Plutonium: How Nuclear Power’s Dream Fuel Became a Nightmare [1st ed. 2019] 978-981-13-9900-8, 978-981-13-9901-5

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxi
Overview (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 1-12
Front Matter ....Pages 13-14
The Dream: A Future Powered by Plutonium (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 15-24
Front Matter ....Pages 25-26
Civilian Plutonium Separation and Nuclear-Weapon Proliferation (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 27-49
Continuation of Plutonium Separation Without Breeder Reactors (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 51-80
A Much Worse Accident That Almost Happened in Fukushima: A Fire in a Dense-Packed Spent-Fuel Pool (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 81-97
Front Matter ....Pages 99-99
Early Dry-Cask Storage: A Safer Alternative to Dense-Packed Pools and Reprocessing (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 101-122
Deep Disposal of Spent Fuel Without Reprocessing (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 123-140
The Case for a Ban on Plutonium Separation (Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, Jungmin Kang)....Pages 141-154
Back Matter ....Pages 155-177

Citation preview

Frank von Hippel Masafumi Takubo Jungmin Kang

How Nuclear Power’s Dream Fuel Became a Nightmare

Plutonium

Global map of civilian reprocessing and breeder reactor sites

Frank von Hippel Masafumi Takubo Jungmin Kang •

•

Plutonium How Nuclear Power’s Dream Fuel Became a Nightmare

123

Frank von Hippel Program on Science and Global Security Princeton, NJ, USA

Masafumi Takubo Koshigaya, Saitama Prefecture, Japan

Jungmin Kang McLean, VA, USA

ISBN 978-981-13-9900-8 ISBN 978-981-13-9901-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9901-5

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To our predecessors and allies who saw the danger and raised the warning. And to the invisible hand of the market, which voted against the commercialization of plutonium.

Foreword by Mohamed ElBaradei

Plutonium, atomic number 94, was first separated in 1941 in Berkeley, California, in a quantity so small that it was difficult to see with the naked eye. By 2019, there are more than 500 metric tons of plutonium in civilian and military stocks in more than 10 countries around the world. Named after the dark planet Pluto, plutonium has been characterized by some as the world’s most dangerous nuclear material; Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years and less than 8 kilograms is sufficient for a nuclear explosive device. Plutonium use in the civilian nuclear fuel cycle has been passionately debated, with proponents sometimes uncharitably referred to as “plutonium eaters” and opponents on occasions derisively called “passive-aggressive.” Those who advocated the use of plutonium emphasized its energy value (“one gram of recycled plutonium in a MOX fuel assembly generates the same quantity of electricity as burning 1–2 tons of oil”) and promoted it as a valuable resource that should not be wasted. Those who opposed its use, on the other hand, stressed its toxicity and its long half-life, and highlighted its role as one of the key materials that can enable the acquisition of a nuclear-weapon capability, and hence advocated that its civilian use be stopped and it be disposed of as nuclear waste. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were serious concerns that the global stocks of commercially recoverable uranium were limited. Uranium prices soared in the mid-1970s due to the effects of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and a short-lived price cartel by some of the then-leading uranium-producing countries. At a time of high uranium prices, a plutonium fuel cycle was estimated to be competitively cost effective. Its proponents regarded plutonium as a “wonder fuel” that could generate a practically infinite amount of energy if produced in a closed fuel cycle, that is, uranium irradiated and discharged as spent fuel would be reprocessed to separate plutonium for fuels to be used in breeder reactors to create yet more plutonium. Over time, however, these optimistic expectations gave way to the realities of new sources of recoverable uranium at low prices, costly engineering challenges, and the complexities of safeguarding reprocessing and the related proliferation concerns. Reprocessing is one of the two most sensitive nuclear technologies from a proliferation perspective, along with uranium enrichment. vii

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Foreword by Mohamed ElBaradei

In October 2003, as the then-director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an op-ed titled “Towards a safer world” in The Economist, I proposed the multilateralization of all uranium-enrichment and plutoniumreprocessing facilities in view of the related proliferation concerns. I suggested that this should happen in three phases. First, any new uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing facilities should be set up exclusively on a multinational basis; second, over time convert all existing facilities to be operated under multinational auspices; and, third, negotiate a treaty on the prohibition of production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and place all existing stocks of military nuclear material under international monitoring. Unfortunately, not much has happened on this score, and much more work clearly needs to be done to curb the proliferation potential of these two most sensitive technologies. This includes the need to safely and securely dispose of plutonium and highly enriched uranium released from dismantled nuclear warheads under international monitoring. In this context, the Trilateral Initiative, and the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement, to place plutonium from dismantled Russian and US nuclear warheads under IAEA monitoring, need to be revived and implemented. In light of the serious security and safety concerns surrounding the separation, use, and disposition of all isotopic mixes of plutonium, policy-makers, the media, and the public need to be better informed. Frank von Hippel, Jungmin Kang, and Masafumi Takubo, three internationally renowned nuclear experts, have done a valuable service to the global community in putting together this book, which both historically and comprehensively covers the “plutonium age” as we know it today. They articulate in a succinct and clear manner their views on the dangers of a plutonium economy and advocate a ban on the separation of plutonium for use in the civilian fuel cycle in view of the high proliferation and nuclear-security risks and lack of economic justification. They advocate instead dry storage of spent fuel after several years of pool cooling and its direct disposal in deep geological repositories when they become available. There exists, however, no international consensus, and some states continue to pursue a commercial plutonium fuel cycle and forecast a sustainable future with new technologies. A comprehensive and sober discussion on the civilian use of plutonium needs to continue in the broader context of the role of nuclear energy in meeting the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs), while reducing its proliferation potential. This book is a valuable contribution to that discussion. Vienna, Austria

Mohamed ElBaradei Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency (1997–2009) Nobel Peace Prize (2005)

Acknowledgments

For more than four decades, we have been part of a small community of experts fighting to keep plutonium, a nuclear-weapon material, out of commerce. During that time, we have accumulated intellectual and other debts to colleagues who have been part of that fight. • Thomas Cochran and Gus Speth, respectively, a physicist and a lawyer, when they worked at the US Natural Resources Defense Council, a nongovernmental organization, sued the US Atomic Energy Commission and forced it to publish in 1974 the analytical basis for its claim that plutonium was the fuel of the future. Cochran also made sure that, when the Carter administration launched the 1977 review that helped end the US breeder-reactor program, independent experts, including himself and von Hippel, were included in the steering committee; • Harold Feiveson of Princeton University recognized the proliferation dangers in the proposed “plutonium economy” even before India’s 1974 nuclear test woke the world up to the issue; • Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists has spent much of his professional life on plutonium issues and has become a leading expert; • Theodore B. Taylor, a nuclear-weapon designer, went public in 1973 with his concerns that making a nuclear explosion with plutonium was no longer beyond the reach of terrorists; and • Others who have made fundamental contributions to the debates over plutonium policy, especially Paul Leventhal in the United States; Yves Marignac and Mycle Schneider in France; M. V. Ramana in India; Tatsujiro Suzuki, Jinzaburo Takagi, and Fumihiko Yoshida in Japan; and Martin Forwood and William Walker in the UK.

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Acknowledgments

Frank Niels von Hippel also owes an intellectual debt—as well as his first two names—to James Franck and Niels Bohr, who were among the first to understand the social responsibility physicists incurred with the world-changing discovery of nuclear fission. Finally, we are grateful to Daniel Horner for his meticulous editorial work.

Contents

1 Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Dreams of Plutonium Breeder Reactors . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Downsides of Breeders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Much More Uranium Found and Demand Growth Much Lower Than Projected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Reprocessing Spent Power-Reactor Fuel . . . . . . . . 1.5 A Wake-up Call from India’s Nuclear Test . . . . . . 1.6 Plutonium Fuel for Light-Water Reactors . . . . . . . . 1.7 Reprocessing for Radioactive-Waste Management? . 1.8 The Nightmares . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part I

The Dream

2 The 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Dream: A Future Powered by Plutonium . . . Dual-Purpose Reactors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Plutonium Is Made . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Light-Water Reactors and Uranium Enrichment Plutonium Breeder Reactors . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Part II

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The Nightmares

3 Civilian Plutonium Separation and Nuclear-Weapon Proliferation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Nuclear-Weapon Proliferation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Wake-up Call of Smiling Buddha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Carter Administration’s Review of the US Breeder-Reactor Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Growth in Electricity Consumption Slows and Nuclear Power Stalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents

3.5 Fading of the Breeder Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Legacies of the Failed Breeder-Reactor Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Continuation of Plutonium Separation Without Breeder Reactors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 France: Recycling Plutonium in Light-Water Reactors . . . . . 4.2 United Kingdom: A Reprocessing Program Finally Winding Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Japan: The Only Non-Nuclear-Armed Country with a Reprocessing Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Russia: Continuing Breeder-Reactor Development . . . . . . . . 4.5 Weapon-Usability of Reactor-Grade Plutonium . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 The Persistence of Civilian Reprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 A Much Worse Accident That Almost Happened in Fukushima: A Fire in a Dense-Packed Spent-Fuel Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Concerns About Fires in Spent-Fuel Pools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Land Contamination by Cesium-137 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Regulatory Considerations in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Potential Impacts from Spent-Fuel-Pool Fires in South Korea .

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Part III

The Path Forward

6 Early Dry-Cask Storage: A Safer Alternative to Dense-Packed Pools and Reprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Dry Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Cost Advantages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Safety Advantages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Central Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 How Long Can Dry Storage Endure? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.6 Transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.7 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Deep Disposal of Spent Fuel Without Reprocessing . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Reprocessing and Proliferation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 The Modest Contribution of Plutonium to the Environmental Hazard from a Spent-Fuel Repository . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Can Reprocessing Significantly Reduce the Size of a Radioactive-Waste Repository? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Hazards of Reprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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8 The Case for a Ban on Plutonium Separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 8.1 A Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 8.2 Attempts to Limit Stocks of Civilian Plutonium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

Contents

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8.3 Parallel Efforts to Limit HEU Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 8.4 A Ban on Plutonium Separation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

About the Authors

Frank von Hippel is a Senior Research Physicist and Professor of Public and International Affairs Emeritus with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, which he co-founded, along with the International Panel on Fissile Materials and the journal Science & Global Security. During 1993–94, he served as Assistant Director for National Security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Masafumi Takubo is a Tokyo-based researcher currently affiliated with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He has been working on nuclear-energy and nuclear-weapon issues in Tokyo as an activist and a researcher since the 1970s and manages the website Kakujoho.net (“Nuclear Information”). Jungmin Kang was trained as a nuclear engineer and has held research positions at Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins Universities and the Natural Resources Defense Council in the United States and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea. During most of 2018, he served as the Chairperson of South Korea’s Nuclear Safety and Security Commission.

xv

Abbreviations, Names and Units

AGR Areva

ASN ASTRID BNFL Bq CEA CIAE CNNC Curie DAE EDF ERDA FMCT GWe HEU HM Holtec IAEA INFCE IPFM IRSN JAEA

Advanced gas-cooled reactor (UK) French government-owned company responsible for nuclear-fuel-cycle services and reactor construction, reorganized in 2018 with the fuel-cycle portion becoming Orano Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, France’s Nuclear Safety Authority France’s proposed Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. Becquerel, a unit of radioactivity: one disintegration per second Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, France’s Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission China Institute of Atomic Energy China National Nuclear Corporation A unit of rate of decay, originally defined as the radioactivity of a gram of radium, later redefined as 3.7  1010 Bq Department of Atomic Energy (India) Électricité de France, France’s nuclear utility, which also owns the operating nuclear power plants in the UK Energy Research and Development Administration (US, 1975–77) Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty Gigawatts, 109 watts, or 1,000 megawatts (electric) Highly enriched uranium (  20% U-235) Heavy metal, either uranium or a mix of uranium and plutonium in nuclear fuel US manufacturer of spent-fuel canisters International Atomic Energy Agency International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (1977–1980) International Panel on Fissile Materials Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, France’s Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety Japan Atomic Energy Agency (does nuclear R&D) xvii

xviii

JAEC JAPC KAERI kg km kWh LEU LWR MBq MBq/m2 MOX MWe MWt MWt-day NAS NDA NNSA NRA OECD IEA Orano PBq PFBR PUREX

R&D SKB TEPCO THORP ton Transuranics

UN AEC US AEC US DOE

US NRC

Abbreviations, Names and Units

Japan Atomic Energy Commission Japan Atomic Power Company Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute Kilograms Kilometers Kilowatt-hours Low-Enriched uranium (0.5 >1.5 >4.5

190 km

MBq/m2 Actual Cs-137 contamination

Hypothetical spent-fuel fire, 9 April 2011

Hypothetical spent-fuel fire, 19 March 2011

Fig. 5.6 Contamination area from the 2011 accident and from hypothetical spent-fuel fires at Fukushima Daiichi beginning on 9 April (center) and 19 March 2011 (right). Orange and red indicate contamination above 1.5 MBq/m2 , the threshold for compulsory relocation, and above 4.5 MBq/m2 (Michael Schoeppner)27

88

5 A Much Worse Accident That Almost Happened in Fukushima …

resettlement was lowered to 0.56 MBq/m2 .28 After the Fukushima accident, there was a debate—both in Japan and internationally29 —over whether the 20 millisieverts per year (roughly equivalent to 1.5 MBq/m2 ) relocation threshold was too high, and the public insisted on additional measures to reduce radiation levels around schools.30 During the days after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, when three Fukushima Daiichi reactors experienced core meltdowns and the tops of three reactor buildings were destroyed by hydrogen explosions, Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked Shunsuke Kondo, chairman of Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission and a distinguished former professor of nuclear engineering, how much worse things could get. Kondo responded that a spent-fuel fire in pool 4 was possible and, if its cesium137 were released to the atmosphere, the contamination level downwind could be above 1.5 MBq/m2 to a distance of 170 km and above 0.5 MBq/m2 out to 250 km.31 This is consistent with the results of our calculations shown on the right side of Fig. 5.6. The high-density-population areas north of Tokyo and the heart of Tokyo are about 100 and 225 km, respectively, south of Fukushima Daiichi. Fortunately, this nightmare scenario did not come to pass, but the scare did have an impact on thinking about spent-fuel storage in Japan. On 19 September 2012, in his first press conference, Shunichi Tanaka, the first chairman of Japan’s post-Fukushima Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA), said, “Spent fuel not requiring active cooling should be put into dry casks… [F]or five years or so cooling by water is necessary… I would like to ask utilities to go along those lines as soon as possible.”32 Although this was framed as a request and not an order, many of Japan’s communities and prefectures that host nuclear power plants have been moving toward accepting construction of facilities to house onsite dry-cask storage.33

5.3 Regulatory Considerations in the United States Long before the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident, there had been concern within the technical research groups at the US national laboratories that support the US NRC about the possibility of a spent-fuel fire in a dense-packed pool. The NRC’s regulatory staff had concluded repeatedly, however, that the probability of such an accident was too low to merit regulatory action.34 After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress requested an independent study of the question by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). That study, published in 2006, recommended that the NRC look into the vulnerability to sabotage of each US reactor pool and that, depending on its findings, the NRC “might determine that earlier movements of spent fuel from pools to dry-cask storage would be prudent to reduce the potential consequences of terrorist attacks on pools at some commercial nuclear plants.”35 After the 2011 Fukushima accident, the NRC undertook a Fukushima “lessons learned” study that included a formal review of a possible regulatory requirement for “expedited transfer” of spent fuel from pools to air-cooled dry casks after five years

5.3 Regulatory Considerations in the United States

89

of pool cooling as NRA Chairman Tanaka had recommended in Japan. In 2013, the NRC staff published an analysis of the costs and benefits of expedited transfer. Despite the concerns that had been expressed in the 2006 NAS study, the NRC staff’s analysis assumed that there was no terrorist threat to spent-fuel pools. It did, however, find a major benefit from reducing the amount of spent fuel in pools. With less zirconium cladding in the pool, less hydrogen would be produced in a loss-ofwater accident. Indeed, the NRC’s computer simulations for its selected scenarios for such an accident found that, with the older fuel removed, the hydrogen concentration above a pool would not rise to an explosion threshold of 10%. As a result, the building covering the pool would remain intact and most of the Cs-137 released from the fuel would condense out on interior surfaces. This would result in more than a 98% decrease of the Cs-137 release to the atmosphere from a spent-fuel-pool fire (on average from 1,600 to 23 PBq) with a corresponding reduction in impact, as is discussed below.36 For a fire in a US dense-packed spent-fuel pool with the building above the pool destroyed by a hydrogen explosion, the NRC staff found that an average of 3.5 million people would have to be relocated from an area of 30,000 square kilometers.37 If the amount of fuel in the pool were reduced to that discharged in the most recent five-year period, the staff found that, with the building intact, both the relocation area and relocated population would be reduced by factors of about 100. The staff did not publish these dramatic findings in a form accessible to the general public, however.38 Instead, it published an opaque cost-benefit analysis that concluded that the estimated cost to the nuclear utilities of about $50 million per pool for moving spent fuel into dry casks after five years of pool cooling would exceed the probability-weighted benefits to the public from the reduced accident consequences. This conclusion was obtained, however, by making a number of erroneous and implausible assumptions. One has already been mentioned—that the probability of a successful terrorist attack was zero. Three others resulted in gross underestimates of the potential economic losses from a spent-fuel-pool fire:39 1. Accident consequences beyond 50 miles (80 km) were excluded in accordance with the NRC’s standard assumptions for accident-consequence calculations. For smaller accidents, one would not expect that the relocation area to extend beyond 50 miles. The relocation area for the Fukushima accident extended about 30 miles (48 km) downwind. As is seen in Fig. 5.6 and will be seen in other scenarios below, however, the relocation areas resulting from the huge releases from a fire in a dense-packed spent fuel pool could extend hundreds of kilometers downwind. 2. Also, in conformance with standard NRC assumptions for accident-consequence calculations, the staff assumed that Cs-137 contamination levels could be reduced by a factor of 15 within a year. When questioned by attorneys from the government of New York state about the use of this assumption in its calculations of the consequences of a hypothetical reactor accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant near New York City, however, the NRC staff was unable to cite a basis for this assumption.40 As mentioned above, the maximum reduction in contamination of a large area achieved in Fukushima was by a factor of three, and it took

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five years.41 Changing the NRC’s assumption for cleanup time but otherwise following its methodology for calculating losses yielded the finding that, for a relocation time exceeding four years, the sum of population relocation costs and the cost of the loss of use of the abandoned property would exceed the property’s original value.42 3. One of the current authors (von Hippel) was a member of a committee organized by the NAS at the request of Congress to conduct an independent review of the conclusions of the NRC’s post-Fukushima review. The NAS review took four years, but von Hippel did not learn until after that review was completed that, in its cost-benefit study, the NRC staff had assumed a contamination threshold for compulsory evacuation three times higher than the 1.5 MBq/m2 threshold used for the populations around Fukushima and Chernobyl and recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency. When the NRC results were recomputed for a relocation threshold of 1.5 MBq/m2 , the average number of people requiring relocation increased from 3.5 million to 8.2 million, with a range of 1.2 to 41.5 million depending on wind direction (Table 5.1). If just these three errors in the NRC staff’s analysis were corrected, the conclusions of NRC’s cost-benefit analysis would be reversed.43 The result would still be very uncertain because of the uncertainty in the probability that the NRC staff assumed for a spent-fuel fire and the variation between sites. Table 5.1 shows the effects of the contamination threshold on the NRC staff’s findings for the interdicted populations and relocation areas resulting from a fire in a high-density pool at the Surry nuclear power plant, the “average site” the NRC uses for its accident-consequence calculations. The reductions in those impacts for the much lower releases calculated by the NRC staff for low-density pools are dramatic. The averages and ranges shown are based on calculations for the Surry plant using historical weather data for hypothetical releases starting on the first day of every month in 2015. Figure 5.7 shows examples of contamination areas for three of those dates. 1 Feb 2015

1 April 2015

1 Sept 2015

m 0k 63

MBq/m2 >0.5 >1.5 >4.5

Fig. 5.7 Relocation areas for hypothetical spent-fuel-pool fires at the US Surry nuclear power plant for releases of 1,600 PBq of cesium-137, the average of the NRC’s assumed releases for fires in different US dense-packed pools. The areas were calculated for releases starting on (left to right) 1 February, 1 April, and 1 September 2015. For hypothetical releases on the first of each month during 2015, these were the dates with the largest, average, and smallest interdicted populations. (Michael Schoeppner)44

5.4 Potential Impacts from Spent-Fuel-Pool Fires …

91

Table 5.1 Relocated populations and interdicted areas for hypothetical spent-fuel-pool fires at the US Surry nuclear power plant with a cesium-137 contamination threshold for relocation of 4.5 MBq/m2 , calculated by NRC staff, and for fires in high- and low-density pools, releasing 1,600 and 23 PBq of cesium-137, respectively, with a corrected contamination threshold for relocation of 1.5 MBq/m2 . Averages for the 1.5 MBq/m2 threshold were calculated for releases from Surry beginning on the first day of each month in 2015. Ranges of the results for the 12 different dates are shown in parentheses45

NRC staff: high-density pool, 4.5 MBq/m2 threshold for relocation

Relocated Populations (millions)

Interdicted areas (square kilometers)

3.5 (1.3–8.7)

30,000 (13,000–47,000)

1.5 MBq/m2 Cs-137 contamination threshold for relocation High-density pool

8.2 (1.2–41.5)

44,000 (10,000–83,000)

Low-density pool

0.14 (0–0.4)

900 (0–3,200)

5.4 Potential Impacts from Spent-Fuel-Pool Fires in South Korea We also have carried out consequence estimates for hypothetical spent-fuel-pool fires at the Kori nuclear power plant on the southeast coast of South Korea. As of the end of 2015, the twenty spent-fuel storage pools of South Korea’s operating light-water power reactors contained an average of 340 tons of spent fuel.46 The Kori plant near Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city, has South Korea’s oldest light-water power reactors, whose four pools were dense-packed with about 600 tons of spent fuel each. We estimate the radioactivity of the Cs-137 in the spent-fuel pool of Kori-3 to be about 2,570 PBq.47 The NRC’s midrange estimate for the Cs-137 release from a fire in a dense-packed pressurized-water-reactor pool is 75%.48 For a fire in the Kori-3 pool, that would correspond to a release of about 1,925 PBq. Hypothetical releases of this magnitude from the Kori plant were assumed starting on the first day of every month of 2015 and extending over three days. Historical weather data were used to calculate the resulting relocation areas.49 Figure 5.8 shows results for fires in the Kori-3 pool starting on 1 January, 1 April, and 1 September 2015. These cases show that a spent-fuel-pool fire in the region could have major impacts in adjoining countries. This also would be the case for spent-fuel-pool fires in Europe. Table 5.2 shows the average and maximum relocation areas and relocated populations in South Korea and the neighboring countries for the hypothetical Kori-3 spent-fuel-pool fire release calculated for 12 historical weather conditions. For South Korea, the average and maximum calculated evacuation areas are, respectively, about 8,000 and 51,000 square kilometers with the average and maximum number of relocated people about 4 million and 21 million, respectively. Given the southeast coastal location of the Kori plant and the prevailing winds blowing toward Japan, the average and maximum impacts in Japan are comparable to those in South Korea. Also,

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1 Jan 2015

1 Sept 2015

1 April 2015

MBq/m2 >0.5 >1.5 >4.5

Fig. 5.8 Relocation areas for hypothetical spent-fuel fires at South Korea’s Kori nuclear power plant, for releases of 1,925 PBq of cesium-137 starting 1 January, 1 April, and 1 September 2015. Of the 12 first-of-the-month releases, those beginning on 1 January and 1 September had the minimum and maximum impacts in South Korea. It also will be seen, however, that there would be major impacts in Japan on both dates. The 1 April 2015 release results in major contamination in both North Korea and China50

Table 5.2 Relocated populations and interdicted areas for hypothetical spent-fuel fires at South Korea’s Kori nuclear power plant for historical weather for releases starting at the beginning of each month of 201551 Country

Relocated populations (millions)

Interdicted areas (square kilometers)

Average

Maximum

Average

Maximum

South Korea

4.2

21

8,000

51,000

North Korea

0.9

11

4,000

51,000

Japan

7.8

27

22,000

58,000

China

0.7

8

2,000

23,000

according to the calculations, for a fire beginning on 1 April 2015, the weather conditions were such that there would be major impacts on North Korea and China. The potential consequences discussed in this chapter of hypothetical fires in densepacked spent-fuel pools in Japan, the United States, and South Korea dramatize the importance of early transfer of spent fuel from pools to dry casks, regardless of a country’s policy on reprocessing. Dry-cask storage is discussed in Chap. 6. Endnotes 1.

2.

Seventy percent of the reactors operating in 2017 went into operation before 1990. See “Operational Reactors by Age” in International Atomic Energy Agency, “PRIS (Power Reactor Information System: The Database on Nuclear Power Reactors,” accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.iaea.org/ PRIS/WorldStatistics/OperationalByAge.aspx. As of the end of 2013, France’s 58 nuclear power reactors contained 5,010 tons of fuel in their cores, and there were 4,150 tons of spent fuel in storage pools at the reactors. National Inventory of Radioactive Materials and Waste: Synthesis

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Report 2015, ANDRA (Agence nationale pour la gestion des d´echets radioactifs, France’s National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management), 2015, 40, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.andra.fr/download/andra-internationalen/document/editions/558va.pdf. In 2013, 1,116 tons of spent fuel were discharged by these reactors. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs: Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World, 2015, Table 3.1, accessed 14 March 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr14.pdf. 3. Pierre-Franck Chevet, president of ASN, letter to the president of EDF, “Programme générique proposé par EDF pour la poursuite du fonctionnement des réacteurs en exploitation au-delà de leur quatrième réexamen de sûreté [Generic program proposed by EDF for the continued operation of operating reactors beyond their fourth safety review],” CODEP-DCN-2013-013464, 28 June 2013, accessed 13 February 2019, http://gazettenucleaire.org/2013/269p12.html. 4. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Staff Evaluation and Recommendation for Japan Lessons-Learned Tier 3 Issue on Expedited Transfer of Spent Fuel, 12 November 2013, COMSECY-13-0030, Table 72, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1334/ML13346A739.pdf. 5. Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, “Concerning the Situation of the Spent Fuel Storage Measures,” 24 October 2017 (in Japanese), accessed 24 January 2018, https://www.fepc.or.jp/about_us/pr/oshirase/_icsFiles/afieldfile/ 2018/01/09/press_20171024.pdf. 6. For stored spent fuel as of the end of 2017, see Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, “Status of Spent Fuel Stored (as of the end of 2017),” 8 January 2018 (in Korean), accessed 17 January 2019, http://cms.khnp.co.kr/board/BRD_ 000179/boardView.do?pageIndex=1&boardSeq=66352&mnCd=FN051304& schPageUnit=10&searchCondition=0&searchKeyword=. Kori-1 contains 44 tons of uranium in its core and Kori-2 contains 50. Hanbit-3 and -4 each contain 73, and Kori-3 and -4, Hanbit-1 and -2, and Hanul-1 and -2 each contain 76. Korean Nuclear Society, Korean Radioactive Waste Society, and Green Korea 21, “Alternatives and Roadmap for Spent Fuel Management in South Korea,” 19 August 2011 (in Korean), Table 3.2. 7. Robert Alvarez et al., “Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power-Reactor Fuel in the United States,” Science & Global Security, 11 (2003): 1–51, Fig. 7, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/articles/ fvhippel_spentfuel/rAlvarez_reducing_hazards.pdf. 8. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www. nrc.gov/images/waste/spent-fuel-storage.jpg. 9. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Expedited Transfer, Tables 42 and 43; National Research Council, Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006). 10. Adapted from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving the Safety and Security of U.S. Nuclear Plant: Phase 2 (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2016), Fig. 2.1. The drop in water level that began about April

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12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

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27 was the result of a test suspension of the addition of water. The purpose was to compare the ensuing rate of decline of the water level with predictions for evaporation in order to detect whether there was a significant additional rate of loss due to leakage. Tokyo Electric Power Company, Fukushima Nuclear Accidents Investigation Report, 2012, Attachment 9–5, “Results of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool (SFP) Status Investigation,” Fig. 3, accessed 13 February 2019, http://www. tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/betu12_e/images/120620e0106.pdf. Randall Gauntt et al. Fukushima Daiichi Accident Study (Status as of April 2012), Sandia National Laboratories, SAND2012-6173, 2012, Figs. 117 and 121, accessed 17 January 2019, http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control. cgi/2012/126173.pdf. “Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant Hi-Res Photos,” accessed 17 January 2019, https://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm. Alvarez et al. “Reducing the Hazards.” Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, “Mechanism of Core Shroud and its Function,” n.d., accessed 13 February 2019, http://www.cnic.jp/english/ newsletter/nit92/nit92articles/nit92shroud.html. The cesium-137 inventory of a reactor core is only about one-half that in the same amount of spent fuel since, on average, the fuel in a reactor core is only halfway to its discharge burnup. So, roughly speaking, the cores of Units 1, 2, and 3, which melted down, contained an amount of Cs-137 equivalent to that in about 1.5 cores of spent fuel. The core of Unit 4, which had temporarily been moved to the spent-fuel pool, similarly contained about half as much Cs-137 as a core of spent fuel. Therefore, with the additional core-equivalent of older spent fuel, the pool in Unit 4 also contained roughly the amount of Cs-137 in 1.5 cores of spent fuel. A more precise analysis that took into account the refueling schedules of the reactors, the fact that unit 1 had 60% the power rating of units 2, 3, and 4, and the effects of Cs-137 decay resulted in an estimated inventory of 698 petabecquerels (PBq) of cesium-137 in cores 1, 2, and 3 at the time of the accident and of 884 PBq in spent-fuel pool 4. See Kenji Nishihara et al., “Estimation of Fuel Compositions in Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant,” Japan Atomic Energy Agency, 2012–2018, 2012, accessed 4 February 2019, http://jolissrch-inter.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/search/servlet/search?5036485& language=1. UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR 2013 Report: Sources, Effects and Risks of Ionizing Radiation (New York: United Nations, 2014), para. 25, accessed 17 January 2019, http://www.unscear.org/ docs/reports/2013/13-85418_Report_2013_Annex_A.pdf. After the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet authorities set threshold contamination levels for compulsory evacuation and for strict radiation control at 40 curies/km2 (1.48 MBq/m2 ), and 15 curies/km2 (0.56 MBq/m2 ), respectively. UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR 2000 Report to the General Assembly, with Scientific Annexes: Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, Vol. 2, Annex J, “Exposures and Effects of the Chernobyl Accident”

5.4 Potential Impacts from Spent-Fuel-Pool Fires …

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

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(New York: United Nations, 2000), accessed 17 January 2019, http://www. unscear.org/docs/publications/2000/UNSCEAR_2000_Annex-J.pdf. At Fukushima, the Japanese government set the threshold for compulsory evacuation at an unshielded dose rate of 20 millisieverts in the first year, which, after taking into account weathering effects, corresponds to about 1.5 MBq/m2 . Frank N. von Hippel and Michael Schoeppner, “Economic Losses from a Fire in a Dense-Packed U.S. Spent Fuel Pool,” Science & Global Security, 25 (2017): 80–92, endnote 10, accessed 27 March 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/08929882. 2017.1318561. Tetsuo Yasutaka and Wataru Naito, “Assessing Cost and Effectiveness of Radiation Decontamination in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan,” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 151 (2016): 512–520, Table 1. UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR 2000 Report, Vol. 2, Annex J, “Exposures and Effects of the Chernobyl Accident,” para. 108, accessed 7 March 2019, http://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/ 2000/UNSCEAR_2000_Annex-J.pdf. Fukushima prefecture, “Transition of Evacuation Designated Zones,” accessed 16 March 2019, http://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal-english/en03-08. html. Reconstruction Agency, “Efforts for Accelerated Fukushima Reconstruction,” 28 September 2018 (in Japanese), accessed 17 January 2019, http://www. reconstruction.go.jp/portal/chiiki/hukkoukyoku/fukusima/material/180928_ fukkokasoku_r.pdf. Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, “Fukushima Evacuees Abandoned by the Government,” 2 April 2018, accessed 17 January 2019, http://www.cnic. jp/english/?p=4086; “Lifting Fukushima Evacuation Orders,” Japan Times, 3 April 2017, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/ 2017/04/03/editorials/lifting-fukushima-evacuation-orders/#.WcrqakyZPYI. von Hippel and Schoeppner, “Reducing the Danger.” (See endnote 27) US Environmental Protection Agency, Protective Action Guides and Planning Guidance for Radiological Incidents, January 2017, 69, accessed 15 March 2019, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-01/documents/ epa_pag_manual_final_revisions_01-11-2017_cover_disclaimer_8.pdf. Maps calculated by Michael Schoeppner and first published in Frank N. von Hippel and Michael Schoeppner, “Reducing the Danger from Fires in Spent Fuel Pools,” Science & Global Security 24 (2016): 141–173, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/08929882.2016.1235382. The relocation contour has been changed from 1 to 1.5 MBq/m2 . UN Development Program and UN International Children’s Emergency Fund, The Human Consequences of the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident: A Strategy for Recovery, 25 January 2002, Table 3.1, accessed 15 March 2019, http:// chernobyl.undp.org/english/docs/strategy_for_recovery.pdf. International Commission on Radiological Protection, “One Year Anniversary of the North-eastern Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Dai-ichi

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31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Nuclear Accident,” 12 March 2012, accessed 18 March 2019, http://www.icrp. org/docs/Fukushima%20One%20Year%20Anniversary%20Message.pdf. Justin McCurry, “Fukushima Effect: Japan Schools Take Health Precautions in Radiation Zone,” The Guardian, 1 June 2011, accessed 16 March 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/01/fukushimaeffect-japan-schools-radiation. An English translation of the slides of the briefing to Prime Minister Kan can be found at Shunsuke Kondo, “Rough Description of Scenario(s) for Unexpected Situation(s) Occurring at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant,” 25 March 2011, accessed 17 January 2019, http://kakujoho.net/npp/kondo.pdf. The Japanese original is at http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pn8r-fjsk/saiakusinario. pdf. “Nuclear Regulation Authority Joint Press Conference Minutes,” 19 September 2012 (in Japanese), accessed 24 January 2019, http://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info: ndljp/pid/11036037/www.nsr.go.jp/data/000068514.pdf. Masafumi Takubo and Frank N. von Hippel, “An Alternative to the Continued Accumulation of Separated Plutonium in Japan: Dry Cask Storage of Spent Fuel,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 1, no. 2 (2018): 281–304, accessed 17 January 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/25751654.2018.1527886. Alvarez et al., “Reducing the Hazards.” National Research Council, Safety and Security, Finding 4E. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Expedited Transfer, Tables 1, 35, and 52. The calculations were for an accident at the Surry nuclear power plant in Virginia on the east coast of the United States. Rather than do calculations for each site, the NRC takes Surry as its average site, on the basis of population within 50 miles of the reactor. The results were extracted and published by a second congressionally mandated review of the issue by the National Academy of Sciences in which one of us (von Hippel) participated, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Lessons Learned Table 7.2. von Hippel and Schoeppner, “Economic Losses.” US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Memorandum and Order in the Matter of Entergy Nuclear Operations, Inc. (Indian Point Nuclear Generating Units 2 and 3),” 4 May 2016, 39, accessed 14 February 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/ docs/ML1612/ML16125A150.pdf. Yasutaka and Naito, “Assessing Cost and Effectiveness,” Table 1. von Hippel and Schoeppner, “Economic Losses.” von Hippel and Schoeppner, “Economic Losses.” Maps calculated by Michael Schoeppner for von Hippel and Schoeppner, “Economic Losses.” NRC staff results published in National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Lessons Learned, Table 7.2; results for a relocation threshold of 1.5 MBq/m2 from von Hippel and Schoeppner, “Economic Losses,” Table 1.

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46. “Draft Basic Plan of High-Level Radioactive Waste Management,” Korea Atomic Energy Commission, 2016 (in Korean). The tonnage is given for the original uranium in the fresh fuel. 47. Calculated for a burnup of 45 MWt-days per kilogram of uranium in the spent fuel using ORIGEN 2 code (“ORIGEN 2.1: Isotope Generation and Depletion Code Matrix Exponential Method,” Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1996). These results are consistent with those obtained by the NRC staff in US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Expedited Transfer, 79. 48. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Expedited Transfer, Table 52. 49. S. Saha et al., “NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2) 6–Hourly Products,” Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, 2011, accessed 17 January 2019, http://dx.doi.org/10.5065/D61C1TXF. 50. Maps calculated by Michael Schoeppner for Jungmin Kang et al. “An Analysis of a Hypothetical Release of Cesium-137 from a Spent Fuel Pool Fire at Kori-3 in South Korea,” Transactions of the American Nuclear Society 117 (2017): 343– 345, accessed 17 January 2019, http://answinter.org/wp-content/2017/data/ polopoly_fs/1.3880142.1507849681!/fileserver/file/822800/filename/109.pdf. 51. Kang et al. “Hypothetical Release.”

Part III

The Path Forward

If our aim isn’t to utilize resources (i.e., extract further energy out of the uranium and plutonium in spent fuel), then it would be better to dispose of the (spent fuel) directly without reprocessing it. —Osamu Tochiyama, chair of the technical working group on waste disposal in Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and director of the Radioactive Waste Disposal Safety Research Center of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Research Association, 20141

Quoted in Daisuke Yamada, “As I See It: Gov’t Needs to Look at Options on Handling, Disposal of Radioactive Waste,” Mainichi, 1 May 2014, accessed 27 January 2019, http://www.fukushimais-still-news.com/article-but-still-no-concrete-plan-to-store-waste-123496575.html. 1

Chapter 6

Early Dry-Cask Storage: A Safer Alternative to Dense-Packed Pools and Reprocessing

Canceled and delayed plans for reprocessing, and delays in identifying centralstorage and burial sites for spent fuel have resulted in nuclear utilities in a number of countries dense-racking their spent-fuel pools as the least costly way to increase onsite spent-fuel storage capacity. As discussed in Chap. 5, dense-racking of spentfuel pools has created the possibility for nuclear accidents 100 times worse than Fukushima. Moving spent fuel into onsite dry-cask storage after it has cooled in the pools for a few years is a slightly more costly but much safer alternative, regardless of a country’s policy with regard to continuation of its reliance on nuclear power. Indeed, the availability of onsite dry-cask storage will also facilitate reactor decommissioning, which requires removal of spent fuel from reactor pools. This chapter provides a general overview of this alternative and of the related issues of safety, transport, and central storage. The rate of radioactive-heat generation by spent fuel from light-water reactors (LWRs) drops from more than 100 thermal kilowatts per ton of contained uranium a few days after the chain reaction stops to between 2 and 4 kilowatts per ton five years later (Fig. 6.1). This is why, after cooling in pools for about five years, it becomes possible to transfer the spent fuel to air-cooled dry cask storage. Given the immense quantity of radioactivity in spent fuel, the primary purpose of spent-fuel storage facilities is to assure that the radioactivity remains contained within the metal cladding of the fuel rods and to protect plant workers and the general public from the penetrating radiation that the fuel emits. A spent-fuel pool keeps the fuel under several meters of water. This keeps the cladding cool. The water also stops the energetic neutrons and gamma rays that the fuel emits. If the water leaks out or boils off, however, both these protections end and, as discussed in the previous chapter, the result could be a spent-fuel fire.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 F. von Hippel et al., Plutonium, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9901-5_6

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Fig. 6.1 Decline with time of radioactive heat from spent fuel. Curves are shown for four levels of fission-energy production from a kilogram of fuel. These levels are known as “burnups” since the cumulative amount of fission energy released is proportional to the fraction of the original uranium in the fuel that has been fissioned (“burned”). Typical burnups for light-water reactors today are between 43 and 53 thermal megawatt-days per kilogram of uranium in the fuel (MWt-days/kgU). (Science and Global Security)1

6.1 Dry Storage Most of the world’s nuclear power plants were designed with the expectation that their spent fuel would be reprocessed. Their cooling pools therefore were sized on the assumption that the spent fuel would be shipped offsite to a reprocessing plant after a few years of pool cooling. The spent fuel would be transported in a shielded air-cooled cask. As has been described in Chap. 5, however, when nuclear utilities in the United States and a number of other countries realized in the early 1980s that reprocessing did not make economic sense, they decided to increase the density of the racking in their pools to the point where the pools could hold 20–30 years of discharges. After that, with an offsite destination still not in sight, they expanded their onsite spent-fuel storage capacity outside of the existing pools with dry-cask storage. Germany pioneered the use of casks for storage purposes. Its casks were originally designed for transporting spent fuel to reprocessing plants in France and the United Kingdom. Germany’s casks are massive cast-iron structures weighing about 100 tons (Fig. 6.2).2 The metal is thick enough to absorb virtually all the gamma rays emitted by the spent fuel. Fast neutrons from spontaneous fissions, which can penetrate great thicknesses of metal, are dealt with by including a layer of borated plastic in the cask

6.1 Dry Storage

103

Fig. 6.2 Heavy cast-iron spent-fuel storage and transport casks used in Germany. Pictured here are casks in a GNS warehouse in Dusseldorf, Germany. Klaus Janberg, in the yellow jacket, was CEO of GNS from 1980 till 2000 and pioneered the use of these casks for interim storage as a less costly alternative to transporting the spent fuel to France and the United Kingdom for reprocessing. (Klaus Janberg)

wall. The neutrons are slowed by collisions with hydrogen nuclei in the plastic and then absorbed by the boron nuclei. When the decay heat generated by spent fuel declines to a few kilowatts per ton, the fuel can be stored in a cask. Usually, the cask is filled with helium, which has a high thermal conductivity and therefore facilitates the transport of heat from the fuel at the center of the cask to its external wall, thereby helping to keep the fuel temperature below a level that can damage the cladding. Helium detectors around the casks can alert technicians if a cask is leaking. The surface area of a cask is large enough so that the air-cooling requirement per square meter is about the same as that of a black road surface heated by the noonday sun. The fuel rods within are maintained at a temperature less than 400 °C. Above this temperature, the fuel cladding could weaken and start to stretch under internal pressure from gaseous fission products.3 As the focus in most countries shifted from reprocessing to dry storage, less costly alternatives to metal casks have been devised—especially in the United States. In the dominant form of dry storage used in the United States today, the fuel assemblies are contained in thin-walled steel canisters, and radiation shielding is provided by a thick shell of reinforced concrete around the canister (Fig. 6.3). The concrete shells have vents that allow cooling air to enter at the bottom of the space between the outside of the canister and the reinforced-concrete shell. The air, warmed by

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BWR = Boiling Water Reactor. A BWR fuel assembly contains about 0.18 tons of uranium. PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) fuel assemblies each contain about 0.45 tons of uranium. Fig. 6.3 Two types of dry spent-fuel storage containers: metal casks with monolithic steel or cast iron with borated plastic inserts to capture the neutrons (left), and concrete casks with thin steel canisters inside reinforced concrete radiation shields (right). (Science and Global Security)4

contact with the hot canister wall, rises buoyantly and exits through vents at the top, pulling cooler replacement air into the bottom vents. No air pump—and therefore no power—is required. Dry-cask storage is therefore “passively safe.” A disadvantage of surrounding the canisters with shielding is that it makes it difficult to inspect them for cracks or corrosion. This is especially problematic at oceanfront sites where salt is in the air.5 A number of canisters are sometimes stored together vertically or horizontally within massive shielding structures with internal passages for convective air cooling.6 The canisters can be transported inside heavy “overpacks” that provide shielding similar to that provided by transport casks.7 A 1,000-megawatt-electric (MWe) power reactor typically discharges about 20 tons of spent fuel annually. Storage casks or canisters with their radiation shields can contain 10 or more tons of spent fuel and cost $1–2 million each.8 As shown in Fig. 6.4, the lifetime output of spent fuel from an LWR can be stored on a hectare (2.5 acres).9 Such an area is easily available within the security zones around US nuclear power plants. In South Korea, the pools of the four heavy-water reactors (HWRs) at Wolsong site filled up in the 1990s. The natural-uranium fuel used by these reactors is discharged at a low “burnup” (cumulative fission energy release per kilogram of uranium) of about 7 thermal megawatt-days per kg uranium (MWt-days/kgU) versus the more than 40 MWt-days/kgU for the low-enriched uranium fuel used in LWRs today. The HWRs therefore discharge about six times as much spent fuel per unit of produced electricity

6.1 Dry Storage

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Fig. 6.4 US spent fuel stored outdoors in concrete-shielded canisters at the former site of the 560 MWe Connecticut Yankee nuclear-power reactor, which operated from 1968 till 1996. The three containers at the right contain radioactive internals from the reactor vessel—all that remains onsite of the decommissioned plant. The other 40 casks hold more than 90% of the spent fuel discharged by the reactor during its life. The square air inlets at the bottom of the reinforced concrete shields are visible, as are the air-outlet slots at the top. (Connecticut Yankee)10

as the LWRs. To make space for newly discharged fuel, older cooled spent fuel has been moved from the reactor pools into air-cooled dry storage (Fig. 6.5). As of the end of September 2017, approximately 6,000 metric tons of HWR spent fuel was stored in dry-storage facilities at Wolsong.11 This tonnage, which represents about 16 years of discharges by the HWRs, is equivalent to about 100 years of discharges by LWRs with the same generating capacity. In Germany and some other countries, metal storage casks are placed inside thickwalled buildings to provide additional radiation shielding and to protect against a crashing aircraft or terrorists, who might use anti-tank weapons.12 All Germany’s nuclear utilities introduced onsite dry-cask storage after a 1998 decision by a new Socialist-Green government to end the requirement that the utilities reprocess their spent fuel. At all but one of Germany’s nuclear power plants, the casks are stored in buildings. At the remaining plant, where there was insufficient space, tunnels were built under the site to hold the casks (Fig. 6.6).

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Monoliths containing canisters

Individual casks

One of the four heavywater power reactors at Wolsong Google Earth 18 April 2018, 35o43’58”N 129o28’28”E

Fig. 6.5 Dry spent-fuel storage at South Korea’s Wolsong nuclear power plant. At the lower left are the cylindrical containment buildings of two of the four heavy-water reactor units, with their associated turbo-generator buildings behind. At the upper right is an area for the dry storage of spentfuel after it has cooled in the reactor pools. Not all of the spent-fuel canisters have separate radiation shields. Some are placed in reinforced concrete monoliths, called MACSTOR-400 (Modular AirCooled Storage), that each contain 40 canisters of spent fuel with air passages providing each canister with passive air cooling. (Google Earth, 27 March 2013, 35° 43 58 N, 129°28 28 E, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.)

Fig. 6.6 Storage tunnels under Germany’s Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant: under construction (left) and with the first casks emplaced (right). (Wolfgang Heni)13

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Fig. 6.7 Recyclable-Fuel Storage Company’s dry-cask storage facility. The facility, which is designed to store about 3,000 tons of spent fuel in dry casks, is located in Aomori prefecture. The fin on the roof facilitates passive convective flow of outside air through the building. Warm air rising through the vents at the top of the fin draws in cool outside replacement air through vents at the top of the outer wall. (Recyclable Fuel Storage Company)

Two of Japan’s nuclear utilities—Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and Japan Atomic Power Company (JAPC)—have built a jointly owned dry-cask storage facility at Mutsu in Aomori prefecture near the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant (Fig. 6.7). But, as the name of the company operating the facility—RecyclableFuel Storage Company (RFS)—makes clear, the fuel it stores is to be reprocessed so that the plutonium and uranium it contains can be recycled. To make sure that Japan does not abandon reprocessing and turn the interim storage facility into a virtually permanent storage facility, Aomori’s prefectural government has stated that it will not even allow a test cask to be emplaced in the facility until it is clear that the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant will definitely go into operation.14 TEPCO and JAPC each also have onsite dry-cask storage at one of their sites: TEPCO at the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and JAPC at its Tokai Daini plant. As of early 2019, an additional three of Japan’s 10 nuclear utilities were applying for licenses to build onsite dry-cask storage, and four others were examining the possibility. The remaining utility, Kansai Electric Power Co., which has all three of its nuclear power plants in Fukui prefecture, had support for considering onsite dry-cask storage from all three of the communities hosting its nuclear plants. The former governor insisted that any dry storage be outside the prefecture,15 but in the absence of progress on that front, both he and his opponent, who won the April 2019 election, announced that they were willing to consider dry storage in the prefecture.16 As of the end of 2018, of the 30 countries plus Taiwan that had operating nuclear power plants:

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• Twenty-two had built or were planning to build onsite dry-storage facilities at some of their nuclear power plants and/or centrally;17 • Six (Brazil, Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, and Sweden) had opted for interim-storage pools; • In France, despite its reprocessing program, the huge intake pools at its reprocessing plant were filling up and Électricité de France was proposing to build a large spent-fuel storage pool at another site. A parliamentary ad hoc Commission of Inquiry into the Safety and Security of Nuclear Installations recommended dry-cask storage, however, because it “seems safer and cheaper”;18 • The Netherlands remained France’s only foreign reprocessing customer because it had designed its small radioactive-waste storage facility to hold only reprocessing waste. Its complex reprocessing contract includes the shipment of Dutch lowenriched uranium spent fuel to La Hague for reprocessing and Dutch mixed-oxide (MOX) spent fuel to France for disposal. In exchange, the Dutch reactor would fission in MOX a quantity of French plutonium equal to the amount of Dutch plutonium that would end up in France in spent MOX and the Netherlands is to receive in glassified reprocessing waste a quantity of fission products equal to the quantity sent to France in MOX spent fuel;19 and • Iran, to allay international concerns about its possible extraction of plutonium from its spent fuel, agreed to ship its spent fuel, with its contained plutonium, to Russia as part of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreed in 2015.

Cumulative Stored Spent Fuel in US (metric tons)

Globally, as of the end of 2013, 59% of spent fuel was in reactor spent-fuel storage pools, 24% in dry storage, and 13% in away-from-reactor spent-fuel storage pools. Four percent had not been reported on.20 In the United States, after a nuclear-power reactor shuts down for the last time, cost-conscious nuclear utilities empty their pools into dry-cask storage as quickly as they can because of the lower operating cost of dry storage. 140,000 120,000 100,000 80,000

In pools

60,000

In dry storage

40,000 20,000 0

2015

2025

2035

2045

2055

2065

Fig. 6.8 Projected distribution of US spent fuel between pool and dry storage. As nuclear power plants are decommissioned, the spent fuel in the pools will be shifted into dry storage. (US Department of Energy)21

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Until underground repositories begin to take spent fuel at the rate at which it is being generated, the amount of stored spent fuel will continue to increase and, as older nuclear power plants are retired, the fraction of spent fuel in dry-cask storage will continue to increase. Figure 6.8 shows a 2016 projection for the United States in which it was assumed that US nuclear power plants would shut down after 60 years of operation and no new nuclear power plants would be completed.

6.2 Cost Advantages The capital cost of dry storage is low relative to the multibillion-dollar capital cost of a power reactor. Even including the cost of its thick steel storage casks and convectively cooled building, Japan’s Mutsu storage facility (Fig. 6.7) will cost about $1 billion to store 3,000 tons of spent fuel. The stored spent fuel will be the equivalent of 40 years of discharges by four 1,000 MWe power reactors.22 The corresponding per-kilowatthour cost of storage amounts to about 1% of the total cost of generating the electric power.23 A spent-fuel pool with the same capacity would have about the same capital cost but, according to a 1998 study done by the predecessor ministry to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, because of the need for active water cooling and treatment systems and the need to maintain and monitor those systems, operational costs for pool storage are about six times higher than for dry-cask storage (Table 6.1).

6.3 Safety Advantages Spent-fuel storage is designed to shield individuals nearby from the penetrating radiation emitted by the spent fuel and to minimize the release of the radionuclides in accidents. In the case of pool storage, both safety functions fail if enough water is lost to uncover the spent fuel. As discussed in Chap. 5, for weeks after the Great Table 6.1 Cost estimates for 5,000-ton-capacity spent-fuel storage facilities in Japan. The capital costs were approximately the same for pool and dry storage, but the operating costs for the drystorage facility were found to be much less.24 A 3,000-ton-capacity dry-cask storage facility has been built at Mutsu (Fig. 6.7) with a plan to add second module with a 2,000-ton capacity Cost (¥100 billion, 1998; ~$1 billion, 2018)

Pool

Dry cask

Capital investment

1.56

1.31

Operations (cumulative, 54 years from construction start)

1.40

0.24

Spent fuel transport

0.04

0.06

Total

3.00

1.61

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Fig. 6.9 Fukushima Daiichi casks after the tsunami. Seaweed is visible on the orange rack on the left and on the second cask from the right, but the fuel within the casks was undamaged. (TEPCO)

Eastern Japan Earthquake of 11 March 2011, it was feared that the earthquake had cracked the pool of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 and that water was being lost by leakage. There was no leakage but water was being lost via the slow but steady process of evaporation and the amount of makeup water added was inadequate. Spent-fuel pools also are vulnerable to attack by terrorists who could use explosives to puncture a pool and cause leakage at a rate too great to offset.25 By contrast, spent-fuel casks are largely immune to natural hazards, including floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Figure 6.9 shows some of the nine massive steel storage casks that held a total of 408 fuel assemblies or about 70 tons of spent fuel26 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. The picture was taken after the tsunami had washed through their building. Although the structure of the building was damaged, there was no concern that the spent fuel stored in the casks could overheat, catch fire, and release the volatile radioactive elements they contained. Therefore, the spent fuel in the casks went unmentioned in the millions of words written and spoken by journalists about the accident. Even Japanese physicists who closely followed reports on developments related to the accident were unaware of the presence of spent fuel in casks on the site.27 Spent-fuel casks could be penetrated by anti-tank missiles or explosive charges, which could also damage the fuel within. A 2006 US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) review concluded, however, that the resulting releases “would be relatively small” compared to those from potential fires in dense-packed spent-fuel pools.28 A

6.3 Safety Advantages

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Fig. 6.10 Holtec’s proposed central storage facility for US spent fuel. The artist’s conception on the left shows how spent fuel canisters would be emplaced in passively air-cooled, in-ground silos. As illustrated on the right, cool air would enter through slots on the bottom exterior of each cover and descend in an annular space next to the wall of the silo before flowing up and cooling the outside wall of the canister and exiting buoyantly through the stubby central vent over each silo. (Holtec)

terrorist-caused fire in a spent-fuel cask could release a larger fraction of its radioactive inventory, but the fire would not spread to other casks. The very roughly 10 tons of spent fuel in a cask is small relative to the several hundred tons in a dense-packed pool, where a fire starting in recently discharged fuel assemblies could spread to all the fuel in the pool.29 The NAS report did suggest additional protective measures for casks, however, such as berms and “visual barriers” to make it impossible to target the casks from a distance.30 As noted above, in Germany and some other countries, casks are placed inside thick-walled buildings that would provide an additional layer of protection against attack. One US company, Holtec International, is now marketing a less costly configuration that offers some additional protection to the canisters by emplacing them in reinforced-concrete silos embedded in the ground. The canisters are cooled by outside air flowing down through a space just inside the silo wall and then up over the canister surface, driven by the buoyancy of the warmed air (Fig. 6.10).31

6.4 Central Storage A few countries have built central spent-fuel storage not associated with a reprocessing plant. Sweden has a central storage pool, CLAB (Centralt mellanLager för Använt kärnBränsle) for spent fuel that is destined for a deep geological repository. The pool is in a mined cavern under 20–30 m of rock. As of 2018, its licensed capacity was about 8,000 tons, but an application had been submitted to increase the capacity to about 11,000 tons.32

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Reprocessing plants have large intake pools:33 • In France, the nominal combined storage capacity of the pools of the La Hague reprocessing plant is 17,600 tons—equivalent to about 13 years’ discharges by France’s 58 operating power reactors.34 The approximately 10,000 tons of spent fuel in the pools as of the end of 2016 included about 1,300 tons of spent MOX fuel35 that was originally to be reprocessed to obtain startup plutonium for breeder reactors. In the absence of breeder reactors, it is simply accumulating in central storage with its ultimate fate—deep burial or reprocessing—undecided. • Japan’s Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Aomori prefecture has intake pools with a combined capacity of 3,000 tons. As noted above, two utilities have built a centralized interim dry-cask storage facility in Mutsu city in the same prefecture for an additional 3,000 tons of spent fuel (Fig. 6.7), with the possibility of adding another storage module with a capacity of 2,000 tons on the same site. Originally, the spent fuel stored at the Mutsu facility was to be sent to a second commercial reprocessing plant to be built later. With the reduction of Japan’s nuclear capacity after the Fukushima accident, it appears unlikely that this second reprocessing plant will be built. • In Russia, the 8,600-ton-capacity storage pool at an unfinished reprocessing plant at Zheleznogorsk near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia is used for central storage of LWR spent fuel. A huge dry-cask storage facility is being built nearby with a planned capacity of 26,510 tons of spent fuel from Russia’s RBMK graphite-moderated power reactors and 11,275 tons from LWRs, for a total of 37,785 tons. As of 2018, about 16,000 tons of dry-storage capacity was already operational, about half for RBMK and half for LWR spent fuel. • In the United Kingdom, the “receipt and storage pond” of the shut-down THORP reprocessing plant will be used to store up to 5,500 tons of spent fuel from advanced gas-cooled reactors “until an export route to a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) is available (currently expected 2085).”36 • In the United States, the storage pool of an inoperable small reprocessing plant, built in the 1970s in Morris, Illinois, is used for long-term storage of 772 tons of spent fuel.37 In countries that do not reprocess, there is little economic incentive to remove spent fuel to central storage until all the reactors at a site have been shut down. The main cost for operating a dry-cask storage facility is the salaries of the guard force. At an operating nuclear power plant, the plant security force can monitor the casks without adding personnel. After the reactors on a site have shut down, however, removing the spent fuel to a central storage site would reduce security costs. Also, after the reactors have been dismantled and the site has otherwise been cleared, the presence of the casks complicates the repurposing of the site and can even require a nuclear utility with no other plants to stay in existence because of its responsibility for the spent fuel.38 In the United States, in the past, central interim dry-cask storage facilities have been proposed to consolidate “orphan” spent fuel from shut-down reactors. They have not been built because of concerns in potential host states that the interim storage

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113

might become permanent and also because of opposition from communities through which the spent fuel would be transported. In 2016 and 2017, however, two companies, Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International, applied for licenses for interim-storage facilities in desert areas on either side of the border between southeastern New Mexico and Texas. Both facilities would be co-located with existing nuclear-waste facilities. Waste Control Specialists operates a shallow burial site for low-level nuclear waste on the Texas side of the border, and the Holtec site would be on the New Mexico side of the border near the US Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a deep underground repository for plutonium-contaminated waste. According to the license applications, the proposed facilities would each store up to 40,000 tons of spent fuel.39 Holtec has indicated, however, that it might apply later to increase this limit to 120,000 tons,40 approximately equal to the total amount of spent fuel that the United States will have produced by the time all its existing nuclear power plants retire (Fig. 6.8). Holtec would place its canisters in passively air-cooled in-ground silos as described above (Fig. 6.10). In 2008, in order to avoid having to build a cask-repacking facility at an interimstorage site or geological repository, the US Department of Energy proposed a system in which a universal disposal canister would have different overpacks for storage and transport.41 Establishment of the specifications of such a canister was suspended, however, after the cancellation of the planned US geological repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Questions also have been raised as to whether high-burnup (more than 45 megawatt-days/kgU) fuel assemblies and spent fuel in high-capacity canisters can be safely transported without repackaging.42 Because of the intense gamma radiation emitted by spent fuel, it would be easiest to transfer spent fuel between canisters or casks underwater in power-plant spent-fuel pools. For sites where pools no longer exist, radiation shielding will have to be improvised.

6.5 How Long Can Dry Storage Endure? The oldest spent fuel in interim onsite storage at US power plants is in dry-cask storage at three shut-down reactors that came into operation in the early 1960s.43 The condition of sample spent-fuel assemblies in dry-cask storage has been checked once after 14 years of storage and no significant degradation was found.44 Otherwise, inspections have been limited to the exteriors of casks and canisters.45 As the availability of a US geological repository has receded, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has extended licenses for a few dry-storage facilities to 60 years. In 2014, it published its conclusion that, if necessary, dry-cask storage could be maintained indefinitely by transferring spent fuel to new canisters every 100 years and by placing damaged or degraded fuel in welded-shut “cans” before transfer.46 Since spent fuel’s heat generation rate determines the required spacing between spent-fuel canisters in a disposal tunnel, it can be beneficial to wait several decades after the discharge of spent fuel from a reactor before placing it in a final repository.

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After it has cooled for 50 years, however, its radioactive heat comes predominantly from long-lived isotopes, and there is no good technical reason to further delay its emplacement. The question, therefore, is whether society can agree that deep burial will be safer in the long term than indefinitely prolonged storage on the surface. This issue is considered in the next chapter.

6.6 Transport Eventually, spent fuel must be removed from reactor sites unless each reactor site is to have its own deep boreholes for disposal of spent fuel, an option that is not seriously being considered anywhere today.47 For centralized direct disposal, the spent fuel must be transported to a final deep disposal site—perhaps via a central storage facility. For reprocessing, it must be transported to the reprocessing plant. After reprocessing and MOX-fuel fabrication, the high-level vitrified waste from reprocessing and the transuranic waste from both processes must eventually be transported to a final deep repository. France and the United Kingdom have decades of experience in both overland and sea transport of spent fuel and high-level waste because they have been reprocessing large quantities of spent fuel and shipping the packaged waste back to their foreign customers in Europe and Japan. Russia also is accumulating experience in the course of shipping spent fuel from its nuclear power plants in European Russia to storage in Zheleznogorsk, 2,000 km east of the Urals. Most of the transport within continental Europe and Russia is by rail in casks that can weigh up to 110 tons empty and contain 10 or more tons of spent fuel.48 Smaller casks, containing 0.5–2 tons of spent fuel can be transported by truck. Transport casks or transport overpacks for canisters of spent fuel have thick steel or cast-iron walls, incorporating an outer layer of plastic that contains hydrogen and boron to slow and absorb neutrons and, in some cases, an inner layer of lead for gamma-ray absorption (Fig. 6.11). Transport casks are subject to internationally agreed tests of their integrity in accident situations, including49 : • • • •

A drop from a height of 9 m onto a flat unyielding surface; A 1-meter drop onto a vertical 15-centimeter-diameter steel “pin”; Exposure to heat equivalent to immersion in an 800 °C oil fire for 30 min; and Immersion in water at a pressure equivalent to a depth of 15 m for at least 8 hours.

As with storage casks, terrorists could breach a transport cask with an anti-tank missile or a shaped charge. The difference is that storage casks are located in exclusion areas outside cities. Railroads carrying casks often go through the hearts of cities. In 2006, a US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee analyzed the likely performance of spent-fuel casks hypothetically exposed to extreme conditions that have occurred in historical transportation accidents and concluded that, in the absence of a multiple-hour fire, the risk of a large release was small. It also noted

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115

Fig. 6.11 Cask for spent-fuel transport by rail. Such casks typically hold 10 or more tons of spent fuel and can weigh 150 tons or more when loaded. The ends are capped with “impact limiters” to reduce shock to the contained fuel assemblies in case of a crash. (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission)50

that the danger of exposure to prolonged fires could be minimized by assuring that trains carrying spent fuel do not pass trains carrying oil or liquefied flammable gas in tunnels.51 The Association of American Railroads subsequently passed a rule to this effect. There also has been interest in requiring that spent fuel be shipped on dedicated trains that would not include tank cars of oil or liquefied natural gas. It is not clear that this requirement has been formalized.52 The NAS committee added this comment: Malevolent acts against spent fuel and high-level waste shipments are a major technical and societal concern, but the committee was unable to perform an in-depth examination of transportation security because of information constraints. The committee recommends that an independent examination of the security of spent fuel and high-level waste transportation be carried out prior to the commencement of large-quantity shipments to a federal repository or to interim storage.53

The US NRC saw no need for an independent study but did upgrade the security requirements for spent-fuel transport, adding a requirement for an armed escort and continuous monitoring of shipments from a central command site.54 In some countries, transport of spent fuel and glassified reprocessing waste has been highly controversial. In November 2010, 20,000 German police were deployed in response to protesters trying to block the delivery of reprocessing waste from France to a central interim surface storage site in Gorleben, Lower Saxony.55 Despite the government’s decision to end shipments of spent fuel for reprocessing as of 2005 and the swift introduction of onsite dry-cask storage,56 there was still the problem of returning reprocessing waste. The last shipment of glassified waste from

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France to Gorleben was in November 2011, with roughly the same number of police being deployed.57 As of 2016, there were plans for repatriating 5 casks of glassified medium-level waste from France and 21 casks of high-level waste from the United Kingdom to be stored at four nuclear-power-plant sites.58 There also have been protests and demonstrations against sea shipments between Europe and Japan of spent fuel, reprocessing waste, plutonium, and unirradiated MOX fuel.59

6.7 Conclusions Increasing quantities of spent fuel are stored in reactor spent-fuel pools pending the availability of geological repositories, centralized interim-storage facilities, or reprocessing plants. This has led to high-density pool storage and to pressure for reprocessing. Dry-cask storage provides a safer alternative that can be relied on for at least several decades. When centralized interim-storage sites and deep repositories are established, large-scale transport of spent fuel will be required. Transportation casks are designed to protect against all but the most extreme accidents, in which a cask is enveloped by an intense fire for many hours. The risk of such accidents can and should be minimized. The danger of terrorism against spent-fuel casks is also a real concern—especially during transport through densely populated areas. Governments must make sure that casks are monitored at all times and that rapid-response forces are available to ensure that any attackers will not have sufficient access and time to cause a spent-fuel fire. Endnotes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

Robert Alvarez et al. “Reducing the Hazards from Stored Spent Power-Reactor Fuel in the United States,” Science and Global Security 11 (2003): 1–51, Fig. 5, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/articles/ fvhippel_spentfuel/rAlvarez_reducing_hazards.pdf. Klaus Janberg and Frank von Hippel, “Dry-Cask Storage: How Germany Led the Way,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 65, no. 5 (September/October 2009), 24–32. “Cladding Considerations for the Transportation and Storage of Spent Fuel,” US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 17 November 2003, Interim Staff Guidance No. 11, Revision 3, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/readingrm/doc-collections/isg/isg-11R3.pdf. Alvarez et al., “Reducing the Hazards,” Fig. 9. Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, Basis of Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage, 2015, 236–274; Klaus Janberg, personal communication with FvH, March 2019.

6.7 Conclusions

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

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US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Dry Cask Storage,” n.d., accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/dry-cask-storage. html. The transport overpacks shield against gamma rays with thick steel walls, sometimes including a layer of lead. Plutonium and other heavy “transuranic” isotopes decay primarily by emitting “alpha” particles, i.e., helium nuclei. When an alpha particle collides with the nucleus of light atoms such as oxygen, it can knock out a neutron that can penetrate a large thickness of steel but is slowed by collisions with the light hydrogen nuclei in plastic. A small admixture of an element such as boron, which is highly absorbing of slow neutrons, then eliminates them as a radiation hazard. Government Accountability Office, Spent Nuclear Fuel Management: Outreach Needed to Help Gain Public Acceptance for Federal Activities That Address Liability, GAO-15-141, October 2014, Tables 1 and 2, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.gao.gov/assets/670/666454.pdf. The spacing between the centers of the casks in Fig. 6.4 averages about 5 m, and each cask contains about 10 tons of spent fuel. A 1,000 MWe reactor discharges about 20 tons of spent fuel per year. It therefore would fill about 120 casks over a 60-year lifetime. The area required for the casks themselves would be about 0.3 hectares. Connecticut Yankee, “Fuel Storage & Removal,” accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.connyankee.com/assets/images/43_vccs02.jpg. The main webpage to which the photo is linked is www.connyankee.com. Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co. Ltd., “Spent Fuel,” accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.khnp.co.kr/eng/content/561/main.do?mnCd=EN030502. National Research Council, Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006), Appendix C, accessed 16 January 2019, https://doi.org/10.17226/11263. Wolfgang Heni, at the time acting manager of Neckarwestheim (GKN) nuclear power plant. “Interim Storage Facility Operation Premised on Reprocessing Startup,” Daily Tohoku, 16 January 2014 (in Japanese). Masafumi Takubo and Frank N. von Hippel, “An Alternative to the Continued Accumulation of Separated Plutonium in Japan: Dry Cask Storage of Spent Fuel,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 1, no. 2 (2018): 281–304, accessed 16 January 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/25751654.2018. 1527886. “Issei Nishikawa, Not Excluding Dry Storage of Spent Fuel, but Maintaining Demand for Eventual Shipment Outside Prefacture Firmly,” 8 March 2019, accessed 16 March 2019, http://fukunawa.com/fukui/43289.html (in Japanese). The 30 countries plus Taiwan that had operating nuclear power plants as of 2018 are listed on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Power Reactor Information System database. For Canada, Germany, South Korea, Russia, and the United States, see International Panel on Fissile Materials, Managing Spent Fuel from Nuclear Power Reactors: Experience and Lessons from Around the

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World, 2011, accessed 16 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr10. pdf. For China and Japan, see International Panel on Fissile Materials, Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs: Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World, 2015, Chaps. 2 and 6, accessed 16 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr14.pdf. For Argentina, Armenia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Mexico, Romania, Spain, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, see International Atomic Energy Agency, Status and Trends in Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management, Nuclear Energy Series No. NW-T-1.14, 2018, Companion CD National Profiles, accessed 25 January 2019, https://www.iaea.org/publications/11173/statusand-trends-in-spent-fuel-and-radioactive-waste-management?supplementary= 44578. For the Czech Republic, see V. Fajman et al. “Czech Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility: Operation Experience, Inspections and Future Plans,” accessed 16 January 2019, https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/30/ 040/30040070.pdf. For India, see P.K. Dey, “An Indian Perspective for Transportation and Storage of Spent Fuel,” International Meeting on Reduced Enrichment for Research and Training Reactors, 2004, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.rertr.anl.gov/ RERTR26/pdf/P03-Dey.pdf. For Pakistan, see S.E. Abbasi and T. Fatima, “Enhancement in the Storage Capacity of KANUPP Spent Fuel Storage Bay,” Management of Spent Fuel from Nuclear Power Reactors: Proceedings of an International Conference Organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Cooperation with the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and Held In Vienna, Austria, 31 May–4 June 2010 (IAEA, 2015), accessed 16 January 2019, https://www-pub.iaea.org/ MTCD/Publications/PDF/SupplementaryMaterials/P1661CD/Session_10.pdf. For Switzerland, see Kernkraftwerk G¨osgen-D¨aniken, “Management of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste as an Integrated Programme in Switzerland” (paper presented at the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board summer meeting, 13 June 2018), accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nwtrb.gov/ docs/default-source/meetings/2018/June/whitwill.pdf?sfvrsn=4. For Taiwan, see Atomic Energy Council, “Dry Storage Management in Taiwan,” accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.aec.gov.tw/english/radwaste/ article05.php. 18. Phil Chaffee, “Recommendations from French Parliamentary Commission,” Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, 27 July 2018, 5. 19. See Alan J. Kuperman, “MOX in the Netherlands: Plutonium as a Liability,” in Plutonium for Energy? Explaining the Global Decline in MOX, ed. Alan J. Kuperman, Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, University of Texas at Austin, 2018, accessed 16 January 2019, http://sites.utexas.edu/prp-mox-2018/ downloads/.

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20. International Atomic Energy Agency, Status and Trends in Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Management (2018), Fig. 20, accessed 25 January 2019, https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1799_web.pdf. 21. Joe T. Carter, “Containers for Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel” (US Department of Energy presentation to the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, Washington DC, 24 August 2016), slide 7, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www. nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/meetings/2016/august/carter.pdf?sfvrsn=12. 22. The cost of Japan’s 3,000-ton-capacity Mutsu dry-cask storage facility, whose construction was basically completed in 2013, including casks, is about ¥0.1 trillion (~$1 billion). Recyclable-Fuel Storage Company (RFS), “Business Outline” (in Japanese), accessed 27 January 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/ 20100904181041/www.rfsco.co.jp/about/about.html. 23. About $0.001 per kilowatt-hour assuming a fission-energy release of 45 megawatt-days per kilogram uranium in the fuel and 1 kilowatt-hour of electric energy produced per 3 kilowatt-hours of fission heat. 24. Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, Advisory Committee for Energy, Nuclear Energy Working Group, Toward Implementation of Interim Storage for Recycled Fuel Resources, Interim Report, Tokyo, 11 June 1998 (in Japanese), accessed 16 January 2019, http:// www.aec.go.jp/jicst/NC/iinkai/teirei/siryo98/siryo38/siryo1.htm. 25. National Research Council, Safety and Security, Chap. 2. 26. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving the Safety and Security of U.S. Nuclear Plant: Phase 2 (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2016), 21, 59, accessed 14 February 2019, https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21874/ lessons-learned-from-the-fukushima-nuclear-accident-for-improving-safetyand-security-of-us-nuclear-plants. 27. A year after the Fukushima accident, one of the authors (von Hippel) gave a talk at the annual spring meeting of the professional society of Japan’s physicists in Osaka, Japan. When he showed the picture in Fig. 6.7, a ripple went through the audience and one professor stood up and exclaimed, “I have studied the accident in great depth and I was completely unaware of the presence of these casks!” 28. National Research Council, Safety and Security, Chap. 2, 69. 29. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Staff Evaluation and Recommendation for Japan Lessons-Learned Tier 3 Issue on Expedited Transfer of Spent Fuel, 12 November 2013, COMSECY-13-0030, Tables 34 and 72, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1327/ML13273A628.pdf. 30. National Research Council, Safety and Security, 68. 31. Holtec International, “HI-STORM Consolidated Interim Storage,” accessed 16 January 2019, https://holtecinternational.com/productsandservices/ wasteandfuelmanagement/dry-cask-and-storage-transport/hi-storm/hi-stormcis/.

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32. SKB (Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company), “Clab—Central Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel,” accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.skb.com/our-operations/clab/. 33. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Plutonium Separation. 34. France’s reactors have a total of 63 GWe of generating capacity and discharge about 1,300 tons of spent fuel per year. 35. The inventory of spent fuel at La Hague as of the end of 2017 was 9,970 tons. Orano, Traitement des combustibles uses provenant de l’étranger dans les installations d’Orano la Hague [Reprocessing of foreign spent fuel at Orano’s installations at La Hague], 2018, 28, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www. orano.group/docs/default-source/orano-doc/groupe/publications-reference/ document-home/rapport-2017_la-hague_traitement-combustible-use-etranger. pdf?sfvrsn=db194397_6. The inventory of spent MOX fuel at La Hague at the end of 2016 is from ANDRA, Inventaire national des mati`ereset d´echets radioactifs, 2018, 36, accessed 27 January 2019, https://inventaire.andra.fr/ sites/default/files/documents/pdf/fr/andra-synthese-2018-web.pdf. 36. Office of Nuclear Regulation, THORP AGR Interim Storage Programme, 2018, 9, accessed 2 March 2019, http://www.onr.org.uk/pars/2018/sellafield-18-022. pdf. 37. Planning Information Corporation, “The Transportation of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste: A Systematic Basis for Planning and Management at the National, Regional, and Community Levels,” Denver, 1996, accessed 16 January 2019, www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/trans/1pic06.htm. 38. The three companies that operated the decommissioned US Connecticut Yankee, Maine Yankee, and Yankee Rowe nuclear-power reactors state that their security and legal costs for maintaining the dry-cask storage at each of the three sites is about $10 million per year. “An Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel,” Connecticut Yankee, accessed 6 February 2019, http://www. connyankee.com/assets/pdfs/Connecticut%20Yankee.pdf; “An Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel,” Maine Yankee, accessed 6 February 2019, http://www.maineyankee.com/public/MaineYankee.pdf; “An Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel,” Yankee Rowe, accessed 6 February 2019, http://www.yankeerowe.com/pdf/Yankee%20Rowe.pdf. 39. Interim Storage Partners, “Overview,” accessed, 27 January 2019, https:// interimstoragepartners.com/project-overview/; Stefan Anton, “Holtec International—Central Interim Storage Facility for Spent Fuel and HLW (HI-STORE)” (presentation at the 2015 US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Division of Spent Fuel Management Regulatory Conference, 19 November 2015) accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/conference-symposia/dsfm/ 2015/dsfm-2015-stefan-anton.pdf. 40. Holtec International, “Holtec’s Proposed Consolidated Interim Storage Facility in Southeastern New Mexico,” accessed 16 January 2019, https:// holtecinternational.com/productsandservices/hi-store-cis/.

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41. US Department of Energy, Transportation, Aging and Disposal Canister System Performance Specification, DOE/RW-0585, 2008, accessed 26 January 2019, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/edg/media/TADS_Spec.pdf. 42. Government Accountability Office, Spent Nuclear Fuel Management, 24–31. 43. The onsite spent-fuel storage facilities associated with the Dresden-1, Humboldt, and Yankee Rowe reactors, all of which came into operation in the early 1960s. For reactor operating dates, see International Atomic Energy Agency, “PRIS (Power Reactor Information System): The Database on Nuclear Power Reactors,” accessed 16 January 2019, www.iaea.org/ programmes/a2/. For US spent-fuel storage facilities, see United States of America Sixth National Report for the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, US Department of Energy, 2017, Annex D1, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/12/f46/10-20-17%206th_ %20US_National_Report%20%28Final%29.pdf. 44. W. C. Bare and L. D. Torgerson, Dry Cask Storage Characterization Project, Phase l: CASTOR V/21 Cask Opening and Examination, Idaho Nuclear Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, INEEL/EXT-01-00183, 2001, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0130/ML013020363.pdf. 45. O.K. Chopra et al. Managing Aging Effects on Dry Cask Storage Systems for Extended Long-Term Storage and Transportation of Used Fuel, Rev. 2 (Argonne National Laboratory, 2014), accessed 16 January 2019, https://publications.anl. gov/anlpubs/2014/09/107500.pdf. 46. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Generic Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel, NUREG-2157, 2014, Sect. 2.2, accessed 26 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1419/ML14196A105. pdf. For a discussion of the management of damaged fuel, see M. French et al. Packaging of Damaged Spent Fuel (Amec Foster Wheeler, 2016) accessed 6 February 2019, https://rwm.nda.gov.uk/publication/packaging-of-damagedspent-fuel/. 47. In one current concept for borehole disposal, the spent fuel would be emplaced in 5-kilometer-deep boreholes with well-designed barriers after emplacement to assure that the borehole did not provide a pathway for radioactivity back to the surface. See, for example, US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, Technical Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Energy Deep Borehole Disposal Research and Development Program, 2016, accessed 16 January 2019, https:// www.nwtrb.gov/docs/default-source/reports/dbd_final.pdf?sfvrsn=7. 48. World Nuclear Association, “Transport of Radioactive Materials,” 2017, accessed 2 March 2019, http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/ nuclear-fuel-cycle/transport-of-nuclear-materials/transport-of-radioactivematerials.aspx. 49. International Atomic Energy Agency, Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Material, 2018 Edition, IAEA SSR-6 (Rev. 1), paras 652, 727–729, accessed 26 January 2019, https://www-pub.iaea.org/books/iaeabooks/12288/ Regulations-for-the-Safe-Transport-of-Radioactive-Material.

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50. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Backgrounder on Transportation of Spent Fuel and Radioactive Materials,” March 2016, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/ transport-spenfuel-radiomats-bg.html. 51. National Research Council, Going the Distance? The Safe Transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste in the United States (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2006), 3, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.nap.edu/catalog/11538/going-the-distance-thesafe-transport-of-spent-nuclear-fuel. 52. Earl P. Easton and Christopher S. Bajwa, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “NRC’s Response to the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Study: Going the Distance?” n.d., accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrc.gov/ docs/ML0826/ML082690378.pdf. 53. National Research Council, Going the Distance? 3. 54. US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Physical Protection of Irradiated Reactor Fuel in Transit,” Federal Register, Vol. 78, No. 97, May 20, 2013, 2952029557, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-201305-20/pdf/2013-11717.pdf. 55. Michael Slackman, “Despite Protests, Waste Arrives in Germany,” New York Times, 8 November 2010, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/11/09/world/europe/09germany.html. 56. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Plutonium Separation, Chap. 4. 57. BBC, “German Police Clear Nuclear Waste Train Protest,” 27 November 2011, accessed 7 March 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15910548. 58. Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management, “Return of Radioactive Waste,” 10 February 2016, accessed 2 March 2019, https://www. bfe.bund.de/EN/nwm/waste/return/return.html. 59. See, for example, Associated Press, “Plutonium Shipment Leaves France for Japan,” New York Times, 8 November 1992, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/08/world/plutonium-shipmentleaves-france-for-japan.html; Andrew Pollack, “A-Waste Ship, Briefly Barred, Reaches Japan,” New York Times, 26 April 1995, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/26/world/a-waste-shipbriefly-barred-reaches-japan.html; “Protesters on Hand as MOX Ship Reaches Saga,” Japan Times, 29 June 2010, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/06/29/national/protesters-onhand-as-mox-ship-reaches-saga/#.XE33Yy2ZNqw.

Chapter 7

Deep Disposal of Spent Fuel Without Reprocessing

With no need for startup plutonium for large numbers of plutonium breeder reactors and with plutonium recycle in light-water reactors (LWRs) not economic, reprocessing and breeder advocates now argue that separation of transuranics from spent fuel and use of fast-neutron reactors to fission them are needed in any case for environmental reasons. The advocates assert that their program is required to reduce the volume and toxicity of nuclear wastes before they are sent to underground repositories. As will be explained in this chapter, however, the environmental benefits from this enormously costly program would be small and possibly negative—and vastly outweighed in any case by the associated increased risks of nuclear-weapon proliferation and nuclear accidents.

7.1 Reprocessing and Proliferation Half a century of government support of efforts to commercialize breeder reactors has failed in all the major industrialized countries. Nevertheless, proponents of fast-neutron reactors continue to demand government support for research and development (R&D). Even breeder R&D is a concern to the nonproliferation community, however. As India demonstrated, a small-scale breeder-reactor R&D program can involve the separation of enough plutonium to produce nuclear weapons. Despite India’s example, however, reprocessing advocates argue that it does not make the proliferation problem worse: • In Japan, they still argue that reactor-grade plutonium obtained by reprocessing power-reactor spent fuel is not fit for making bombs (see Chap. 4). • In South Korea, officials from the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute argue that pyroprocessing, a variant of reprocessing, is proliferation resistant because it does not produce pure plutonium. As noted in Chap. 3, however, a proliferation assessment published by the US national nuclear laboratories in 2009 found “only a modest improvement in reducing proliferation risk over [standard] PUREX © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 F. von Hippel et al., Plutonium, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9901-5_7

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[reprocessing] technologies, and these modest improvements apply primarily for non-state actors.”1 There are even reprocessing advocates who argue that deep burial of spent fuel without reprocessing could make the proliferation problem worse. In 2004, for example, the New Nuclear Policy-Planning Council, created by the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, asserted that the temptation for diversion of [the plutonium in spent fuel] will increase in the period between hundreds and tens of thousands of years after disposal, so it will be necessary to develop and implement an efficient and effective internationally agreed monitoring and physical protection system. When these things are taken into account, there is no significant difference between the [reprocessing and direct disposal] scenarios on the issue of nonproliferation.2

This is the proliferation via “plutonium mining” scenario, and it deserves analysis.3 But to justify separating plutonium for large-scale commercial use today by invoking the risk that, centuries and millennia in the future, some country might dig half a kilometer down to try to recover a cask of spent fuel shows how far-fetched the arguments for reprocessing have become.

7.2 The Modest Contribution of Plutonium to the Environmental Hazard from a Spent-Fuel Repository In Japan, advocates of reprocessing have made contradictory arguments about the health risks associated with plutonium. They have asserted at different times that plutonium in spent fuel will be dangerous to the water supply if put several hundred meters underground in an engineered repository and that separated plutonium would be relatively innocuous if thrown into a reservoir. In 1993, the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a predecessor of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, created a video featuring a cute cartoon character, Pluto Boy, who reassured viewers that he was not dangerous: Let’s assume that bad guys throw me into a reservoir. In addition to not being easily soluble, I am so heavy that I will mostly go down to the bottom. Even if swallowed with water by any chance, mostly I will avoid being absorbed by the stomach and intestines and exit out of the body.4

In fact, as will be seen below, there is some validity to the argument that plutonium and other “transuranic” elements (elements with more protons than uranium and therefore to the right of it on the periodic table) are relatively insoluble in water and that, in oxide form, they are not readily absorbed from the gut. However, these facts undercut the more recent argument made by reprocessing advocates that the plutonium and other transuranics in deeply buried spent fuel would be so hazardous to the environment above that they must be separated by reprocessing and fissioned in fast reactors.

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Arguments about the danger to the human environment of deep burial of plutonium-containing spent fuel exploit fears of radiation. There seems to be a special horror associated with the longevity of some transuranic isotopes. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. It would take about seven half-lives, or 170,000 years, for 99.9% to decay. Plutonium-242, which comprises about 6% of the power-reactor plutonium in spent fuel, has a half-life of 380,000 years. Neptunium-237, which is about as abundant in spent power-reactor fuel as plutonium-242, has a half-life of 2.1 million years. As the half-lives become longer, however, the number of disintegrations per gram per second goes down, and so does the hazard. If you ingest a long-lived atom, the probability that it will decay and contribute to your radiation dose while in your body goes down as the half-life of the radioisotope increases. Figure 7.1 shows the half-lives of transuranic elements in spent fuel and how they are produced by neutron capture and convert by radioactive decay when a neutron in the nucleus decays into a proton. Some ask whether, considering that humanity has a recorded history of less than 10,000 years, engineers can guarantee that long-lived radioactive isotopes in deep

Curium

Cm-242 +n Cm-243 +n Cm-244 +n Cm-245 +n Cm-246 α 163 days

α 29 yr

α 18 yr

α 8,500 yr

decay

Americium

Am-241 +n Am-242 α 433 yr

16 hr

+n Am-243 +n Am-244 α 7,400 yr

Pu-239 +n Pu-240 +n Pu-241 +n Pu-242 +n Pu-243

Pu-238 α 88 yr

α 24,000 yr

+n

α 2 Myr

α 6,600 yr

Np-238

Np-239

2 days

2 days

α 23 Myr

α 0.4 Myr

5 hr

7 days

Neutron in atomic nucleus turns into a proton + electron + anti-neutrino.

decay

decay

decay

U-235 +n U-236 +n U-237

α (natural)

14 yr

decay

decay

Neptunium Np-237

10 hr decay

decay

Plutonium

α 4,700 yr

decay

U-238 α (natural)

+n

U-239 24 min

+n

Uranium

Neutron absorption increases number of neutrons + protons by 1

Fig. 7.1 How transuranic elements are produced. Even when uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, there is a significant probability that instead of a fission, a heavier nucleus—U-236 will result. Often, a nucleus resulting from neutron absorption is unstable, and one of its neutrons decays into a proton, emitting an electron and antineutrino in the process. Such a decay transmutes the nucleus into that of another element. In this way, “transuranic” elements can be formed all the way up to and beyond curium. Many transuranics decay by emission of an “alpha” (α) particle, a helium-4 nucleus, consisting of two protons and two neutrons. The transuranic nucleus thereby becomes that of a lower element. For example, after an α emission, a nucleus of Cm-243 becomes a nucleus of Pu-239 and, after another α emission, a nucleus of U-235. Among the elements shown, only U-238 and U-235 are found in nature because their half-lives of 4.5 and 0.7 billion years, respectively, are long enough so that significant fractions of the Earth’s original inventories, created in supernovas prior to the formation of the solar system, are still with us. (authors)

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underground repositories will stay there for hundreds of thousands or millions of years without contaminating the surface environment. Taking advantage of this concern, advocates of fast-neutron reactors cry out, “Fund us to build advanced reprocessing plants and fast-neutron reactors and we will separate out the plutonium and other long-lived transuranic elements and fission them in repeated recycles in fast-reactor fuel until more than 99% are gone!” There are practical problems with this prescription, however. First of all, it would require building and operating new kinds of reprocessing and fuel-fabrication plants.5 Current commercial reprocessing plants recover only uranium and plutonium and leave the other transuranic elements in their radioactive waste. Also, fabrication of the transuranics other than plutonium into fuels is not easily done even in a laboratory. At a November 2015 meeting of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) during which the regulators and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) discussed the maintenance problems of the moribund, JAEAoperated Monju prototype breeder reactor, Toyoshi Fuketa, then the NRA’s acting chairman, criticized JAEA’s contention that the reactor could be used to fission minor transuranic elements. He pointed out that there was no facility in Japan to produce fuel for the experiment and then added: “To say that Monju, if operated, will contribute to solving the problem of waste, isn’t this what the private sector calls fraudulent advertising?”6 In any case, the JAEA had already lost its credibility. The following year, Japan’s government made the final decision to shut down Monju. Thus, it would be very difficult to eliminate the transuranic elements in spent fuel using reprocessing plants and fast reactors. But what do we know about the seriousness of the danger that would be posed to the food and water supply of our distant descendants by the transuranic elements in spent fuel if it were buried in a deep repository? SKB, a company established by Sweden’s nuclear utilities to design and build a spent-fuel repository 500 m underground in granite, has pioneered the analysis of this problem. SKB’s current repository design would have about 6,000 copper canisters loaded with spent fuel emplaced in 60 km of tunnels 500 m under the Earth’s surface. Each canister would be surrounded with a layer of bentonite clay, which swells and becomes impermeable when wet.7 In the course of defending the safety of this repository design to Sweden’s public and government, SKB developed a computer model to analyze the consequences of various failure scenarios. In one beyond-worst-case scenario, both the copper and clay barriers were assumed to fail quickly. Then water would slowly dissolve the spent fuel and carry its contained radionuclides—the most soluble first—through cracks in the granite to contaminate surface water and food grown by farmers assumed to be living off the land (Fig. 7.2). Our interest here is not to determine the validity of the absolute magnitude of the resulting doses calculated by SKB or to argue for or against its specific disposal system, which is quite controversial in Sweden.8 We are interested in SKB’s results for the relative contributions to the surface dose from the different radionuclides. These ratios should be less sensitive than the absolute doses themselves to some of the uncertain assumptions in the model.

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Fig. 7.2 SKB estimates of contributions to surface doses from a failed spent-fuel repository. In this beyond-worst-case scenario, it is assumed that both the copper canister and the surrounding clay layer fail immediately, allowing groundwater direct access to the spent fuel. About 100 years later, the fuel’s metal cladding corrodes through and the radioisotopes in the fuel begin to dissolve into the water, which transports them to the surface at rates that depend on their solubilities. It will be seen that, in no time period do plutonium (Pu-239, Pu-240 and Pu-242) and the other transuranic isotopes shown (neptunium-237 and americium-243) account for more than about 10% of the estimated total dose. (SKB)9

As shown in Fig. 7.2, some of the radionuclides in spent fuel—for example, the long-lived fission product iodine-129 (light-blue line)—are quite soluble and would reach the surface quickly. Others, like plutonium-239 (gray line), are less soluble. Its concentration in the biosphere therefore would peak only after tens of thousands of years. Overall, it will be seen that there are so many long-lived radionuclides in spent fuel that separating and fissioning the plutonium and other transuranic elements would not significantly reduce the long-term radiation dose to humans. In SKB’s computer output, one of the largest contributors to the long-term dose is radium-226 (solid red line), a decay product of the uranium-238 in the spent fuel. Radium-226 has a half-life of 1,600 years and decays into short-lived (four-day half-life) radon-222, a radioactive gas that leaks into basements. Radon’s short-lived airborne decay products are inhaled and may account for a large fraction of lung cancers in nonsmokers.10 If the uranium-238 had been left in place in the deposit from which it was originally mined, these decay products would have been a greater or lesser hazard, depending on what fraction produced in the natural deposit reached the surface compared to the fraction from the spent-fuel repository and on the densities

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and lifestyles of the populations living above. This may put into perspective the magnitude of the overall risk from a deep underground repository. It is comparable to that from a natural underground deposit of uranium. Indeed, the density of uranium in SBK’s spent-fuel repository would be comparable to that in typical uranium ore.11 A similar finding was published in 2009 in a presentation co-authored by a senior South Korean expert from the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) in which the same methodology that SKB had used was used to learn how to estimate doses from a deep repository.12 The authors found that the long-term doses from the decay products of transuranics in spent fuel were comparable to those from the uranium in the spent fuel, which, in reprocessing, is separated and kept aboveground indefinitely, much less isolated than in deep burial. They did not draw the obvious policy implication, however, that this finding undermined KAERI’s advocacy of reprocessing and fast-neutron reactors to reduce the hazard from buried spent fuel. In fact, during the subsequent years of negotiations prior to the conclusion of a new US-South Korean agreement on peaceful nuclear cooperation in 2015, KAERI lobbied relentlessly in both Seoul and Washington to promote South Korea’s right to reprocess. In a moment of exasperation during the stalemated negotiations, a South Korean negotiator reportedly described KAERI as “our Taliban.”13 Two decades earlier, in 1996, the US National Academy of Sciences had completed the first detailed study of the costs and benefits of “transmutation”—that is, fission—of plutonium and other long-lived transuranic elements in scenarios involving many cycles of reprocessing and recycling in fast-neutron-reactor fuel.14 The study concluded that, for most repository conditions, the greatest doses to subsistence farmers living above a spent-fuel repository would be from two soluble long-lived fission products, iodine-129 (17-million-year half-life) and technetium-99 (213,000year half-life).15 The conclusion for I-129 is consistent with the results of the SKB calculations shown in Fig. 7.2. It is striking, therefore, that, while arguing for reprocessing because of the potential future environmental danger from spent fuel buried deep underground, Orano (formerly Areva), the operator of France’s reprocessing plant, dumps into the Atlantic Ocean the volatile I-129 captured from the off-gases of its reprocessing operations.16 It also will be noted in Fig. 7.2 that, in the period between 400 and 20,000 years, carbon-14 leaking from a failed repository would inflict the largest doses to subsistence farmers above a repository. Yet, Orano simply dumps into the atmosphere the carbon-14-containing carbon dioxide released by its reprocessing of spent fuel.17 As with most businesses, Orano’s primary motivation is to sell its products and services. In 2013, however, France’s Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) analyzed Orano’s arguments for fissioning the transuranic elements other than plutonium and came to the conclusion that “the transmutation of minor actinides should not significantly alter the radiological impact of deep geological disposal because it is mainly due to fission and activation products.”18 (Activation products are radioactive isotopes such as carbon-14 created out of stable isotopes in the spent fuel or its cladding by neutron absorption.19 Minor actinides are transuranic elements other than plutonium).20 ASN’s statement that the “radiological impact of deep geological disposal…is mainly

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due to fission and activation products” makes clear its view that plutonium also is not among the main contributors to the surface doses from an underground repository. In 2018, the chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, Yoshiaki Oka, a nuclear engineer and former president of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, cited Japanese specialists on geological disposal who were skeptical of the argument that separation and transmutation would reduce the duration of the hazard from radioactive waste from tens of thousands to hundreds of years. He suggested, “Perhaps… those reactor specialists who so argue don’t know much about the safety analysis of geological disposal, or perhaps they do know but are making this argument in order to serve their own purposes.”21

7.3 Can Reprocessing Significantly Reduce the Size of a Radioactive-Waste Repository? Another argument made by advocates of reprocessing is that it would make a repository smaller by reducing the volume of the waste that has to be disposed of deep underground. The most simplistic version of the argument runs like this: In spent light-waterreactor fuel, 93–96% of the uranium is not fissioned. If separated, this uranium may not have to be deeply buried—although its future remains to be determined.22 Another 1% is plutonium, which can be separated and recycled in MOX fuel and about 0.2% is other transuranics that, in the future, might be separated out and recycled as well. In this view, the only waste that requires deep burial is the 3–6% of the original uranium that has been converted to fission products. This argument is simplistic for a number of reasons. First of all, the fission products have to be mixed with another material—in practice, glass—to create a disposal waste form. That increases both the volume and mass of the “high-level” (concentrated) radioactive waste that requires deep disposal. Furthermore, the additional radioactive wastes that are created in the process of recycling would also require space in a deep repository. These wastes include the fuel cladding out of which the irradiated uranium was dissolved by acid, but which is contaminated by residual plutonium, and plutonium-contaminated waste and equipment from the fabrication of mixed-oxide (MOX) uranium-plutonium fuel. These are often referred to as transuranic wastes. Finally, as noted in Chap. 4, most spent MOX fuel will probably be disposed of without reprocessing. A careful analysis of France’s reprocessing program found that the volume of reprocessing and MOX-fuel production wastes plus spent MOX fuel that would have to be emplaced in a repository and the volume of the underground galleries that would be required for their emplacement are comparable to the corresponding volumes that would have been required for disposal of the unreprocessed spent fuel. Which volume is less depends upon detailed assumptions about packaging (Fig. 7.3). The volume of the repository tunnels depends more on the heat output from the packages than on their volumes. This is because the rock or clay surrounding the

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7 Deep Disposal of Spent Fuel Without Reprocessing Volume of packaged waste (m3) per ton of spent fuel

Excavated volume (m3) per ton of spent fuel

3.5

70

3.0

60

2.5

50

2.0

40

1.5

30

1.0

20

0.5

10

0

0

Fig. 7.3 Comparison of waste and repository volumes for reprocessing and direct disposal of spent fuel. The volumes of the waste packages are shown at the left and the volumes of the associated underground “gallery” space on the right. The comparison labeled “2004” is based on French industry assumptions, including that the spent-fuel rods would be disposed of in the assemblies used in the reactor. The comparison labeled “variation” assumes that the fuel assemblies would be disassembled so that the rods could be packed into a more compact configuration. It will be seen that, for the first assumption, the total volume of the waste packages when spent fuel is disposed of without reprocessing would be about 30% more than for the volume of reprocessing waste and spent MOX and recycled uranium fuel, and, with the second assumption, it would be about 75% less. “Structural” waste is leached fuel cladding, and “technological” waste is other waste material that has been contaminated with long-lived radioactivity during reprocessing and MOX fuel fabrication. (Schneider and Marignac)23

waste must be kept below temperatures at which its ability to contain radioactivity would be degraded. In the case of clay, which has to stay wet to be impermeable, the surface temperature of the waste package must be below the boiling temperature of water. This limits the amount of high-level waste or spent fuel that can be placed in a single container. As shown in Fig. 7.3, the tunnel volume required for spent MOX fuel is comparable to that for the original amount of unreprocessed spent low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel despite the fact that only about 1 ton of MOX fuel is produced for every 8 tons of LEU spent fuel reprocessed. The reason is that spent MOX fuel contains about 5% plutonium versus the approximately 1% in spent LEU fuel24 and, after 50 to 100 years, the heat output of spent fuel is dominated by the decay of plutonium and the Am-241 into which Pu-241 decays with a half-life of 14 years (Figs. 7.4 and 7.5). Therefore, if spent MOX fuel is disposed of in geological repositories—as is likely, given the commercial failure of fast-neutron reactors—any repository space-saving effect due to reprocessing will be nullified. Areva, the failed predecessor of Orano, the government-owned company that now operates France’s reprocessing and MOX-fuel-fabrication facilities, admitted as much in an economic analysis that it commissioned for a proposed reprocessing plant in the United States: “Disposal of used MOX in Yucca Mountain is not considered a viable option because it would almost entirely eliminate the repository optimization benefits [of reprocessing].”25

7.3 Can Reprocessing Significantly Reduce …

Decay heat (Watts/tonU)

1,000

131

GWd/MTIHM PWR Fuel Spent50 LWR fuel (50Spent MWt-days/kgU burnup)

Fission Products

Actinide andand Fission Product Decay Transuranic Fission Product DecayHeat Heat

Total

Actinides Transuranics 137m 238

Ba

Pu

100 90

Sr

137

241

Cs

90

Y

Am

240 239

10 10

100

Pu

1,000

Pu

10,000

Time after discharge (Years)

Fig. 7.4 Long-term radioactive-decay heat is dominated by transuranics. Shown here are the contributions to the decay heat of a ton of spent low-enriched fuel from fission products and transuranic elements—mostly plutonium and americium-241. Am-241 is a decay product of plutonium-241, which has a half-life of only 14 years. At 10 years, the decay heat from the fission products is dominated by cesium-137 and strontium-90, which both have half-lives of about 30 years, and by their short-lived decay products, barium-137 m and yttrium-90, respectively. If spent fuel were buried after about 50 years of cooling, the contributions of the fission products and the transuranics would be comparable. After about 200 years, the fission-product decay heat is relatively insignificant. (Argonne National Laboratory)26

Fig. 7.5 Spent MOX generates more radioactive-decay heat than LEU fuel. Because of the larger quantity of plutonium and other transuranics that it contains, the radioactive decay heat of MOX declines much more slowly than that of LEU spent fuel. At 50 years, the ratio between the heat generation rate of MOX and LEU fuel per ton is approximately a factor of 3 and, after 150 years, it is a factor of 5. This means that a disposal container of a given size can only hold one third to one fifth as much spent MOX as LEU fuel before its surface temperature becomes too hot in a repository. The spent MOX fuel therefore requires three to five times more space per ton in a repository than does spent LEU fuel. (Authors)27

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Figure 7.4 shows the dominance of the transuranics in the long-term radioactive decay heat output of spent fuel. The comparison of the decay heat of spent MOX fuel and spent LEU fuel in Fig. 7.5 explains why the repository space-saving effect will be lost with the likely disposal of the spent MOX fuel in the repository. Advocates of fast-neutron reactors have argued that the size of a repository could be dramatically reduced if all of the transuranic elements were removed and completely fissioned by repeated recycle in fast-neutron reactors, leaving only fission products to be buried.28 This is supposed to be important because, as noted above, the contribution to the decay heat from fission products declines much more rapidly than that from the transuranic elements. As pointed out earlier, however, given the economic failure of fast-neutron reactors and the difficulties of separating and making fuels out of the transuranic elements, this scenario could only be realized at huge extra cost. This is why the development of fast-neutron reactors is of interest today primarily to the reactor-development laboratories. Some governments are willing to continue to fund design work on fastneutron reactors and occasionally build a prototype, but no government or nuclear utility has been willing to build fast-neutron reactors in the numbers that would be required to fission the transuranics accumulating in their spent fuel. As Yoshiaki Oka, the chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, observed, The era where those that receive research funds...decide policy is over [in other areas. Unfortunately,] such a way of thinking is still seen among people involved in nuclear power. The voices arguing that light-water reactors will be replaced by fast reactors or that reduction of harmfulness of radioactive wastes is possible come mainly from research institutions. When, as in Japan, there are companies that rely on government research and development funds, the voices of the two work in tandem…Proponents tend to justify their research and development work in order to obtain research and development funds…After having conducted research for many years, attachment [to the project] grows and sometimes one ends up not realizing that the conclusions have been determined by likes and dislikes. Likes and dislikes are like love and cannot be debated [logically].29

Graphs such as Fig. 7.4 are also used by reprocessing advocates to argue that the transuranics dominate the long-term hazard from deeply buried spent fuel. But, as has been explained in the discussion of Fig. 7.2, the hazard on the surface is determined by the solubility of radioisotopes as well as their radioactivity, and the transuranics are much less soluble in deep groundwater than some of the other longlived radioisotopes in spent fuel.

7.4 Hazards of Reprocessing Reprocessing advocates focus on the potential long-term hazard of radioactivity leaking from spent fuel in a deep repository. But liquid high-level wastes from reprocessing are created on the surface and the hazard they pose while there is potentially much greater.

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In fact, the first major nuclear accident that required relocation of a population from a large area was an explosion in a tank of liquid high-level waste at a Soviet reprocessing plant in 1957. The accident is not well known because it was kept secret for two decades until it was revealed in 1976 by dissident Soviet scientist and historian Zhores Medvedev.30 By that time, it was history, not news. As of 2018, this was still the most serious reprocessing accident in history. Western intelligence agencies must have known about this major nuclear accident. It has been speculated that they did not make it public because they feared that the information would encourage opposition to plutonium separation in the West’s nuclear-weapon programs.31 They may have been correct. Three decades later, the Chernobyl accident, involving a Soviet reactor whose design was derived from Soviet plutonium-production reactors whose designs were in turn based on the original US plutonium-production reactors, resulted in the shutdown of the last two US plutonium-production reactors, in large part because they too did not have modern safety systems.32 The 1957 accident occurred at the Soviet Union’s first reprocessing plant, located in the Urals near the village of Kyshtym. As with all reprocessing sites, the Kyshtym plant had huge tanks for storing the concentrated solution of fission products and

SCHEMATIC MAP OF DENSITY CONTAMINATION BY STRONTIUM-90 (ON 1997) OF THE TERRITORIES OF THE SOUTHERN URALS REGION Kamyshlov

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other radionuclides that remain from the dissolution of spent fuel after the uranium and plutonium have been extracted. In September 1957, the cooling system of one of the high-level-waste tanks failed. The failure was not noticed and the tank boiled dry. The residues of the nitric acid used to dissolve the irradiated uranium, in combination with the residues of the organic solvent that had been used to separate the plutonium and uranium from the solution, formed an explosive mixture. Its explosion released the energy equivalent of up to 100 tons of TNT and dispersed a large amount of radioactivity, including about 5 megacuries (185 petabecquerels, or PBq) of 30-year half-life strontium-90.35 The explosion contaminated a downwind area of about 1,000 km2 to a level greater than 2 curies of strontium-90 per km2 (Fig. 7.6).36 This is about the same size as the area of long-term population relocation that resulted from the 2011 Fukushima accident. Fortunately, the long narrow area (about 140 km long) contaminated by the plume missed nearby cities and towns. Still, about 10,000 people were evacuated from villages in the “Urals trace.” Strontium-90 is less of an external hazard than the cesium-137, which was the primary cause of relocation in Fukushima, but it is a greater internal hazard if ingested in food. It has a chemistry similar to calcium’s, which makes it a “bone seeker.” It therefore has a long biological half-life in the body and delivers a correspondingly magnified radiation dose to the bone marrow.37 In 1979, three years after the Kyshtym accident became known in the West, an international group of independent analysts was convened by Ernst Albrecht, premier of the German state of Lower Saxony, to assess the safety of the design of the reprocessing plant that Germany’s utilities proposed to build near the town of Gorleben. After digesting the group’s critique, Albrecht agreed to construction of the plant, but only if two design conditions could be met: passively safe storage of the spent fuel that was to be delivered to the site and no storage of liquid high-level waste.38 The utilities decided not to build the reprocessing plant there, and the site ultimately became an interim-storage site for spent fuel and for vitrified (glassified) high-level waste from the reprocessing of German spent fuel in France and the United Kingdom. Vitrification equipment often breaks down, and the operators of hugely costly reprocessing plants are reluctant to shut down the separations process when that happens. All existing plants are therefore designed with tanks capable of holding very large quantities of high-level waste in liquid form. Japan’s Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant, for example, has two tanks for high-level liquid waste. If filled to capacity with liquid reprocessing waste from five-year-old spent fuel, each would have an inventory of about 1,000 PBq of cesium-137, comparable to the amount in a densepacked spent-fuel-storage pool.39 The release of Cs-137 from the Chernobyl accident was about 85 PBq.40 A dry-out of a high-level-waste tank is not the only scenario that can lead to an explosion in a reprocessing plant. A layer of “red oil” can form in a tank as a result of nitric acid reacting with organic solvent under the influence of the intense radiation from the fission products and can explode if overheated.41 Red oil also can form in process tanks where solvents are introduced to separate plutonium and uranium from

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Fig. 7.7 Damage from 1993 red-oil explosion in the Seversk military reprocessing plant. The explosion occurred after nitric acid was poured into a tank containing organic solvent and residual fission products. In the absence of mixing, the solvent had floated to the top, and an autocatalytic reaction occurred between the solvent and acid that resulted in overpressurization of the tank, a release of hot gas and droplets into the air above it, and then an explosion. (IAEA)42

the dissolved spent fuel or in the evaporators where high-level waste is concentrated to reduce its volume. In fact, there have been a number of red-oil explosions at reprocessing plants. As of 2018, the most serious was in 1993 at the Seversk military reprocessing plant in Russia, near the city of Tomsk in western Siberia. The explosion blew out the side of the reprocessing building (Fig. 7.7). Fortunately, the concentration of radioactivity in the tank was low and the release of Cs-137 was only about 0.003% as large as the Fukushima release.43

7.5 Conclusions Even in the absence of an accident, the environmental benefits from reprocessing are small to nonexistent. One accident at a reprocessing plant already has contaminated an area orders of magnitude larger than that which would be affected by leakage from a failed deep spent-fuel repository.

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Endnotes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

R. Bari et al., “Proliferation Risk Reduction Study of Alternative Spent Fuel Processing” (paper presented at the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management 50th annual meeting, Tucson, Arizona, USA, 12–16, July 2009), accessed 2 March 2019, https://www.bnl.gov/isd/documents/70289.pdf. New Nuclear Policy-Planning Council, “Interim Report Concerning the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Policy,” trans. Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, 12 November 2004, accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.cnic.jp/english/ topics/policy/chokei/longterminterim.html. Edwin S. Lyman and Harold A. Feiveson, “The Proliferation Risks of Plutonium Mines,” Science & Global Security 7, no. 1 (1998): 119–128, accessed 16 January 2019, http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs07lyman.pdf. “Plutonium Story: Reliable Friend, Pluto Boy,” planned and directed by Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation and produced by Sanwa Clean, Tokyo, 1993 (in Japanese); Thomas W. Lippman, “Pluto Boy’s Mission: Soften the Reaction,” Washington Post, 7 March 1994, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/03/07/plutoboys-mission-soften-the-reaction/e3832c8f-56aa-49a3-9695-dbcfd517ce27/? utm_term=.a1b8a42ff468. National Research Council, Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separations and Transmutation (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1996), Chap. 4, accessed 16 January 2019, doi:org/https://doi.org/10.17226/4912. “Minutes of the 38th Nuclear Regulation Authority Meeting of 2015,” 2 November 2015 (in Japanese), accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.nsr.go.jp/data/ 000129463.pdf. SKB (Svensk K¨arnbr¨anslehantering AB), “A Repository for Nuclear Fuel That Is Placed in 1.9 Billion Years Old Rock,” accessed 16 January 2019, http:// www.skb.com/future-projects/the-spent-fuel-repository/. International Panel on Fissile Materials, “Diverging Recommendations on Sweden’s Spent Nuclear Fuel Repository,” IPFM Blog, 23 January 2018, accessed 15 February 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/blog/2018/01/diverging_ recommendations.html. SKB, Long-Term Safety for the Final Repository for Spent Nuclear Fuel at Forsmark: Main Report of the SR-Site Project, Volume 3, TR-11-01, 2011, Fig. 13–63, accessed 16 January 2019, http://skb.se/upload/publications/pdf/ TR-11-01_vol3.pdf. With regard to the other radioisotopes shown: cesium-137, strontium-90, selenium-79, technetium-99, cesium-135, and tin-126 (Sn-126) are fission products; silver-108 m (Ag-108 m), chlorine-36, nickel-59, nickel63 and niobium-94 are the products of neutron absorption by stable isotopes in the fuel and its cladding; americium-241 is a decay product of plutonium-241; and neptunium-237 and americium-243 result from multiple neutron captures starting on uranium-235 and uranium-238, respectively.

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10. Boris B.M. Melloni, “Lung Cancer in Never-Smokers: Radon Exposure and Environmental Tobacco Smoke,” European Respiratory Journal 44, no. 4 (October 2014): 850–852, accessed 7 March 2019, https://doi.org/10.1183/ 09031936.00121314. 11. The SKB repository is to contain about 12,000 tons of uranium in spent fuel in an area of 3–4 km2 . The copper canisters are about 5 m high and would be emplaced in vertical holes in the bottoms of the tunnels. SKB, “Repository for Nuclear Fuel.” For a density of granite of 2.65 tons per cubic meter, this would correspond to an average density of uranium of 260 parts per million by weight in a layer of granite 3.5 km2 in area and 5 m thick. 12. Yongsoo Hwang and Ian Miller, “Integrated Model of Korean Spent Fuel and High Level Waste Disposal Options,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Environmental Remediation and Radioactive Waste Management, Liverpool, UK, October 11–15, 2009, paper no. ICEM2009-16091, 733– 740. At 100,000 years, Hwang and Miller found that the dominant doses were from radon-222, radium-226, and thorium-230, all decay products of U-238; actinium-231 and protactinium-231, decay products of U-235; Th-229, a decay product of neptunium-237, a transuranic; and technetium-99, a fission product. 13. Quoted to one of the authors (von Hippel) by a State Department official. 14. Multiple cycles would be required because only about 20% of the transuranics would be fissioned in a single pass. National Research Council, Nuclear Wastes, Table 4–2 for the case of a breeding ratio of 0.65. 15. National Research Council, Nuclear Wastes, 33. 16. In 2016, Areva reprocessed 983 tons of spent fuel. ASN (Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire), Rapport de l’ASN sur l’État de la Sûreté Nucléaire et de la Radioprotection en France en 2017, 2018, 381, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.asn.fr/annual_report/2017fr/. Assuming that the fission energy released in that spent fuel averaged 43–53 megawatt-days per kilogram, the corresponding number of fissions in that fuel would have been 1.07–1.31 × 1029 with about 55% of the fissions being of U-235 and most of the rest being of Pu-239. OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Plutonium Fuel: An Assessment (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1989), Table 9, accessed 27 January 2019, https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/ 1989/nea6519-plutonium-fuel.pdf. The average fission yields of I-129 from U-235 and Pu-239 fissions caused by “thermal” (slow) neutrons are 0.71 and 1.41%, respectively, for a weighted average of 1.02%. The fissions in the 983 tons of spent fuel would therefore yield 1.09–1.34 × 1027 atoms (234–288 kg) of I-129 or, measured by their radioactivity, 1.6–1.9 terabecquerels (TBq). AREVA (Orano) has reported that, in 2016, its reprocessing plant at La Hague discharged 1.44 TBq of I-129 into the Atlantic Ocean. Rapport d’information du site Orano la Hague, Édition 2017, 51, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www. orano.group/docs/default-source/orano-doc/groupe/publications-reference/ document-home/rapport-tsn-la-hague-2017.pdf?sfvrsn=2325ae4f_6. 17. In 2016, Areva’s (Orano’s) plant at La Hague released to the atmosphere 19.1 TBq of carbon-14. Rapport d’information du site Orano la Hague, 47. This

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

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is an order of magnitude larger than the estimate in the endnote above of the amount of I-129 in the spent fuel reprocessed that year. According to the SKB study, measured by radioactivity, the inventory of C-14 in the spent fuel in Sweden’s repository will be about 40 times the inventory of I-129. SKB, LongTerm Safety, Volume 1, Table 5.4. This suggests that Orano releases into the atmosphere about 25% of the C-14 inventory in the spent fuel it reprocesses. ASN, “Avis no. 2013-AV-0187 de l’Authorité de sûreté nucléaire du 4 July 2013 sur la transmutation des elements radioactifs à vie longue,” 16 July 2013, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.asn.fr/Reglementer/Bulletin-officielde-l-ASN/Installations-nucleaires/Avis/Avis-n-2013-AV-0187-de-l-ASN-du4-juillet-2013. Carbon-14 is produced from the nitrogen-14 in air trapped in the fuel when a neutron knocks out and replaces a proton in the N-14 nucleus, converting a stable nitrogen nucleus containing seven protons and seven neutrons into a carbon nucleus containing six protons and eight neutrons with a radioactive half-life of 5,600 years. Radiochemists group the transuranics as “actinides” in the periodic table because they all have the same number of electrons as actinium in the populated shell with the highest quantum number (7 s) and different numbers in two lower shells (5f and 6d). Electrons in all three shells have similar binding energies, however, and participate in determining the elements’ variety of chemical valences and crystal structures. Yoshiaki Oka, “Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Plutonium, Fast Reactor, Reduction of Harmfulness,” Japan Atomic Energy Mail Magazine, 20 July 2018 (in Japanese), accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.aec.go.jp/jicst/NC/melmaga/2018-0250. html. Reprocessed uranium is somewhat more neutron-absorbing and radioactive than natural uranium because of the presence of the reactor-produced isotopes, U236 (half-life, 23 million years) and U-232 (half-life, 70 years), respectively. As of 2007, some was being enriched or blended with enriched uranum and recycled but a large fraction was being stored with no alternative plans for disposal. International Atomic Energy Agency, Use of Reprocessed Uranium: Challenges and Options, 2009, accessed 10 February 2019, https://www-pub. iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1411_web.pdf. Adapted from Mycle Schneider and Yves Marignac, Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing in France, International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2008, Fig. 16, accessed 16 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr04.pdf. OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Plutonium Fuel, Tables 9 and 12 for spent fuel with a burnup of about 43 MWt/kgU. Boston Consulting Group, Economic Assessment of Used Nuclear Fuel Management in the United States, 2006, 20, accessed 16 January 2019, http://www. nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/proliferation/fuelcycle/Economic_Assessment_Used_Nuclear_Fuel_Mgmt_US_Jul2006[1]. pdf.

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26. Adapted from Roald A. Wigeland et al., “Spent Nuclear Fuel Separations and Transmutation Criteria for Benefit to a Geologic Repository” in Proceedings of Waste Management Conference ‘04, February 29 – March 4, 2004, Tucson, Arizona. There is a black-and-white version of this figure in the Nuclear Technology article cited below. 27. Calculations done by Jungmin Kang, for 43 MWt-day/kg burnup spent fuel. The LEU fuel was assumed to be initially 3.7% enriched and the MOX fuel was assumed to initially contain 7% plutonium extracted from 43 MWt-day/kg spent LEU fuel after ten years of cooling. OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, Plutonium Fuel, Tables 9 and 12. 28. Roald A. Wigeland et al., “Spent Nuclear Fuel Separations and Transmutation Criteria for Benefit to a Geologic Repository” in Proceedings of Waste Management Conference ‘04, February 29 – March 4, 2004, Tucson, Arizona. There is a black-and-white version of this figure in the Nuclear Technology article cited below. 29. Oka, “Nuclear Fuel Cycle.” 30. Zhores Medvedev, “Two Decades of Dissidence,” New Scientist, 4 November 1976, 276. Medvedev published a more complete account three years later. Zhores Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, trans. George Saunders (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979). 31. Thomas Rabl, “The Nuclear Disaster of Kyshtym 1957 and the Politics of the Cold War,” Arcadia (2012), no. 20, accessed 16 January 2019, https://doi.org/ 10.5282/rcc/4967. 32. “Six-Month Safety Shutdown of Hanford’s N Reactor,” United Press International, 11 December 1986, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.upi.com/ Archives/1986/12/11/Six-month-safety-shutdown-of-Hanfords-N-Reactor/ 7261534661200/; Keith Schneider, “Severe Accidents at Nuclear Plant Were Kept Secret Up to 31 Years,” New York Times, 1 October 1988, accessed 7 March 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/01/us/severe-accidents-atnuclear-plant-were-kept-secret-up-to-31-years.html. The latter article focused on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site. The last Hanford reactor was shut down in January 1987 and the last Savannah River reactor in June 1988. 33. Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority, “The Kyshtym Accident, 29th September 1957,” NRPA Bulletin, September 2007, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www.nrpa.no/filer/397736ba75.pdf. 34. Figure from L.M. Peremyslova et al., Analytical Review of Data Available for the Reconstruction of Doses Due to Residence on the East Ural Radioactive Trace and the Territory of Windblown Contamination from Lake Karachay, USRussian Joint Coordinating Committee on Radiation Effects Research, September 2004, Figure 1, accessed 3 March 2019, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ 58aa/870b2cb0589089a0ed2b36be4a923fa0066f.pdf. 35. A curie is the amount of radioactivity in a gram of radium, 37 billion disintegrations per second, or 37 gigabecquerels. Five megacuries therefore is the radioactivity of 5 tons of radium (185 PBq).

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36. Thomas B. Cochran, Robert S. Norris, and Oleg A. Bukharin, Making the Russian Bomb: From Stalin to Yeltsin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 109– 113. 37. A.V. Akleyev et al. “Consequences of the Radiation Accident at the Mayak Production Association in 1957 (the ‘Kyshtym Accident’),” Journal of Radiological Protection 37, no. 3 (2017) R19-R42, accessed 16 January 2019, http:// iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6498/aa7f8d/meta. 38. Ernst Albrecht, “Concerning the Proposed Nuclear Fuel Center,” in Debate: Lower Saxony Symposium on the Feasibility of a Fundamentally Safe Integrated Nuclear Waste Management Center, 28-31 March and 3 April 1979, Deutsches Atomforum e.V., 16 May 1979, 343-347 (in German), accessed 9 March 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/de79.pdf. An English translation of Albrecht’s statement may be found at http://fissilematerials.org/library/de79ae.pdf. 39. Each of the tanks has a capacity of 120 m3 , and each cubic meter is expected to contain the high-level waste from 2.5 tons of spent fuel. Gordon Thompson, Radiological Risk at Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Plants (2013), Appendix B, “Rokkasho Site,” 13, accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.academia.edu/12471966/Radiological_Risk_at_ Nuclear_Fuel_Reprocessing_Plants_Appendix_B_Rokkasho_Site_2013. 40. UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR 2000: Summary of Low-Dose Radiation Effects on Health (New York: United Nations, 2000), Annex J, para. 23, accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.unscear.org/ docs/publications/2000/UNSCEAR_2000_Annex-J.pdf. 41. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Plutonium Separation in Nuclear Power Programs: Status, Problems, and Prospects of Civilian Reprocessing Around the World, 2015, Chap. 12, “Radiological Risk,” accessed 15 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr14.pdf. 42. International Atomic Energy Agency, Radiological Accident, 22 (see endnote 43). 43. The release at Tomsk was about 0.02 PBq, about 2 percent of which was cesium-137. International Atomic Energy Agency, The Radiological Accident in the Reprocessing Plant at Tomsk (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1998), 20, accessed 16 January 2019, https://www-pub.iaea.org/ MTCD/Publications/PDF/P060_scr.pdf. The release of cesium-137 to the atmosphere in the Fukushima accident was 6-20 PBq. UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR 2013 Report: Sources, Effects and Risks of Ionizing Radiation (New York: United Nations, 2014), Volume 1, Scientific Annex A, “Levels and Effects of Radiation Exposure Due to the Nuclear Accident after the 2011 Great East-Japan Earthquake and Tsunami,” 6, accessed 16 January 2019, http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2013/1385418_Report_2013_Annex_A.pdf.

Chapter 8

The Case for a Ban on Plutonium Separation

The previous chapters have described the history of reprocessing, starting with its role in the US World War II effort that produced the plutonium-based nuclear bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. After the war, military plutonium-production reactors and reprocessing plants became central elements in virtually all nuclear-weapon programs while plutonium separation and breeder reactors became central to the dream of a future powered by nuclear energy. Breeder reactors were unable to compete economically with conventional nuclear-power reactors, however, and conventional nuclear power capacity, instead of growing exponentially, plateaued. As a result, there is no longer any foreseeable prospect of a uranium-fuel shortage, the problem that breeders were supposed to solve. On the nightmare side, there was the question that had already been recognized by the scientists in the US World War II nuclear-weapon program and that was central to the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report: Can we spread separated plutonium without spreading the bomb? India’s 1974 nuclear test, using plutonium separated for a nominally civilian breeder program, suggested the answer. Fortunately, the strength of international political support for the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty and quick action by the United States to block further sales of reprocessing technology discouraged other countries from using civilian plutonium programs as a route to nuclear weapons. And, at least so far, the feared rise of nuclear terrorism fueled by plutonium stolen from civilian fuel facilities has not been realized. Despite the lack of economic or other justification, however, as of 2018, plutonium separation for civilian purposes continued in five nuclear-armed states (China, France, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom) and Japan, a non-nuclear-armed state. Stocks of separated civilian plutonium were continuing to grow. Global stocks of uniradiated civilian plutonium—about 300 tons in 2019—would supply the equivalent of only three weeks of global electricity production if they were made into mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel.1 If diverted, however, only 1% of that same plutonium would be sufficient for hundreds of Nagasaki bombs. After half a century of attempts by eight major countries (China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to develop fast breeder reactors, only Russia, has succeeded technically in operating fast-neutron © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 F. von Hippel et al., Plutonium, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9901-5_8

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reactors—although not as breeder reactors and not economically. India and China are continuing to build breeder-reactor prototypes. The United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom have abandoned their plutonium programs. France shut down its failed breeder prototype in 1998 but continues with its plutonium-separation program, using the plutonium in MOX fuel for light-waterreactors (LWRs). Economically, the program is pointless and wasteful. The MOX fuel costs several times more than the low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel that it is replacing. Nevertheless, Japan aspires to follow France’s example. Although their radioactive-waste experts say that it would make no significant difference to the risk from a radioactive-waste repository, the French and Japanese reprocessing establishments justify continuing with plutonium recycle by arguing that plutonium is too environmentally dangerous to put into a repository. They are trying to obtain funding to build fast-neutron reactors that could fission the isotopes of plutonium and other transuranic elements that LWRs cannot fission efficiently. If separating plutonium from the spent fuel produced by civilian nuclear reactors makes no economic or environmental sense and brings with it the dangers of nuclearweapon proliferation and terrorism, why not end it? In fact, for a quarter of a century, there has been a closely related effort to ban the separation of plutonium and production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) for weapons purposes. This chapter reviews the history of that effort and the efforts to go further to eliminate the use of HEU as a reactor fuel and to limit the sizes of stocks of separated civilian plutonium. Finally, it discusses the possibility of and obstacles to achieving a ban on the separation of plutonium for all purposes.

8.1 A Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty In 1993, the UN General Assembly called for “negotiation in the most appropriate international forum of a non-discriminatory, multilateral and internationally and effectively verifiable treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”2 In practice, the only fissile materials that have been used in nuclear weapons are HEU and plutonium.3 The Conference on Disarmament (CD) and its predecessor bodies have negotiated the various multinational arms-control treaties that we have today: the Nonproliferation Treaty (1968), the Biological Weapons Convention (1972), the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993), and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (1996). Along with other UN offices and meetings, the CD is located in Geneva, in the Palais des Nations complex, originally built in the 1930s for the League of Nations, the predecessor of today’s United Nations (Fig. 8.1). Although the CD was busy working on the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty until 1996, Canada’s ambassador to the CD, Gerald Shannon, was asked to consult with his colleagues and prepare recommendations for how the body could proceed with negotiations on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). In March 1995, Shannon reported back that there were divisions among CD member countries over the scope of a treaty. The original five nuclear-weapon states (the

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Fig. 8.1 Conference on Disarmament in the Council Chamber of the Palais des Nations being addressed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 23 February 2018. (United Nations)4

United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China), which are also the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and therefore known collectively as “the P5,” wanted the treaty to be limited to the General Assembly’s mandate: a ban on the production of additional fissile material for weapons. This would at least cap the number of nuclear weapons each nuclear-armed state could produce. Many non-nuclear-weapon states, suspecting that the P5 were less interested in nuclear disarmament than in keeping other countries out of the nuclear-weapon club, wanted to go further. They pointed out that, with the end of the Cold War, the P5 had already stopped producing fissile materials for weapons and that, furthermore, Russia and the United States possessed huge stocks of excess fissile materials as a result of deep post-Cold War cuts in their weapon stockpiles. Those countries, together with nuclear-disarmament activists, wanted to go beyond a freeze and push for irreversible reductions in existing stocks of fissile materials available for weapons. Shannon recommended that these issues be worked out in the negotiations— specifically, that the CD establish an Ad Hoc Committee to negotiate an FMCT with a mandate that “does not preclude any delegation from raising for consideration in the [A]d Hoc Committee any of the above noted issues.”5 However, as of 2018, the CD had a membership of 65 governments,6 and, under its rules, “The Conference shall conduct its work and adopt its decisions by consensus.”7 Thus, any country among the 65 can block a plan of action if it wishes and, in fact, a series of such objections had blocked negotiations on an FMCT for more than two decades.8

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Consensus was blocked initially by a disagreement within the P5. China and Russia were worried that the US defenses against ballistic missiles might over time develop to the point of being able to block their surviving nuclear missiles after a hypothetical US first strike. The two countries therefore insisted on parallel negotiations on a Treaty on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space. The United States, however, was opposed to negotiating any additional constraints on its military activities in space.9 In 2003, after almost a decade of impasse, China and Russia dropped their demand for linkage between the two negotiations. But then Pakistan began to block a consensus. Pakistan made a number of arguments, but the underlying issue appeared to be that it did not want to be locked into a situation of inferiority to India with regard to its stock of separated plutonium.10 Plutonium, because of its smaller critical mass, allows lighter warheads than the HEU Pakistan used in its first nuclear warheads. Lighter warheads can be delivered by smaller, more mobile, and more easily hidden missiles. As of the end of 2016, in addition to an estimated 0.6 tons of weapons plutonium, India had separated about 6 tons of reactor-grade plutonium for its breeder program. Between 1998 and 2015, Pakistan brought online four military plutonium-production reactors, but they were less numerous and of lower power than the power reactors India was using to produce the plutonium for its breeder program. As of the end of 2018, Pakistan’s estimated stock of weapons plutonium therefore was about 0.4 tons, sufficient for about 100 modern nuclear weapons.11 Although its reactor-grade plutonium is weapon-usable, India is unlikely to use it for weapons.12 Its breeder program could be used, however, to convert reactor-grade into weapon-grade plutonium, and India has raised suspicions that it is interested in that option.13 In 2005, when India made a deal with the United States to place some of its nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards in exchange for access to foreign civilian nuclear technology and uranium, it explicitly ruled out placing under safeguards its prototype breeder reactor and the associated separated plutonium at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research in Kalpakkam in southeast India because of their “strategic” and “national security” significance.14 Pakistan is not the only country to complain about a neighbor’s stockpile of civilian plutonium. China has expressed concerns about Japan’s.15 Even putting aside the more than 37 tons of separated Japanese plutonium stored in France and the United Kingdom, the approximately ten tons of unirradiated plutonium in Japan16 is larger than China’s estimated stockpile of 3 tons of weapons plutonium.17

8.2 Attempts to Limit Stocks of Civilian Plutonium Well before the CD started discussing an FMCT, the United States had made more than one attempt to limit global stocks of uniradiated civilian plutonium.

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In 1977, in the wake of India’s 1974 nuclear test and its own review of the US breeder program, the Carter administration called for an international review, which resulted in an International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) in Vienna. Carter hoped to bring other industrialized countries to the same conclusions that the United States had arrived at: reprocessing and breeder programs were unnecessary, uneconomic, and destabilizing of the nonproliferation regime. The other countries were not persuaded, however, and, the INFCE summary report indicated that each country would proceed with its preexisting fuel cycle plans. In part, the resistance by other industrialized states to giving up their plans for breeder reactors was due to high expectations for the future of nuclear power. INFCE’s analysis of the need for breeder reactors was premised on a projection of 1,450–2,700 gigawatts-electric (GWe)18 of nuclear capacity outside the Communist countries in 2015, then 35 years in the future. This projection turned out to be much higher than the actual realized capacity of 306 GWe in 2015.19 Assumptions about the economics of breeder reactors and reprocessing were similarly optimistic. The next effort to set limits on civilian plutonium stocks occurred during the 1990s in a series of closed meetings between representatives of the United States and eight countries with civilian plutonium programs over a period of five years, ending in 1997. The countries involved were Belgium, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These meetings resulted in agreed “Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium”20 mentioned in Chap. 4. The most the group could agree to with regard to limiting stocks, however, was “the importance of balancing supply and demand, including demand for reasonable working stocks for nuclear operations, as soon as practical.”21 Over the next two decades, the United Kingdom demonstrated how far this guideline could be stretched by increasing its stock of separated plutonium by another 60 tons—7,500 weapon-equivalents by the IAEA’s metric—with no planned use. During this period, the UK stockpile of separated plutonium grew at an average rate of about 3 tons per year. Each of those average annual increments was roughly equal to the total UK stock of military plutonium, including that in its nuclear weapons.22 Russia, also without a near-term plutonium-use program, similarly increased its stock by another 30 tons while France and Japan, despite having plutonium-use programs, each also increased their stock by about 30 tons.23

8.3 Parallel Efforts to Limit HEU Use Progress toward the elimination of civilian use of HEU is somewhat more advanced. Already in the late 1970s, at the INFCE meetings, while there was strong pushback from breeder advocates to the US proposal for ending plutonium separation and use, a consensus developed that it would be desirable to move away from HEU as the standard fuel for civilian research reactors:

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“The trade in and widespread use of highly enriched uranium and the production of fissile materials constitute proliferation risks with which INFCE is concerned. Proliferation resistance can be increased by: 1. Enrichment [level] reduction preferably to 20% or less which is internationally recognized to be a fully adequate isotopic barrier to weapons usability of 235 U; 2. Reduction of stockpiles of highly enriched uranium…”24

Al Qaeda attack on World Trade Center

This consensus was achieved despite widespread opposition to conversion to LEU fuel among the operators of HEU-fueled research reactors. As a result of INFCE, the United States and Soviet Union launched programs to convert the research reactors outside their borders to which they were supplying HEU fuel. The United States also began to convert its own research reactors. Finally, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States provided Russia with funds to extend the Soviet conversion program to the non-Russian former Soviet republics. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, concerns about the possibility of nuclear terrorism spread into the larger body politic in the United States. Congress increased the budgets for research-reactor conversion and for retrieval of fresh and spent HEU fuel from low-security research-reactor sites, with annual appropriations rising from $7 million in fiscal year 2000 to a peak of $172 million in 2014 (Fig. 8.2). The growth in the program’s funding was due to a group of supporters in Congress, but President Barack Obama obtained high-level support in other countries by launching what became a series of four Nuclear Security Summits. Each was attended by the leaders of more than 50 nations. These leaders were invited to make commitments, or deliver on previous commitments to take actions such as returning unirradiated HEU fuel to the United States and Russia. As of 30 September 2017, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) nonproliferation program claimed that 100 HEU-fueled research reactors had been converted to LEU or shut down worldwide and about 6 tons of HEU had been retrieved from foreign countries since the beginning of the program.25 Cumulatively, as of the end

Fig. 8.2 US DOE funding for converting HEU-fueled research reactors to LEU increased dramatically after the terrorist attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001. (US DOE data)26

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Al Qaeda attack on World Trade Center

50 Eisenhower Atoms for Peace Speech

Countries with 1 kg or more of HEU

8.3 Parallel Efforts to Limit HEU Use

0 1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

Fig. 8.3 Number of countries with more than 1 kg of HEU. The number increased rapidly after President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace speech at the United Nations as a result of US and Soviet exports of HEU-fueled research reactors. Half a century later, it dropped almost as rapidly as a result of the ramped-up US program for converting research reactors to LEU following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. (The jump in 1991 was due to the breakup of the Soviet Union.) (IPFM updated)27

of 2018, 33 countries plus Taiwan had been cleared of HEU down to a level of less than 1 kg (Fig. 8.3). The last frontier in the battle against the use of HEU as a fuel is naval reactors. France and China fuel their naval reactors with LEU, but the United States and the United Kingdom use weapon-grade uranium, and Russia and India use mostly medium-enriched but weapon-usable uranium.28

8.4 A Ban on Plutonium Separation In 2018, the United Kingdom was finally ending its reprocessing program. In China, France, India, Japan, and Russia, however, advocates of reprocessing and fast-neutron reactors could be expected to be just as hostile to a proposal to end civilian reprocessing as their predecessors were four decades earlier at INFCE. The situation in 2018 was different, however. The combined stocks of separated civilian plutonium in France, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom had reached almost 300 tons, with an average rate of net increase over the previous two decades of about 6.5 tons a year. Even without the United Kingdom’s reprocessing, the average rate of increase would have been 3.4 tons—or enough for 400 to 800 nuclear weapons—per year. Global plutonium use was running at about 10 tons per year, almost entirely in France, where the civilian stock of unirradiated plutonium was nevertheless growing by about a ton per year. Given this reality and the continued fading of the hopes for commercial breeder reactors, a ban, or at least a suspension of further

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accumulation of plutonium, should be more difficult to argue against—logically, at least. For most activities that make no sense, outsiders can just watch and wonder and wait until reform eventually brings the practice to an end. Separated plutonium, whether labeled military or civilian, is a direct-use nuclear-weapon material, however, and therefore a global threat. Reducing the separation and use of plutonium should have a priority comparable to that of reducing the production and use of HEU. Unlike HEU, plutonium oxide also could be used in a dispersal device to contaminate a city. For every milligram of reactor-grade plutonium inhaled by a large population, 30–100 cancer cases would be expected to result.29 Would it be possible to clean up an urban area contaminated by plutonium to a level where people would be willing to move back in? The challenge of ending plutonium separation is politically different from that of ending HEU use in research reactors. Converting research reactors to LEU did not require shutting them down. It was only necessary to develop LEU fuel with nearly the same performance as the HEU fuel and then inform research-reactor operators that, after satisfactory completion of studies of the safety of the new fuel in their reactors, HEU fuel would no longer be made available to them. After initial resistance, the process went relatively smoothly. In contrast, a ban on the separation of plutonium for civilian as well as for weapons purposes would require the shutdown of huge reprocessing complexes with thousands of employees. The political challenge is similar to that of shutting down a major military base or government shipyard or nuclear-weapon laboratory. The resistance of the host communities and their political representatives to such proposals is usually so fierce that they are seldom carried out. In the United States, after the end of the Cold War, for example, since no new nuclear weapons were planned, the Clinton administration considered shutting down nuclear-weapon work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of the two US nuclear-weapon-physics laboratories.30 That proved, however, to be too politically difficult to accomplish. In 2017, two decades later, weapons work at Livermore was being funded at a level of about $1.3 billion per year31 and, in constant dollars, the US DOE was spending twice as much on nuclear-weapons work each year as it had on average during the Cold War.32 In the case of reprocessing, however, there is a new mission for the sites: cleanup. In the United States, the projected cost of cleaning up each of the two US Cold War plutonium-production sites has been estimated at over $100 billion and the cleanup duration at about a century.33 In constant dollars, the annual funding levels for these cleanups are equal to the peak funding levels for these same sites during the latter part of the Cold War (1967–1991).34 The estimated cost of cleaning up the United Kingdom’s Sellafield nuclear complex as of 2018 was similarly huge, £91 billion (~$115 billion)35 with an annual expenditure of about £2 billion.36 The seamless transition of the US military plutonium-production reprocessing plants from production to cleanup with no reduction in funding during the 1990s was, in fact, deliberate. A coalition of arms controllers and environmentalists worked to assure that reductions in the site production budgets were offset by increases in

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their cleanup budgets.37 In the case of the Hanford reprocessing plant, a schedule for cleaning up the site was formalized in a long, detailed agreement between Washington state, the US DOE, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.38 The agreement is being enforced by a federal court.39 France and Japan also are engaged in multidecade cleanup efforts at smaller reprocessing sites: • France’s first reprocessing plant, UP1 (“Usine de Plutonium” or “Plutonium Factory”) at Marcoule, which reprocessed primarily gas-cooled-reactor fuel, both military and civilian, shut down in 1997. In 2005, its cleanup cost was estimated by France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) at about $9 billion (2018 $), and the cleanup process was expected to continue until 2040.40 • In Japan, in 2014, the decision was made to decommission the Tokai reprocessing pilot plant, which had been built and operated by the government-funded Japan Atomic Energy Agency and its predecessors. It was estimated that the project would cost more than $9 billion and last more than 70 years.41 These examples show that, once a decision is made to shut down a reprocessing plant, there need not be, for decades, any loss of employment and income for the host community. Making the decision is not so easy, however. In the United States, the decision to end military reprocessing was facilitated by the end of the Cold War. In the United Kingdom, the decision to end civilian reprocessing was forced by the refusal of both foreign and domestic nuclear utilities to renew their reprocessing contracts. And, in France and Japan, decommissioning of the first-generation reprocessing plants was justified by the construction of more-modern industrial-scale reprocessing plants. For France to shut down its currently operating plant or Japan not to operate the nearly complete Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant would require the responsible government bureaucracies to admit that they had been imposing costly and pointless plutonium programs on their countries. A new generation of policy-makers could blame these follies on their predecessors and shut the programs down. By doing so, they could greatly contribute to nonproliferation efforts as the actions of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter did in the 1970s. In addition, they could create huge savings for their own countries. If Japan decides to terminate the Rokkasho project, for example, it could save its electricity ratepayers and taxpayers about a net ¥ 10 trillion ($90 billion).42 Cleanup costs would, unfortunately be incurred in any case since the plant was contaminated by test operations during 2006–2008. In 2018, the Nuclear Reprocessing Organization of Japan estimated that the decommissioning cost would be ¥1.6 trillion (about $14 billion).43 Redirecting the fast-breeder-reactor community would involve an additional challenge. There is a widespread general belief that the future depends on research and development (R&D) and that the technologists have to be trusted to find the most promising avenues of advance.

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Even in the United States, half a century after President Carter mounted a campaign to end plutonium programs, the US DOE continues to fund research groups working on sodium-cooled reactors and reprocessing. As discussed in Chap. 3, during the first term of the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney accepted the claims from the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory that pyroprocessing was proliferation resistant. Argonne then began to collaborate on pyroprocessing R&D with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, greatly complicating the efforts of the US State Department to prevent the spread of reprocessing.44 In 2017, researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory succeeded in getting preliminary congressional backing for construction of a multibillion-dollar sodiumcooled Versatile Test Reactor as a first step toward reviving a US breeder-reactor development program.45 Japan’s fast-neutron-reactor advocates are interested in cooperating with the United States in that area.46 If terrorists steal some plutonium from one of the ongoing civilian plutonium programs and contaminate or destroy a city, or another country uses nominally civilian plutonium to acquire nuclear weapons, the dangers of these programs will become of interest to a broader policy audience. This is what happened in the United States when the shock of India’s 1974 nuclear explosion created the conditions for ending the US nuclear R&D establishment’s promotion of plutonium as the fuel of the future. It would be far better, however, to force an end to the separation of plutonium before a disaster happens. It is our hope that this book will help inform the public and policy-makers about the dangers and lack of benefits from plutonium separation. In our view, it is time to ban the separation of plutonium for any purpose. Endnotes 1.

2. 3.

Three hundred tons of plutonium, if diluted with depleted uranium, would be sufficient for 4,300 tons of MOX fuel containing 7% plutonium. For a burnup of 43 GWt-days/tonMOX, 184 terawatt thermal (TWt)-days of heat would be produced. Assuming a heat-to-electricity conversion factor of onethird, that amount of heat would produce 61 TWe-days or about 1,500 TWehours of electric power. In 2016, global production of electrical power was about 25,000 TWe-hours. International Energy Agency, “Electricity Information 2018 Overview,” accessed 12 February 2019, https://www.iea.org/statistics/ electricity/. UN General Assembly Resolution 48/75, part L, 16 December 1993, accessed 17 January 2019, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r075.htm. U-233, which is produced by neutron absorption on thorium (Th-232) in the same manner that plutonium-239 is produced from uranium-238, is another possible nuclear-weapon material that would be included in the production ban.

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

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“In Geneva, UN Chief Urges New Push to Free World from Nuclear Weapons,” UN News, 26 February 2018, accessed 17 January 2019, https://news.un.org/ en/story/2018/02/1003632. UN Conference on Disarmament, “Report of Ambassador Gerald E. Shannon of Canada on Consultations on the Most Appropriate Arrangement to Negotiate a Treaty Banning the Production of Fissile Material for Nuclear Weapons or Other Nuclear Explosive Devices,” CD/1299, 24 March 1995, accessed 3 March 2019, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G95/610/ 27/PDF/G9561027.pdf?OpenElement. UN Office at Geneva, “Member States,” accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.unog.ch/80256EE600585943/(httpPages)/ 6286395D9F8DABA380256EF70073A846?OpenDocument. UN Office at Geneva, “Rules of Procedure of the Conference on Disarmament,” CD/8/Rev.9, 19 December 2003, para. 18, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B8954/(httpAssets)/ 1F072EF4792B5587C12575DF003C845B/$file/RoP.pdf. Reaching Critical Will, “Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty,” accessed 17 January 2019, http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/resources/fact-sheets/critical-issues/ 4737-fissile-material-cut-off-treaty. The Outer Space Treaty already bans the placement of nuclear weapons in Earth orbit or on celestial bodies. “Elements of a Fissile Material Treaty (FMT),” working paper submitted to the Conference on Disarmament by Pakistan, 21 August 2015, accessed 17 January 2019, http://www.pakistanmission-un.org/2005_Statements/CD/cd/ 20150821.pdf. At the end of 2016, Pakistan had an accumulated stockpile estimated to be about 280 kg of plutonium. International Panel on Fissile Materials, “Pakistan,” 12 February 2018, accessed 17 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/countries/ pakistan.html. We have estimated that an additional 90 kg were produced in 2017 and 2018. India’s reactor-grade plutonium contains about 71% Pu-239. P. K. Dey, “Spent Fuel Reprocessing: An Overview” in Nuclear Fuel Cycle Technologies: Closing the Fuel Cycle, eds. Baldev Raj and Vasudeva Rao (Kalpakkam: Indian Nuclear Society, 2003), pp. IT-14/1 to IT-14/16, Table 1, accessed 17 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/barc03.pdf. Weapon-grade plutonium is usually defined as containing more than 90% Pu-239. Zia Mian et al., Fissile Materials in South Asia: The Implications of the U.S.India Nuclear Deal, International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2006, accessed 30 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr01.pdf. Ministry of External Affairs, “Implementation of the India-United States Joint Statement of July 18, 2005: India’s Separation Plan,” accessed 17 January 2019, http://mea.gov.in/Uploads/PublicationDocs/6145_bilateral-documentsMay-11-2006.pdf. Kentaro Okasaka and Seana K. Magee, “China Slams Japan’s Plutonium Stockpile, Frets About Nuke Armament,” Kyodo, 20 October 2015, accessed

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17 January 2019, https://www.sortirdunucleaire.org/China-slams-Japan-splutonium-stockpile-frets. Cabinet Office, Office of Atomic Energy Policy, Status Report of Plutonium Management in Japan—2017, 31 July 2018, accessed 17 January 2019, http:// www.aec.go.jp/jicst/NC/about/kettei/180731_e.pdf. Hui Zhang, China’s Fissile Material Production and Stockpile, International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2017, accessed 17 January 2019, http:// fissilematerials.org/library/rr17.pdf. International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation: Summary Volume (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1980) Table 1. International Atomic Energy Agency, Energy, Electricity and Nuclear Power Estimates for the Period up to 2050, 2016 Edition (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2016), accessed 17 January 2019, https://www-pub. iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/RDS-1-36Web-28008110.pdf. For perspectives on the development of the guidelines, see “Guidelines for the Management of Civil Plutonium (INFCIRC/549): Overview, Goals and Status” (transcript of a panel from the conference “Civil Separated Plutonium Stocks: Planning for the Future,” Washington, DC, 14–15 March 2000), accessed 17 January 2019, http://isis-online.org/conferences/detail/civil-separatedplutonium-stocks-planning-for-the-future/17. International Atomic Energy Agency, “Communication Received from Certain Member States Concerning Their Policies Regarding the Management of Plutonium,” INFCIRC/549, 16 March 1998, 13, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/infcirc549.pdf. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Global Fissile Material Report 2010: Balancing the Books: Production and Stocks, 2010, Table 5.5, accessed 17 January 2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/gfmr10.pdf. See International Atomic Energy Agency, “Communication Received from Certain Member States Concerning Their Policies Regarding the Management of Plutonium, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.iaea.org/ publications/documents/infcircs/communication-received-certain-memberstates-concerning-their-policies-regarding-management-plutonium. (See also Chap. 4, note 3.) International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, Summary Volume, 255. Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Department of Energy Fiscal Year 2019 Congressional Budget Request: National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy, March 2018, Vol. 1, 461, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/03/f49/FY-2019-Volume-1.pdf. US Department of Energy annual Congressional Budget Requests. Volumes back to 2005 may be found online at “Budget (Justification & Supporting Documents),” Office of the Chief Financial Officer, accessed 17 January 2019, https:// www.energy.gov/cfo/listings/budget-justification-supporting-documents. Frank von Hippel, Banning the Production of Highly Enriched Uranium (International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2016), Fig. 10, accessed 30 January

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28. 29.

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2019, http://fissilematerials.org/library/rr15.pdf. See also National Nuclear Security Administration, “NNSA Removes All Highly Enriched Uranium from Nigeria,” 7 December 2018, accessed 12 February 2019, https://www.energy. gov/nnsa/articles/nnsa-removes-all-highly-enriched-uranium-nigeria. von Hippel, Banning the Production, Table 3. See Steve Fetter and Frank von Hippel, “The Hazard from Plutonium Dispersal by Nuclear-Warhead Accidents,” Science and Global Security 2, no. 1 (1990), 21–41, accessed 15 February 2019, http://scienceandglobalsecurity. org/archive/sgs02fetter.pdf. That article cites 3 to 11 cancer cases per milligram of weapon-grade plutonium inhaled. Reactor-grade plutonium has about ten times more alpha activity per gram than weapon-grade plutonium. Recommendation 3, “Configuration of the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories,” in the “Galvin Report”—named for its chair, Robert Galvin, a former chief executive officer of Motorola Inc.—was that weapons work at Livermore could be phased out over five years. Task Force on Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories, Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories, 1995, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www2.lbl.gov/LBL-PID/Galvin-Report/. Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Department of Energy Fiscal Year 2019 Congressional Budget Request: Laboratory Tables, Preliminary, Department of Energy, February 2018, accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.energy.gov/ sites/prod/files/2018/03/f49/DOE-FY2019-Budget-Laboratory-Table.pdf. Annual funding, 2001–2018 in 2010$ from National Nuclear Security Administration, Fiscal Year 2019 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan—Biennial Plan Summary, Report to Congress, 2018, Fig. 4.1, accessed 12 February 2019, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/10/f57/ FY2019%20SSMP.pdf; annual funding 1942–1996 in 1996$ from Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), Fig. 1.7. One 1996$ = 1.31 2010$. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Gross Domestic Product: Implicit Price Deflator,” accessed 12 February 2019, https:// fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPDEF. The Hanford Site cleanup on the Columbia River in Washington state is divided into two projects: Hanford and Office of River Protection. According to the US Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, as of 2018, the combined number of workers in the two projects was approximately 9,100; the annual budget was $2.2 billion; the projected cost was about $130 billion; and the projected completion date was in the 2070 s. For the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the corresponding figures were: number of workers, 7,000; annual budget, $1.7 billion; projected cost, $106 billion; projected completion date, 2065. US Department of Energy, “Cleanup Sites: Progress through Action,” accessed 17 January 2019, https://www.energy.gov/em/cleanup-sites. Schwartz, Atomic Audit, Table A1. National Audit Office, The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority: Progress with Reducing Risk at Sellafield, 2018, 27, accessed 17 January 2019, https://

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37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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8 The Case for a Ban on Plutonium Separation

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Subject Index

B Breeder reactor research and development United States, 60, 150 Breeder reactors Carter administration and, 5, 32, 34 China, 6, 68, 69 fast neutrons and, 20 France, 3, 6, 29, 67 India, 6, 39, 67, 69 invention, 1 Japan, 58–60, 67 nuclear power growth projections and, 4 nuclear proliferation and, 2 Russia, 6, 39, 51, 67, 69 Russia/Soviet Union, 3 safety issues, 3, 37 Seaborg, Glenn and, 21, 30 sodium problems, 3, 39 United Kingdom, 3 United States, 3, 5, 19 uranium resources and, 4

C Cesium-137 Chernobyl accident, 86 Fukushima accident, 85, 86 land contamination, 85 releases, 87, 90, 92

D Dry-cask storage as an alternative to dense-packed pools, 88, 89 central storage, 111, 112 cost, 109, 112 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 F. von Hippel et al., Plutonium, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9901-5

design, 103 endurance, 113 France, 108 Germany, 102, 105, 115 global status, 108 interim storage, 113, 115 Japan, 107, 112 On-site, 105, 106, 115 repackaging, 113 safety, 110 South Korea, 104, 106 transport, 114 transport casks and, 102, 115 transport safety, 114 United States, 105, 108, 112, 113 Universal storage-transport-disposal canister, 113

F Fast-neutron reactors fissioning of transuranic elements by, 126 Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty India, 144 Pakistan, 144 Fuel cycle International Fuel Cycle Evaluation, 34, 144, 145 once-through, 33

H Heavy-water reactors, 18, 104 Highly enriched uranium (HEU), 28 Budgets for cleanout, 146 175

176 Conversion of research reactors to LEU fuel, 145, 146 Naval reactor fuel, 147 Number of countries cleaned out, 147

L Light-water reactors, 18, 33, 81 invention, 3

M Mixed-oxide fuel Belgium, 7 economics, 7, 53 France, 6, 51–53, 67 Germany, 7 Japan, 7, 59, 62 Netherlands, 7 radioactive heat generation compared with spent LEU fuel, 130 Russia, 63 United Kingdom, 56, 57 United States, 64

N Nuclear weapons Acheson-Lilienthal Report, 27, 28 Atoms for Peace program, 31 Baruch, Bernard, 27, 28 China, 29 France, 29 India, 29 Israel, 29 Japan, 62 Nonproliferation Treaty, 30 North Korea, 29 Pakistan, 29 proliferation, 28 reactor-grade plutonium, 62, 65 South Korea, 62 Soviet Union, 28 United Kingdom, 28 United States, 28

P Plutonium disposal Japan, 57 Russia, 63 United States, 63 Plutonium production, 16 Plutonium recycle

Subject Index France, 6 Japan, 7 Plutonium stocks global, 8 Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium, 52, 145 Japan, 61, 144 United Kingdom, 145 Plutonium-production reactors, 1 Canada, 17 France, 16 Israel, 29 United Kingdom, 16, 29, 55 United States, 1 Proliferation resistant, 42, 62

R Reprocessing access to plutonium, and, 30 accident, Kyshtym waste-tank explosion, 133 accident, Seversk red-oil explosion, 134, 135 Brazil, 5, 31 Carter administration and, 5, 32, 33 China, 40, 68 Civilian, 5, 66 Cleanup cost, 148 economics, 5 France, 6, 51–53, 66, 108, 112 Germany, 6 India, 5, 31 Japan, 41, 51, 58–62, 66, 82, 107, 112 military, 6 moratorium proposal, 9 Netherlands, 108 nuclear proliferation and, 123 Pakistan, 5, 31 pyroprocessing, 41, 42 radioactive waste management and, 8, 52, 60 Reagan administration, 33 Russia, 6, 51, 62 safety requirements, 134 South Korea, 5, 31, 41, 123 transport casks, 114 United Kingdom, 6, 7, 51, 55–57, 66 United States, 5, 112 Reprocessing research and development United States, 149

Subject Index S Spent fuel decay heat, 102 Spent fuel repositories effect of reprocessing on size, 129, 130 plutonium hazard from, 124, 127 plutonium mines and, 124 Spent-fuel pools central, 112 dense-racking, 10, 82, 110 fire danger, 10 fires, 83, 111 France, 81, 112 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant unit 4, 83–85 Japan, 82 reprocessing and, 102

177 South Korea, 82 terrorism risk, 88 Spent-fuel-pool fires, 83 Cesium-137 land contamination, 85–88 Fukushima-Daiichi nightmare scenario, 88 Hydrogen explosions and, 85 reduced risk from low-density racking, 82, 89, 90 South Korea, 91, 92 Szilard, Leo, 2

T Transuranic elements fuel fabrication, 126 production process, 125