seeks to address four basic contributors to the spread of nuclear weapons: the
growing presence of atom-bomb materials in civilian nuclear power and research
programs; behavior of the nuclear-weapon states that stimulates or facilitates
other states to go nuclear; loopholes in U.S. nuclear-export laws and international
nuclear agreements, and tensions that drive regional rivals to acquire nuclear
weapons. In particular, we focus on the urgency of eliminating weapons-usable
materials, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, from civilian nuclear programs.
Among its initiatives,
is:  preparing
safety and security analyses for licensing proceedings on introducing plutonium
as reactor fuel in Europe and Japan, and opposing U.S. assistance to their plutonium
programs;
opposing a German plan to build a new research reactor with bomb-grade uranium
fuel, and assisting the U.S. Department of Energy to encourage conversions of
foreign research reactors to non-weapons-usable fuel by taking back their U.S.-origin,
bomb- grade fuel without reprocessing it;
opposing an impending agreement between the U.S. and Euratom that allows unrestricted
use of U.S.-origin plutonium in Europe, as well as an impending agreement between
Russia and Euratom to provide bomb-grade uranium for European research reactors;
advocating
stricter international safety codes for transports of plutonium and highly radioactive
waste and advising en-route countries of their legal rights under the "precautionary
principle" in the face of safety, security and environmental risks associated
with these shipments;
advocating direct disposal of warhead plutonium as waste rather than use of it
as fuel in civilian power reactors, in order to thwart government and private
efforts to revitalize an uneconomical, risk-prone plutonium industry;
re-examining the threat of nuclear terrorism in the face of an emerging black
market in plutonium and bomb-grade uranium, a decade after NCI's International
Task Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism first identified nuclear terrorism
as a major security risk;
opposing the restart of military plutonium-separation plants in the United States
and a Westinghouse plan to use them to reprocess spent fuel from civilian nuclear
reactors, as well as opposing the start-up of pyroprocessing and other experimental
reprocessing technologies;
analyzing limitations of international and national safeguards arrangements at
commercial plutonium plants to detect or prevent diversions, thefts or abrupt
conversions of "peaceful" plutonium into nuclear weapons. Plutonium 
Bomb-Grade
Uranium
Nuclear
Disarmament
Regional
Approaches
Nuclear
Terrorism
U.S.
Laws and Policies
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