Plutonium Giveaway Another Rash Step
Excess plutonium stored at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina
On May 23, President Trump signed four Executive Orders to promote the development of nuclear energy. These actions go beyond previous efforts to reinvigorate the U.S. nuclear industry both by putting safety at risk and by rashly promoting commercial use of weapon-grade plutonium. The order on Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base would halt programs to dispose of plutonium left over from the Cold War and make it available to industry to fuel advanced nuclear reactors. This initiative risks undermining longstanding U.S. policy to prevent the spread both of nuclear weapons and of the materials needed to make them.
The Nuclear Fuel Cycle
Nuclear power now produces around 10% of electricity worldwide and is a major source of reliable baseload power for electrical grids. Almost all nuclear power reactors use uranium-based fuel, produced by mining, refining, and enriching uranium to increase the concentration of its fissile isotope uranium-235. They produce highly radioactive spent fuel containing residual uranium, plutonium and radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission.
Dealing with spent fuel is one of the chronic, though not insurmountable challenges of nuclear power. One option is recycling. Much of the uranium, plutonium, and heavy elements can be separated from spent fuel – a simple but often messy process known as reprocessing – and used to make new reactor fuel. This closed fuel cycle sounds benign in principle, but in practice it is both difficult and potentially dangerous. The alternative is a once-through fuel cycle, in which spent fuel is treated as waste and disposed of by burying it underground. [In either case, the byproducts of nuclear power are easier to handle than those from burning fossil fuels, which produces large quantities of greenhouse gases and toxic coal ash.]
The Danger: Fueling Proliferation
In 1974, India conducted what it called a peaceful nuclear explosion, using plutonium produced in a civilian research reactor supplied by Canada and the United States. Despite the label, there is no practical difference between a “peaceful” nuclear explosion and a nuclear weapon. This highlighted that reprocessing spent fuel to recover plutonium, even if ostensibly for peaceful purposes, created risks that nuclear weapons would proliferate around the globe. A few years later the Carter Administration decided not to pursue civil reprocessing in the United States and to oppose the spread of reprocessing around the world. Opposing that spread has been a consistent element of U.S. policy, though with inconsistent rigor and mixed results.
The Difficulties: Cost and Complexity
But there’s a second reason industry has not historically been interested in nuclear recycling: cost. It costs more to build a large-scale industrial plant to reprocess and recycle spent fuel than to produce fresh fuel by mining and enriching uranium. To make a closed fuel cycle work requires a different type of reactor from those used by U.S. companies. These so-called breeder reactors both use and produce nuclear material that is richer in the isotopes used in nuclear weapons. They are also more expensive and harder to operate than the reactors in use today. Several countries have tried and failed to achieve a closed nuclear fuel cycle and were left with large stockpiles of plutonium they cannot now use.
Excess Plutonium
From 1945 to 1989, the United States produced roughly 100 tons of plutonium for use in weapons. After the Cold War, it declared over half of this plutonium to be excess, no longer needed for national defense. Protecting these large stockpiles of weapon-usable material from theft and sabotage is a significant burden. The initial plan was to use it to fuel reactors and turn it into spent fuel. This was meant to be a once-through disposal process with the policy against civilian reprocessing. However, escalating costs and delays led the Department of Energy to abandon its plan to recycle excess plutonium in favor of a simpler plan to dilute and bury it at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. President Trump’s Executive Order reversed that decision.
What’s happening now?
The rapid growth of power-hungry data centers and growing worldwide demand for low-carbon electricity to mitigate climate change have fueled growing interest in nuclear power. A surge in funding for studies of new reactor designs has spawned a wide array of startups pushing proposals for small modular reactors, transportable reactors, and some for “advanced” closed fuel cycles that use plutonium-based fuels. However, most of these concepts remain technically unproven, and they are all far from proving they can be cost-competitive in an electricity market driven by low-cost wind, solar, and natural gas.
On October 21, the Energy Department invited industry to apply to use U.S. stockpiles of weapon-grade plutonium to support companies with “advanced” fuel cycle concepts plans that involve plutonium recycling. There is nothing wrong with exploring advanced nuclear reactor and fuel cycle concepts, but current concepts remain unproven, and the potential implications for nuclear weapons proliferation have not received much attention. Holding on to large stocks of plutonium in the hope that these new concepts will prove technically feasible and economically competitive is wishful thinking at best. Other countries with advanced nuclear ambitions are watching.
Mark Goodman is a senior scientist who retired from the State Department after a thirty-year career in nuclear policy. He has extensive experience in multilateral nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament issues. Dr. Goodman is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of The Steady State.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 340 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.