separated plutonium continues to grow – about 15-20 tonnes of plutonium are separated from spent fuel each year but only 10-15 tonnes are fabricated into MOX fuel. (Albright and Kramer, 2004.)

Hence there is a growing stockpile of plutonium in unirradiated forms (separated or in MOX), currently amounting to about 240 tonnes.

What would it take to address this problem of growing stockpiles of unirradiated / separated plutonium? All that would need to be done is to slow or suspend reprocessing until the stockpile was drawn down. That the nuclear industry refuses to do this shows how little it cares about the WMD proliferation risks it creates.

ALTERNATIVE REACTOR TYPES AND ALTERNATIVE FUEL CYCLES

Proliferation-resistant technologies are the subject of much discussion and some research (a number of examples are discussed in Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, n.d.)

However, there is little reason to believe that minimising proliferation risks will be a priority in the evolution of nuclear power technology. The growing stockpiles of unirradiated plutonium provide compelling evidence of the low priority given to non-proliferation initiatives compared to commercial and political (and sometime military) imperatives. Further, a number of the ‘advanced’ reactor concepts being studied involve the large-scale use of plutonium and the operation of fast breeder reactors (Burnie, 2005).

Plutonium breeder reactors rely on plutonium as the primary fuel. There are various possible configurations of breeder systems. Most rely on irradiation of a natural or depleted uranium blanket which produces plutonium which can be separated and used as fuel. Breeder reactors can potentially produce more plutonium than they consume, and the use of uranium is only a tiny fraction of that consumed in conventional reactors. (Hirsch et al., 2005, pp.33-35; von Hippel and Jones, 1997.) Breeder technology is highly problematic in relation to proliferation because it involves the large-scale production and separation of plutonium (although separation is not required in some proposed configurations). (Feiveson, 2001.) The proliferation of reprocessing capabilities is a likely outcome.

Fast neutron or fast spectrum reactors can be ‘breeders’ (producing more fissile material than they consume) or burners or they can produce as much fissile material as they consume. Burner reactor concepts (e.g. integral fast reactors) have some obvious attractions from a non-proliferation standpoint but the claims made about the proliferation resistance of these reactor concepts has been grossly overblown. Those issues are discussed in more detail at: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/nuclear-weapons-and-generation-4-reactors/

Like conventional reactors, proposed ‘Pebble Bed’ reactors are based on uranium fission. The nature of the fuel pebbles may make it somewhat more difficult to separate plutonium from irradiated fuel. However, uranium (or depleted uranium) targets could be inserted to produce weapon-grade plutonium for weapons. The enriched uranium fuel could be further enriched for HEU weapons – particularly since the proposed enrichment level of 9.6% uranium-235 is about twice the level of conventional reactor fuel. The reliance on enriched uranium will encourage the use and perhaps proliferation of enrichment plants, which can be used to produce HEU for weapons. (Harding, 2004.)

Fusion power systems remain a distant dream, and fusion also poses a number of weapons proliferation risks including the following:
* The production or supply of tritium which can be diverted for use in boosted nuclear weapons. (As mentioned above,  the USA used a power reactor to produce tritium for weapons in the 1990s.)
* Using neutron radiation to bombard a uranium blanket (leading to the production of fissile plutonium) or a thorium blanket (leading to the production of fissile uranium-233).
* Research in support of a (thermonuclear) weapon program. (Gsponer and Hurni, 2004; WISE/NIRS, 2004; Hirsch et al., 2005.)

The use of thorium-232 as a reactor fuel is sometimes suggested as a long-term energy source, partly because of its relative abundance compared to uranium. No thorium-based power system would negate proliferation risks altogether (Friedman, 1997; Feiveson, 2001). Neutron bombardment of thorium (indirectly) produces uranium-233, a fissile material which is subject to the same safeguards requirements as uranium-235. The possible use of highly enriched uranium or plutonium to initiate a thorium-232/uranium-233 reaction is a further proliferation concern. Most proposed thorium fuel cycles require reprocessing with the attendant proliferation risks. More information on the proliferation risks associated with thorium is posted at: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/thorium-and-wmd-proliferation-risks-2/

SAFEGUARDS

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards system is seriously flawed and under-resourced. IAEA Director-General Mohamed El Baradei has described the IAEA’s basic inspection rights as “fairly limited”, complained about “half-hearted” efforts to improve the system, and expressed concern that the safeguards system operates on a “shoestring budget … comparable to a local police department”. (El Baradei, n.d.)

There is serious concern that the NPT/IAEA safeguards system could collapse. For example, the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004) noted: “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

MORE INFORMATION

Connections between civil and military nuclear programs – general information and country case studies: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/power-weapons/

REFERENCES

Albright, David, and Mark Hibbs, September 1992, “India’s silent bomb”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.48, No.07, pp.27-31, <www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=sep92albright>.

Albright, David, and Kimberly Kramer, November/December 2004, “Fissile material: Stockpiles still growing”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.60, No.6, pp.14-16, <www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=nd04albright_016>.

Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, n.d., “The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime: An overview of Institutional & Technical Issues”, <www.asno.dfat.gov.au/nuclear_safeguards.html>.

Boureston, Jack, and Charles D. Ferguson, March/April 2005, “Laser enrichment: Separation anxiety”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.61, No.2, pp.14-18, <www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=ma05boureston>.

Burnie, Shaun, April 2005, “Proliferation Report: sensitive nuclear technology and plutonium technologies in the Republic of Korea and Japan”, Greenpeace report, <www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/Proliferation-Korea-Japan>.

Carlson, John, 2000, “Nuclear Energy and Non-proliferation – Issues and Challenges: An Australian Perspective”, Paper prepared for JAIF Symposium on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy and Non-Proliferation, Tokyo, 9-10 March 2000.

Carlson, John, November 27, 2006, supplementary submission 30.2 to the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, Inquiry into Uranium Sales To China, <www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/ jsct/8august2006/subs2/sub30_2.pdf>.

Davies, Andrew, 2006, Australian uranium exports and security: Preventing proliferation. Australian Strategic Policy Institute . <www.aspi.org.au/publications.cfm?pubID=98>.

El Baradei, Mohamed, n.d., various speeches and papers available at <www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/index.html>.

Feiveson, Harold, 2001, “The Search for Proliferation-Resistant Nuclear Power”, The Journal of the Federation of American Scientists, September/October 2001, Volume 54, Number 5, <www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n5/nuclear.htm>.

Friedman, John S., 1997, “More power to thorium?”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 53, No.5, September/October .

Green, Jim, 2002, “Research Reactors and Nuclear Weapons”, paper prepared for the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, https://nuclear.foe.org.au/power-weapons/

Greenpeace, 2004, “Secrets, Lies and Uranium Enrichment: The Classified Silex Project at Lucas Heights”, www.greenpeace.org.au/frontpage/pdf/silex_report.pdf

Gsponer, A., and J-P. Hurni, 2004 “ITER: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and the Nuclear Weapons Proliferation Implications of Thermonuclear-Fusion Energy Systems”, Independent Scientific Research Institute report number ISRI-04-01, http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0401110

Harding, Jim, 2004, “Pebble Bed Modular Reactors—Status and Prospects”,
www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid171php#E05-10

Hirsch, Helmut, Oda Becker, Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt, April 2005, “Nuclear Reactor Hazards: Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century”, Report prepared for Greenpeace International, www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/nuclearreactorhazards

Hore-Lacy, Ian, 2000, “The Future of Nuclear Energy”, www.uic.com.au/opinion6.html

ISIS – Institute for Science and International Security, n.d., “Nuclear Weapons Programs Worldwide: An Historical Overview”, www.isis-online.org/mapproject/introduction.html

ISIS – Institute for Science and International Security, 2004, “Civil Plutonium Produced in Power Reactors”, <www.isis-online.org/global_stocks/civil_pu.html>.

Nuclear Weapon Archive, n.d., “Nuclear Weapon Nations and Arsenals”, <nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq7.html>.

UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility”, November 2004, <www.un.org/secureworld>.

Uranium Information Centre, 2002, “Plutonium”, Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper 18, <www.uic.com.au/nip18.htm>.

von Hippel, Frank, and Suzanne Jones, 1997, “The slow death of the fast breeder”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol.53, No.5, September/October.

WISE/NIRS, February 13, 2004, “The Proliferation Risks of ITER”, WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, #603, https://wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/603/proliferation-risks-iter

There are three main problems with the nuclear “solution” to climate change — it is a blunt instrument, a dangerous one, and it is unnecessary.

First, nuclear power could at most make a modest contribution to climate change abatement. The main limitation is that it is used almost exclusively for electricity generation, which accounts for about 25% of global greenhouse emissions (estimates vary from 16-40%).

The 2006 Switkowski report found that even a major nuclear power program in Australia – 25 reactors by mid-century – would reduce emissions by a modest 17% compared to business-as-usual (assuming nuclear displaces black coal). A more modest (and realistic) program of six power reactors would reduce Australia’s overall emissions by just 4% if they displaced coal or 2% if they displaced gas.

Compared to most renewable energy sources, nuclear power produces more greenhouse emissions per unit of power generated. For example, the 2006 Switkowski report states that nuclear power is three times more greenhouse intensive than wind power. Nuclear power is far more greenhouse intensive than many energy efficiency measures.

Therefore displacing renewables and energy conservation with nuclear power will worsen climate change, as explained by US physicist Amory Lovins: “If climate is a problem, we need the most solution per dollar and the most solution per year. We can get two to 10 times more coal displaced per dollar buying stuff other than nuclear. Every time I spend a dollar on an expensive solution I forgo a lot more that I could have bought of a cheaper solution.”

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons

The second big problem with the nuclear “solution” to climate change is that all nuclear power concepts (including “next generation” concepts) fail to resolve the greatest problem with nuclear power — its repeatedly demonstrated connection to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).  Not just any old WMDs, but nuclear weapons — the most destructive, indiscriminate and immoral of all weapons.

These risks are not hypothetical – there is already an alarming history of ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs providing the expertise, facilities and materials for nuclear weapons programs. Supposedly ‘peaceful’ nuclear programs have facilitated many nuclear weapons research and production programs. Of the 10 nations to have produced nuclear weapons, five did so under cover of a supposedly peaceful nuclear program – India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa and North Korea. Over 20 countries have used their ‘peaceful’ nuclear facilities for nuclear weapons research.

The greenhouse benefits of a global doubling nuclear power output would be small but the same cannot be said of the proliferation risks. Doubling nuclear output by the middle of the century would require the construction of 800-900 reactors to replace most of the existing cohort of reactors and to build as many again. These reactors would produce over one million tonnes of nuclear waste (in the form of spent fuel) containing enough plutonium to build over one million nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power plants have already produced enough plutonium to build over 160,000 nuclear weapons. Safeguarding this material is the responsibility of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Yet the outgoing Director General of the IAEA, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, has noted that the IAEA’s basic rights of inspection are “fairly limited”, that the safeguards system suffers from “vulnerabilities” and it “clearly needs reinforcement”, that efforts to improve the system have been “half-hearted”, and that the safeguards system operates on a “shoestring budget … comparable to that of a local police department “.

UNSW academic Dr Mark Diesendorf argues: “On top of the perennial challenges of global poverty and injustice, the two biggest threats facing human civilisation in the 21st century are climate change and nuclear war. It would be absurd to respond to one by increasing the risks of the other. Yet that is what nuclear power does.”

Likewise, former US Vice President Al Gore has summarised the problem: “For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal … then we’d have to put them in so many places we’d run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale.”

Running the proliferation risk off the reasonability scale brings us back to climate change — a connection explained by Alan Robock in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “As recent work … has shown, we now understand that the atmospheric effects of a nuclear war would last for at least a decade — more than proving the nuclear winter theory of the 1980s correct. By our calculations, a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan using less than 0.3% of the current global arsenal would produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history and global ozone depletion equal in size to the current hole in the ozone, only spread out globally.”

 

Nuclear power and climate change

Energy expert Mycle Schneider notes that countries and regions with a high reliance on nuclear power also tend to have high greenhouse emissions:

“The largest generators of nuclear power also have energy sectors with the highest CO2 emissions. Western Europe and the United States produce about two-thirds of the nuclear electricity in the world [yet] their energy sectors also produce 39% of the world’s energy-related CO2 emissions.

“The same analysis applies to overall CO2 emissions per country or region. There is an interesting correlation between nuclear generation and CO2 emissions. The United States alone, [with] less than 5% of the world’s population, accounts for 25% of the world’s total CO2 emissions and generates 29.4% of the world’s nuclear electricity. Western Europe, with only 6.5% of the world’s population accounts for about 15% of global CO2 emissions and 34% of the nuclear power production.

“China is the counter example. With 21.5% of the world’s population, the country emits 13.5% of global CO2 and generates 0.6% of the world’s nuclear power.  The example of China illustrates well the potential role of energy efficiency in greenhouse gas abatement. Analysis of developments between 1980 and 1997 shows that while the country reduced its CO2 emissions through penetration of “carbon-free fuel” by hardly more than 10 million tonnes of carbon, the reduction due to energy efficiency measures delivered savings of more than 430 million tonnes of carbon over the same period.”

Mycle Schneider, April 2000, “Climate Change and Nuclear Power”, <www.panda.org/downloads/climate_ change/fullnuclearreprotwwf.pdf>.

Similar points can be made in relation to India. Leonard Weiss, a former staff director of the US Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation, noted in the May/June 2006 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that a concerted program of improved energy efficiency could substitute for all the future power output from nuclear reactors currently being planned in India between 2006 and 2020.

Clean energy solutions

A significant and growing body of scientific literature demonstrates how the systematic deployment of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency policies and technologies can generate major reductions in greenhouse emissions without recourse to nuclear power.

For Australia, a starting point is the study by the Clean Energy Future Group (CEFG). The CEFG proposes an electricity supply scenario which would reduce greenhouse emissions from the electricity sector by 78% by 2040, comprising solar (5%); hydro (7%); coal/petroleum (10%); wind (20%); bioenergy − mostly from crop residues so it is not competing with other land uses (28%); and gas (30%).

The CEFG study is conservative in that it makes no allowance for technological advancement in important areas like solar-with-storage or geothermal power, even over a timeframe of several decades. Recently, Mark Diesendorf, who contributed to the CEFG study, has proposed a more ambitious scenario: “By 2030 it will be technically possible to replace all conventional coal power with the following mixes: wind, bioelectricity and solar thermal each 20 to 30%; solar photovoltaic 10-20%; geothermal 10-20%; and marine (wave, ocean current) 10%. Natural gas too, provided it hasn’t all been sold to China, could be fuelling cogeneration of electricity and heat, trigeneration (electricity, heating and cooling), combined-cycle power stations and back-up for solar hot water, solar thermal electricity and wind power. There is an embarrassment of riches in the non-nuclear alternatives to coal.”

It is a myth that all renewable energy sources are incapable of providing reliable base-load electricity (see briefing paper #16 on the issue of baseload power posted at www.energyscience.org.au/factsheets.html):

* Geothermal ‘hot rocks’ can provide baseload power.

* Bioenergy can provide base-load power.

* Depending on the water source, hydro can provide base-load, intermediate-load or peak-load power.

* Dispersed wind farms with a small amount of back-up (e.g. from gas) can provide base-load power.

* Solar with storage can provide baseload – this is an expensive option at the moment, but an Australian government-funded Cooperative Research Centre reported in 2006 that solar thermal technology “is poised to play a significant role in baseload generation for Australia” and will be cost-competitive with coal within seven years. Solar water heating can reduce demand for baseload supply.

* Energy efficiency and conservation measures can reduce demand for base-, intermediate- and peak-load power.

As Dr Diesendorf notes: “The producers and consumers of fossil fuels, and their supporters among public officials, the Federal Government and CSIRO, are well aware that we already have the technologies to commence a rapid transition to an energy future based on renewable energy and efficient energy, with gas playing the role as an important transitional fuel. The barriers to this transition are not primarily technological or economic, but rather are the immense political power of vested interests.”

More information on the nuclear/greenhouse debate:

• See the links page. https://nuclear.foe.org.au/links/
• WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, 25 June 2016, ‘Nuclear power: No solution to climate change’:

https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/806/nuclear-power-no-solution-climate-change

https://wiseinternational.org/sites/default/files/NM806-climate-nuclear.pdf