ML20055B890
| ML20055B890 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Clinch River |
| Issue date: | 07/20/1982 |
| From: | Feiveson H PRINCETON UNIV., PRINCETON, NJ |
| To: | Gilinsky V, Palladino N, Roberts T NRC COMMISSION (OCM) |
| References | |
| NUDOCS 8207230490 | |
| Download: ML20055B890 (5) | |
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Princeton University senooi. or i NciNEEmiNc/xertiEn science.
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US.':FC CENTER FoR '.INERcY AND ENVIRONMENTAL $TUDiES rus zNc Nstas (C QU ADRANCLE ra:Nctron, Nr F JER5EY 08344 July 20. 1982 E-]Eg,. 3,5 q:p _.
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The Honorable Nunzio J. Palladino The Honorable James K. Asselstine Chairman Commissioner Nuclear Regulatory Commission Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, D.C.
20555 Wa shington, D.C.
20555 The Honorable Victor Gilinsky The Honorable John F. Ahearne Commissioner Commissioner Nuclear Regulatory Commission Nuclear Regulatory Commission Wa shington, D.C.
20555 Washington, D.C.
20555 The Honorable Thomas F. Roberts Commissioner Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, D.C.
20555 Centlemen:
This letter is in response to the request by the Department of Energy that the NRC authorize site preparation activities for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant on an accelerated schedule (letter to NRC Commissioners re: Clinch River Breeder Reactor Plant, Docket No. 50-537, Section 50.12 Request, by W. Kenneth Davis, July 1, 1982).
I urge that the request be denied.
The economic arguments that the CP3RP is unnecessary at this time (above all, on an accelerated schedule), have been well-made by others, including by my colleague Frank von Hippel (in letters to the Commission early this year)1 and recently by the General Accounting Office.2 Even while paying a ritualistic deference to Department of Energy sensibilities, the GAO quite pointedly emphasized that it was a " Clinch River-type" project that it supported, not the CRBRP itself, an emphasis that follows naturally from the GAO finding that breeder reactors are unlikely to be economic before 2025-2035 at the earliest.
I wish, therefore, to focus my brief comments on the danger that construction of the CRBRP (above all, on an accelerated schedule) would significantly complicate U.S. non-proliferation efforts.
It really takes a wonderful chutzpah for the Department of Energy to claim that "... acceleration of the CRBRP schedule by 6 to 12 months will... support the achievement of the Administrations' non-proliferation policy obj ectives"!
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o This certainly seems a rather dubious contention. What possible leadership position could the U.S. attain in international saf eguards' discussions during the next several years merely by the acceleration by 6-12 months of the construction schedule for the CRBRP? What technical information do we expect to learn about safeguarding plutonium through an accelerated schedule?
A more natural consequence of such an acceleration would be to signal to other countries that the day for the commercial use of plutonium is approaching.
This could not do otherwise than contribute to a f rustration of U.S. efforts to discourage (where it is most important to do so) reprocessing and separation of plutonium.
Indeed, the development of breeder reactors must logically presume
.the development of reprocessing technology, and at a still more accelerated pace, for a reprocessing industry must be in place and well-used and testod before the first commercial breeder goes on-line.
This support for reprocessing that would be signalled by moving the CRBRP schedule ahead would be especially evident in light of two other initiatives coming out of the Administration:
one, a recommendation floated by the Secretary of Energy that the Federal government subsidize the purchase and operation of the Barnwell Fuel Reprocessing Plant (a proposal that the Department of Energy will justify in part on grounds that Barnwell plutonium is needed for the CRBRP); and, two, a plutonium-use policy under which the U.S. would in certain cases (i) grant blanket approval for a nation or group of nations to reprocess spent fuel and (ii) consider permitting the export of sensitive reprocessing technology and equipment.
Although together these initiatives (or trial balloons) send a strong and unfortunate me s sage, in some crucial respects they interfere with one another.
In particular, the plutonium-use policy, if it makes any sense at all, depends on the U.S.
drawing a distinction between countries such as Japan where reprocessing will be approved and countries (such as Mexico, Taiwan and South Korea?) where it will not.
But this distinction, a difficult f eat at best, will be undermined by any U.S.
move to breeder reactors and reprocessing; for such a move will strip away any arguments that we might have otherwise wanted to make that the commercial use of F utonium was not yet inevitable.
l Although there may be some nuclear experts who believe plutonium can be effectively saf eguarded, I know of no study (INFCE included) that has shown in detail how this might be done.
The NRC itself has more than once noted its concern that plutonium could not be adequately saf eguarded.
Unless there are powerful countervailing economic reasons, we should focus during the next years on making more secure the nuclear systems on which nations now rely instead of dissipating our technical and diplomatic energies developing and then frantically trying to devise saf eguards for breeder technologies which are inherently more vulnerable to the diversion of weapons-usable materials.
In this connection, it is worth recalling the sheer quantities of plutonium at issue once reprocessing goes forward on any substantial scale. By 1985, INFCE estimated that the cumulative fissile plutonium inventory in spent fule in non-0 ECD and non-Communist countries would exceed 18,000 kilograms - out of a non-Communist world total of 227,000 kilograms. These numbers were proj ected to rise to over l
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' V 50,000 and 500,000 kilograms respectively by 1990, not so far away.3 If nuclear power ever reaches the " low case" levels projected by INFCE for 2025 and breeder reactors come to constitute a large fraction of this power (neither a likely eventadmittedly), this would imply an annual flow of fissile plutonium of well 4
over one million kilograms!
I also enclose, for your information, a note by Frank von Hippel and myself,
" Cutting Off the Production of Fissile lhterials for Nuclear Weapons," June 1982.
Sincerely, g{w d.
H. A. Feiveson HAF/zk
References:
1.
F. von Hippel, Letters to NRC Commissioners, January 13, 1982.
2.
Report by the Comptroller General, "The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor
--Options for Deciding Future Pace and Direction," GA0/EMD-82-79, July 12,1982.
1 3.
Congressional Research Service, Nuclear Proliferation Fact book, September 1980, pp. 216-217 (reprinted from INFCE Summary. Volume, Vienna,1980).
4 Ibid, p.137 The " low case" projected for 2025 for the World Outside Centrally Planned Economic Areas (WOCA) is 1800 GWe.
Since the annual discharge from a plutonium breeder would be about 1000 kg fissile plutonium, if half or so of the 1800 GWe were breeders, the annual plutonium discharge from the breeders alone would be almost one million kilograms.
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~ Pagt 10 Federation of knz-icen Scicntietc, Public Interent R port June 1982 CUTTING OFF THE PRODUCTION OF and those not at full capacity. Their combined average FlSSILE MATERIAL FOR ~ '
production rate has been only about 1.5 tonnes of NUCLEAR WEAPONS plutonium per year. The Department of Energy (DOE) is liarold A. Feiveson and Frank von Ilippel currently undertaking a program to almost triple this rate Centerfor Energy and Environmental Studies of weapon-gr de plutonium product 2on by the msd 1980's.
Princeton, University Rationale for a Production Catoff
-..the United States would be prepared to work out, with Although a complete cutoif in the production oi fissile other nations, suitable and safeguarded arrangements so snaterials for we pons would not by stselistcp the produc-thatfutureproduction offissionable materials anywhere in tnon oi higher-yield, and even a somewhat increased the world would no longer he used to increase the nu ber of, nuclear warheads, st would at least put an upper stockpiles of explosive weapons.
limit on the total number of warheads which the super-
-President Eisenhower in letter to p wers c uld produce. It would certainly be an essential Premier Bulganin, March 1,1956 P*" *I *"Y *'0 *E*" *'"' '* I'"*' ""'I' ***P*"'
production. By undertakmg to halt fissile material produc-Current Stockpues and Production Rates tion for weapons and to accept the necessary safeguards on In 1956, when Eisenhower first proposed a freeze in the their peaceful nuclear programs, the superpowers would product on by the superpowers of fissile materials for als be removing one of the long-standing inequities bet-i nuclear weapons (plutoni'.sm and highly enriched ween the nuclear weapons and non nuclear weapons uranium), U.S. stockpiles of these materials and of nuclear signatories of the Non-proliferation Treaty; and they warheads were on the order of one tenth their curt:nt size.
w uld place pressure on critica!" threshold" states such as Today, based on the statements of government officials, Argentina, Brazil, India, Israel, Pakistan, and South one can estimate that the U.S. has approximately 25,000 Africa to accept such restrictions as well.
nu.: lear wa heads. And, based 'on the history of AEC Verifiestion of a Catoff uranium purchases, enrichment capacity and radioactive It appears likely that, while verification of a fissile waste generation, one can estimate that the U.S. inventory material production cutoff could not be perfect, the uncer-of weapon-grade fissile material-both inside and outside tainties involved could be reduced to levels which are small of nuclear warheads-is several hundred metric tonnes of relative to the sizes of the already existing stockpiles.
highly enriched uranium and about one hundred tonnes of There are four principal areas of concern:
plutonium. As far as we know, the order ofmanitude of The safeguarding of the huge amounts of weapons-a the corresponding inventories in the Soviet Union is corn-usable materials which would continue to build up in the parable.
civilian nuclear energy systems of the superpowers; These are enormous inventories of fissile material-even
- The assurance that shut-down military production without the amplification of the explosive power of facilities really were shut down; nuclear weapons which was introduced with the develop-
- The assurance that no clandestine production facilities ment of thermonuclear weapons. The 20-kiloton Nagasaki of significant sizes were in operation; and bomb contained only 6 ulcyrar= of plutonium. The U.S.
- The assurance that plants producing highly enriched stockpile of weapon-grade plutonium is thcrefore suf-uranium for naval nuclear reactors and producing replace-ficient for the production of about 15,000 Nagasaki-type ment tritium required for the maintenance of existing bombs-equal to more than half the number of nuclear weapons in tht U.S. stockpile. If one adds 500 tonnes of higl ly enriched uranium and assumes that all this heavy me al could be fissioned with 33 percent efficiency (the ef-7 fi'.iency of the Nagasaki bomb was 20 percent) the total fis-3 sion yield would be about 3000 megatons-equal to about one-third the total estimated yield of the U.S. stockpile.
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The U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads reached its peak in 1%7. Since that time obsolete warheads have been retired about as fast as new ones have been produced (on the order of 1000 per year), and their fissile material has been recycled. As a result the demand for the production of new fissile material fell dramatically ist the mid-1960's.
y The U.S., therefore, stopped production of highly. en-
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riched uranium for nuclear weapons purposes in 1964 and shut down between 1964 and 1971 ten of the fourteen plu-gk tomum production reactors located at the Department of Energy's facilities at Savannah River, South Carolina and Frank von Hippel at Richland, Washington. Of the four operating produc-tion reactors, only the three at Savannah River have been
.Any mixture or plutonium isotopes can be used to make a nuclear ex-piome. weapons designers, h o
- ev er.
prefer reia hely pure producing " weapon grade"* plutonium in recent years-plutonium-239 with an admixture orless than 7 percent pL: onium 240.
, June 1,902 Page 11 nuclear weapons were not used to produce large amounts of new fissile material for weapons purposes.
Civilian Nuclear Energy Systems: Safeguards would be m
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needed on the nuclear energy activities of the superpowers because of the huge quanthies of nuclear weapons-usable i
materials involved in these civilian programs. At present, I i for example, approximately 50 tonnes of fissile plutonium I
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%%hgg;g are in spent fuel at U.S. nuclear power plants. Fortunately, international machinery already exists for imptNenting A
....; y safeguards on such material, and these safeguards, which are administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have been accepted by the non-nuclear weapons states which have signed the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Although there is some question as to whether IAEA safeguards can guarantee the
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detection under all circumstances of the diversion of enough fissile material to make a few nuclear weapons, j.
di they could certainly detect diversions on a scale sufficient g
g, to have a significant ef fect on the nuclear weapons balance g,,
between the superpowers.
_ _y M Shut-down Afilitarv Production Facilities: Monitoring Fuel and target assemblies being loaded into a production reactor at the Savannah River Plant, Aiken, South Carolina.
shut-down military plutonium production reactors and uranium enrichment plants would be even easier than active ingredient. The primary purpose of this tritium is safeguarding the material being processed by an operating to provide extra neutrons via a fusion reaction with civilian plant and could conceivably even be done deuterium. These neutrons are then used either to " boost" remotely--by using infrared sensors on satellites, for ex-the efficiency of fission explosions, to simplify the design ample, to detect the waste heat discharges associated with of variable-yield warheads, or to contribute the enhanced the operations of these facilities.
radiation effects of low-yield (" neutron") warheads clandestine Facilities: For the foreseeable future, there designed for battlefield use.
would appear to be no realistic alternative to the use of Because the radioactive half-life of tritium is about 12
" national technical means"-satellites in particular-to years, a cutoff of tritiurn production would severely limit confirm that no fissile material prod rtion facilities of not only the number but also the lifetime of enhanced significant scale were being constructed or operated radiatio'n weapons. It would also, after a number of years, clandestinely. The detailed information published by the result in a reduction in the peak yields of the boosted-and U.S. government on the numbers and locations of Soviet variable-yield fission weapons.
missiles and weapons subassembly plants suggests that the If, in light of (or despite) these consequences, a observation technologies are equal to the task. In its most replenishment of tritium reservoirs were deemea essential, (1%9) proposal concerning a fissile production production could be allowed without_ creating large new recent cutoff, the U.S. expressed no concern about the danger of opportunities for the circumvention of a fissile material undetected clandestine production facilities.
cutoff. It is true that nuclear reactors designated to pro-Naval Reactor Fuel: In U S. nuclear powered ships, the duce tritium might be used to produce plutonium instead,
.iranium in the reactor fuel is highly enriched. Therefore, but according to an estimate published by Thomas B.
since there is no intention in a freeze to stop the refueling Cochran et al (Science, May 12, 1982), U.S. tritium pro-of these warships, either they would have to be fueled from duction has averaged only about 3 kilograms per year over stockpiled highly enriched uranium or special ar.
the past decade. This is well within the capabilities of a mngements would have to be made to allow a continued single production reactor which, even if diverted fully to apply of highly enriched uranium for this purpose, plutonium production, could produce annually the For some years, the easiest option, for the U.S. at least, equivalent ofless than a percent of the current U.S. inven-might be to use stockpiled highly enriched uranium. The tory of weapon-grade plutonium.*
grrent annual requirements of weapon. grade uranium for v.S. naval propulsion are on the order of 5 tonnes. This is Acknowledgment
.dy approximately one percent of the existing U.S.
We would like to thank Thomas B. Cochran and ockpile of this matenal and is about one-tenth of the 60 William M. Arkin for sharing with us some of their fin-uanes of weapon. grade uranium which the U.S. offered dings prior to the publication of their Nuclear Weapons
~ ; recently as 1969 to transfer to " peaceful purposes" pro-Databook (Ballinger,1983).
.2 9 that the Soviet Union similarly transferred 40 ton-
'Smce it takes the capture of one nmtron to produce either one atom of Tr/ri't"?: In many U.S. nuclear warheads the heavy tritium or one of plutonium, =t ch weighs 80 times as much as a tntium atom. a reactor producing 3 kregrams of tritium per year could alter.
Qvthe isotope of hydrogen, tritium, is present as an nathcly produce one quarter of a tonne of plutonium per year.