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Our institute has long been active in seeking to restrain U.S. nuclear-weapon activities and to promote disarmament efforts along specific lines that advance nuclear non-proliferation objectives.
In 1981, when the U.S. was engaged in a massive buildup of nuclear weapons under President Reagan, we exposed a U.S. plan to use spent fuel from civilian power plants as a source of plutonium for weapons. The result was enactment of a 1982 law that prohibits military use of civilian spent fuel.1 In 1988, we organized a coalition of eminent scientists in support of suspending new production of tritium, a radioactive substance used to boost nuclear warheads, and using tritium's relatively rapid rate of decay (the "Tritium Factor") to help pace U.S.-Soviet negotiation of deep cuts in nuclear warheads.2 Recently, we have been working with a number of delegations to the UN Conference on Disarmament to build support for negotiation of a comprehensive ban on weapons-usable fissile materials, civilian as well as military.3 We are also playing a leading role in pressing for disposal of U.S. and Russian warhead plutonium as waste rather than as fuel in civilian reactors.
Continued progress toward nuclear disarmament is essential if the U.S. and other recognized nuclear-weapon states are not to signal to the rest of the world that nuclear weapons are indeed important to national security. Failure to meet disarmament commitments could threaten future adherence by non-weapon states to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its international inspection system. The approximately 170 NPT parties without nuclear weapons agreed overwhelmingly in May to extend the treaty and forgo nuclear weapons permanently on the basis of disarmament commitments made by the weapon states.
The clearest and most immediate commitment made by the weapon states is to conclude a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, which we actively support. But we are also pressing the case that without a comprehensive ban on weapons- usable fissile materials as well, a test ban will be of limited value because it is now possible to develop first-generation nuclear weapons without testing if the essential nuclear materials are available.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that plutonium and highly enriched uranium "are the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons, and limits on access to them are the primary technical barrier to nuclear proliferation. The existence of large excess stocks of these materials poses a clear and present danger."4 A similar view was expressed recently by the RAND Corporation: "It is critical that countries pay attention to the proliferation threat from the civilian side if they want to maximize the nonproliferation value of dismantling U.S. nuclear weapons and those of the Former Soviet Union."5
We will be pursuing a number of initiatives toward this objective.
To build an effective global non-proliferation regime, it is crucial that military plutonium recovered from U.S. and Russian warheads be stored and disposed of as waste. This approach could serve as a model for non-nuclear- weapon states to keep their plutonium in an equivalent form---unreprocessed spent fuel, pending geological disposal. We underscore this important non- proliferation objective as the U.S. proceeds with warhead dismantlement and plutonium disposition.
Our preferred option for disposing of warhead plutonium (and also stockpiled separated civilian plutonium) is to re-mix plutonium with the high- level waste from which it was originally extracted and then "vitrify" the mixture into highly radioactive glass logs for eventual geological disposal. This approach sends a clear signal that plutonium serves no useful purpose and should be stored and disposed of in a form that meets the U.S. National Academy of Science so-called "spent-fuel standard." Our scientific director, Dr. Edwin Lyman, a physicist who recently came to NCI from Princeton University where he concentrated on vitrification issues, is exploring the feasibility and desirability of the technology.
By making the case for disposing of excess military plutonium as waste rather than as fuel in nuclear reactors, we are seeking to head off government and private efforts to revitalize the plutonium industry. Leading an international coalition that includes Greenpeace International and Japanese, German, and French organizations, we have made the case against a plan to ship Russian warhead plutonium to Germany for fabrication into MOX fuel for use in German power reactors. We are hopeful that our arguments in a letter to Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin and Chancellor Kohl have prevailed and thte plan is now dead. Had it been approved by the U.S., German and Russian governments, would save an unfinished German MOX fuel fabrication plant (the last commercial plutonium plant left in Germany) that its builder, Siemens AG, was about to abandon after German utility companies withdrew their financial support at the end of June.
Our institute is also chairing a working group of Washington-based organizations---including Federation of American Scientists, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Natural Resources Defense Council and Union of Concerned Scientists---that is seeking to ensure that the U.S. government gives vitrification fair consideration in relation to reactor disposal options. DOE recently agreed to execute the coalition's proposal that DOE conduct a vitrification conference this summer to draw together the principal developers of vitrification technology from government and from the private and public sectors. But the Department of Energy is signaling a clear preference for disposing of plutonium "in existing, modified or new nuclear reactors." We are monitoring the situation closely and are preparing to make the case on Capitol Hill and in legal and regulatory proceedings against relicensing existing commercial reactors or building new reactors to use warhead-plutonium fuels.
The Department of Energy is considering the future production of tritium for remaining weapons and disposal of plutonium from dismantled weapons. We oppose all reactor options for disposing of plutonium, and we have taken the lead in defeating recent efforts to resuscitate breeder and other advanced technologies that earlier had been touted for their ability to produce plutonium and are now being promoted as plutonium "burners."
We also seriously question the need for a new tritium production plant at this time, and we are preparing to make the non-proliferation and disarmament arguments against it. A recommendation to DOE Secretary O'Leary on which technology to use for new tritium production is expected in the fall.
In 1988, NCI led the opposition to construction of two new tritium production reactors. Our "Tritium Factor" proposal, to suspend tritium production and to pace negotiated nuclear-arms reductions by tritium's nearly 6% annual rate of decay, proved to be prescient. The end of the Cold War put a halt to plans for the new tritium production reactors. Projected nuclear stockpile reductions under START I are proceeding faster than the decay rate of tritium and, if fully implemented along with START II cuts, will eliminate any immediate need for a new military tritium production source.
Nonetheless, DOE is once again considering reactor or other technologies to meet a highly questionable tritium need. A leading candidate, being pushed on Capitol Hill by a powerful industry consortium, is the so-called "Triple Play" reactor---so named because this light-water reactor would be built to burn warhead plutonium while producing tritium and generating electricity at the same time. We recently led the fight for an amendment that succeeded in preventing the House from authorizing the Triple Play reactor before Secretary O'Leary has the chance to make her decision on whether and how to proceed with tritium production, but the main Congressional bout is still ahead.
Our institute holds the "non-proliferation chair" in another, broad-based coalition---including National Taxpayers' Union, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Military Production Network, and Critical Mass---that is seeking to strip funding from the 1996 budget for this and a number of other nuclear projects on a wide range of fiscal, safety, energy and security grounds.
The group was also successful in cutting off funding for an advanced, gas- cooled reactor, the latest rationale for which was to burn warhead plutonium. Last year, the coalition succeeded in stopping construction of a plutonium- burning Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor, originally a breeder reactor, but is still battling efforts on Capitol Hill to keep alive its associated fuel-cycle technology, "pyroprocessing," an advanced form of reprocessing that was developed jointly with Japan.
We are also challenging the legality of U.S. transfers of reprocessing technology to Japan and, in alliance with Greenpeace and NRDC, have petitioned DOE to develop a rule barring such transfers of "sensitive nuclear technology"-- -a matter now pending at DOE.
A recent study of nuclear weapons dismantlement conducted by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) emphasized that "nuclear weapons production history and recent developments in DOE operations have demonstrated that...continued scrutiny by outside parties will be necessary to ensure that progress continues in improving protection of the environment, safety, and health during dismantlement activities." NCI will play such a role in the dismantlement process by participating in the various NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) reviews of the nuclear-weapons complex and plutonium disposition options.
We are continuing to build support for a treaty that would ban further production and use of separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium for military or civilian purposes. The UN Conference on Disarmament (CD) is now considering a proposal, originally made by the United States, for a cut-off of such materials for weapons purposes only. The negotiations are now stalled by a disagreement over whether the treaty should cover not only new production of warhead materials, but existing stockpiles of these military materials, as well. The U.S. and the other four declared weapon states oppose such a move, as well as any effort to broaden the treaty to capture civilian, weapons-usable materials. However, we are appealing to interested delegations in the CD to pursue a comprehensive fissile-material ban as an essential complement to a comprehensive test ban. Our objective is to move toward a global norm that regards weapons-usable plutonium and uranium as contraband and an international non-proliferation regime that verifies the absence of these materials and allows only non-weapons-usable fuel in reactors.
1. Robert Hershey, "U.S. Said to Plan Atom Fuel Re-use," New York Times, September 11, 1981; NCI, "Action Alert: Converting Nuclear Power Plants Into Atom Bomb Factories," October 1981; Hart-Simpson-Mitchell amendment to S. 1207, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Authorizations, Congressional Record, March 30, 1982, p. S2958. Back to document
2. Hans Bethe et. al., "Atomic Weapons: America's Non-Existent Nuclear Crisis," Washington Post, Sunday, April 16, 1989, Outlook Section; also see J. Carson Mark, "The Tritium Factor as a Forcing Function in Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks," Science, Vol. 241, pp. 1166-1169, September 2, 1988. Back to document
3. "Weapons-Usable Fissile Materials and the NPT Review and Extension Conference," Nuclear Control Institute, May 1995; Paul Leventhal and Daniel Horner, "Peaceful Plutonium? No Such Thing," New York Times, January 25, 1995.Back to document
4. Panel on Reactor-Related Options for the Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National Academy of Sciences, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium: Reactor-Related Options, 1995, p. 1. Back to document
5. Brian Chow and Kenneth Solomon, Limiting the Spread of Weapon-Usable Fissile Materials, RAND Corporation, November 1993.Back to document
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