Thread: Reprocessed Nuclear Fuel Creates Undetectable Weapons-Grade Plutonium and HEU

Read a couple of rather alarming articles recently.

With oil and gas prices skyrocketing, the US Department of Energy (DOE) now has a plan to reprocess it's massive stockpile of used nuclear fuel into separated plutonium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) which ironically are harder to detect than regular uranium fuel.

France, the UK and Russia have been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for some time now, and now have large stockpiles of plutonium and HEU, which is very expensive to store and not economic to burn anyway, since it requires a special type of "breeder" reactor that have proven very expensive and problematic.

The point and concern is that only a few kilograms of separated plutonium are necessary to create an atomic weapon; the UK, for instance, currently has 80 tons of the stuff, enough for 10,000 atomic weapons. With a permanent ground storage site still not available (remember Yucca Mountain?) how are they going to get rid of stuff that needs to be stored for a million years, and more importantly, how are they going to ensure it never gets into the hands of terrorists since only small amounts are needed to create weapons, it can be so easily concealed in shipping containers and it currently cannot be detected! I'm very surprised, given Homeland Security and the post-911 security measures, that they're going ahead with a scheme that is not cost-effective and increases the availability of a substance critical to the realization of a worst-case scenario.

April, 2008

Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth

Plans are afoot to reuse spent reactor fuel in the U.S. But the advantages of the scheme pale in comparison with its dangers


LA HAGUE, on France's Normandy coast, hosts a large complex that reprocesses spent fuel from nuclear power plants, extracting its plutonium for fabrication into new fuel. The U.S. Department of Energy has recently proposed building a similar facility.

Key Concepts

• Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium, which can be extracted and used in new fuel.
• To reduce the amount of long-lived radioactive waste, the U.S. Department of Energy has proposed reprocessing spent fuel in this way and then “burning” the plutonium in special reactors.
• But reprocessing is very expensive. Also, spent fuel emits lethal radiation, whereas separated plutonium can be handled easily. So reprocessing invites the possibility that terrorists might steal plutonium and construct an atom bomb.
• The author argues against reprocessing and for storing the waste in casks until an underground repository is ready.

Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. What more could the moribund nuclear power industry possibly want?

Just one thing: a place to ship its used reactor fuel. Indeed, the lack of a disposal site remains a dark cloud hanging over the entire enterprise. The projected opening of a federal waste storage repository in Yucca Mountain in Nevada (now anticipated for 2017 at the earliest) has already slipped by two decades, and the cooling pools holding spent fuel at the nation’s nuclear power plants are running out of space.

Most nuclear utilities are therefore beginning to store older spent fuel on dry ground in huge casks, each typically containing 10 tons of waste. Every year a 1,000-megawatt reactor discharges enough fuel to fill two of these casks, each costing about $1 million. But that is not all the industry is doing. U.S. nuclear utilities are suing the federal government, because they would not have incurred such expenses had the U.S. Department of Energy opened the Yucca Mountain repository in 1998 as originally planned. As a result, the government is paying for the casks and associated infrastructure and operations—a bill that is running about $300 million a year.

Under pressure to start moving the fuel off the sites, the DOE has returned to an idea that it abandoned in the 1970s—to “reprocess” the spent fuel chemically, separating the different elements so that some can be reused. Vast reprocessing plants have been running in France and the U.K. for more than a decade, and Japan began to operate its own $20-billion facility in 2006. So this strategy is not without precedent. But, as I discuss below, reprocessing is an expensive and dangerous road to take.

The Element from Hell

Grasping my reasons for rejecting nuclear fuel reprocessing requires nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle and a dollop of common sense. Power reactors generate heat—which makes steam to turn electricity-generating turbines—by maintaining a nuclear chain reaction that splits (or “fissions”) atoms. Most of the time the fuel is uranium, artificially enriched so that 4 to 5 percent is the chain-reacting isotope uranium 235; virtually all the rest is uranium 238. At an enrichment of only 5 percent, stolen reactor fuel cannot be used to construct an illicit atom bomb.

In the reactor, some of the uranium 238 absorbs a neutron and becomes plutonium 239, which is also chain-reacting and can in principle be partially “burned” if it is extracted and properly prepared. This approach has various drawbacks, however. One is that extraction and processing cost much more than the new fuel is worth. Another is that recycling the plutonium reduces the waste problem only minimally. Most important, the separated plutonium can readily serve to make nuclear bombs if it gets into the wrong hands; as a result, much effort has to be expended to keep it secure until it is once more a part of spent fuel.

These drawbacks become strikingly clear when one examines the experiences of the nations that have embarked on reprocessing programs. In France, the world leader in reprocessing technology, the separated plutonium (chemically combined with oxygen to form plutonium dioxide) is mixed with uranium 238 (also as an oxide) to make a “mixed oxide,” or MOX, fuel. After being used to generate more power, the spent MOX fuel still contains about 70 percent as much plutonium as when it was manufactured; however, the addition of highly radioactive fission products created inside a reactor makes this plutonium difficult to access and make into a bomb. The used MOX fuel is shipped back to the reprocessing facility for indefinite storage. Thus, France is, in effect, using reprocessing to move its problem with spent fuel from the reactor sites to the reprocessing plant.

Japan is following France’s example. The U.K. and Russia simply store their separated civilian plutonium—about 120 tons between them as of the end of 2005, enough to make 15,000 atom bombs.

...During the cold war, the U.S. operated reprocessing plants in Washington State and South Carolina to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons. More than half of the approximately 100 tons of plutonium that was separated in those efforts has been declared to be in excess of our national needs, and the DOE currently projects that disposing of it will cost more than $15 billion. The people who were working at the sites where this reprocessing took place are now primarily occupied with cleaning up the resulting mess, which is expected to cost around $100 billion.

In addition to those military operations, a small commercial reprocessing facility operated in upstate New York from 1966 to 1972. It separated 1.5 tons of plutonium before going bankrupt and becoming a joint federal-state cleanup venture, one projected to require about $5 billion of taxpayers’ money.

With all the problems reprocessing entailed, one might rightly ask why it was pursued at all. Part of the answer is that for years after civilian nuclear power plants were first introduced, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) promoted reprocessing both domestically and abroad as essential to the future of nuclear power, because the industry was worried about running out of uranium (a concern that has since abated).

But that was before the security risks of plutonium production went from theoretical to real. In 1974 India, one of the countries that the U.S. assisted in acquiring reprocessing capabilities, used its first separated plutonium to build a nuclear weapon.


the India 1974 test (about
400 meters across) what
a few kilos can do...

At about this time, the late Theodore B. Taylor, a former U.S. nuclear weapons designer, was raising an alarm about the possibility that the planned separation and recycling of thousands of tons of plutonium every year would allow terrorists to steal enough of this material to make one or more nuclear bombs.

Separated plutonium, being only weakly radioactive, is easily carried off—whereas the plutonium in spent fuel is mixed with fission products that emit lethal gamma rays. Because of its great radioactivity, spent fuel can be transported only inside casks weighing tens of tons, and its plutonium can only be recovered with great difficulty, typically behind thick shielding using sophisticated, remotely operated equipment. So unseparated plutonium in spent fuel poses a far smaller risk of ending up in the wrong hands.

Having been awakened by India to the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation through reprocessing, the Ford administration (and later the Carter administration) reexamined the AEC’s position and concluded that reprocessing was both unnecessary and uneconomic. The U.S. government therefore abandoned its plans to reprocess the spent fuel from civilian reactors and urged France and Germany to cancel contracts under which they were exporting reprocessing technology to Pakistan, South Korea and Brazil.

The Reagan administration later reversed the Ford-Carter position on domestic reprocessing, but the U.S. nuclear industry was no longer interested. It, too, had concluded that reprocessing to make use of the recovered plutonium would not be economically competitive with the existing “once-through” fueling system. Reprocessing, at least in the U.S., had reached a dead end, or so it seemed.

Rising from Nuclear Ashes

The current Bush administration has recently breathed life back into the idea of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel as part of its proposal to deploy a new generation of nuclear reactors. According to this vision, transuranics (plutonium and other similarly heavy elements extracted from conventional reactor fuel) would be recycled not once but repeatedly in the new reactors to break them down through fission into lighter elements, most of which have shorter half-lives. Consequently, the amount of nuclear waste needing to be safely stored for many millennia would be reduced [see “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste,” by William H. Hannum, Gerald E. Marsh and George S. Stanford; Scientific American, December 2005]. Some scientists view this new scheme as “technically sweet,” to borrow a phrase J. Robert Oppenheimer once used to describe the design for the hydrogen bomb. But is it really so wise?

The proposal to recycle U.S. spent fuel in this way is not new. Indeed, in the mid-1990s the DOE asked the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to carry out a study of this approach to reducing the amount of long-lived radioactive waste. The resulting massive report, Nuclear Wastes: Technologies for Separation and Transmutation, was very negative. The NAS panel concluded that recycling the transuranics in the first 62,000 tons of spent fuel (the amount that otherwise would have been stored in Yucca Mountain) would require “no less than $50 billion and easily could be over $100 billion”—in other words, it could well cost something like $500 for every person in the U.S. These numbers would have to be doubled to deal with the entire amount of spent fuel that existing U.S. reactors are expected to discharge during their lifetimes.

...If a full-scale reprocessing plant were constructed (as the DOE until recently was proposing to do by 2020) but the sodium-cooled reactors did not get built, virtually all the separated transuranics would simply go into indefinite storage. This awkward situation is exactly what befell the U.K., where the reprocessing program, started in the 1960s, has produced about 80 tons of separated plutonium, a legacy that will cost tens of billions of dollars to dispose of safely.

Reprocessing spent fuel and then storing the separated plutonium and radioactive waste indefinitely at the reprocessing plant is not a disposal strategy. Rather it is a strategy for disaster, because it makes the separated plutonium much more vulnerable to theft. In a 1998 report the U.K.’s Royal Society (the equivalent of the NAS), commenting on the growing stockpile of civilian plutonium in that country, warned that “the chance that the stocks of plutonium might, at some stage, be accessed for illicit weapons production is of extreme concern.” In 2007 a second Royal Society report reiterated that “the status quo of continuing to stockpile a very dangerous material is not an acceptable long-term option.”

Nuclear Fuel Recycling: More Trouble Than It's Worth: Scientific American

Previously, I had read this:

March, 2008

Detecting Nuclear Smuggling

Radiation monitors at U.S. ports cannot reliably detect highly enriched uranium, which onshore terrorists could assemble into a nuclear bomb


Key Concepts

Existing radiation portal monitors, as well as new advanced spectroscopic portal machines, cannot reliably detect weapons-grade uranium hidden inside shipping containers. They also set off far too many false alarms.

• So-called active detectors might perform better, but they are several years off and are very expensive.
• The U.S. should spend more resources rounding up nuclear smugglers, securing highly enriched uranium that is now scattered overseas, and blending down this material to low-enriched uranium, which cannot be fashioned into a bomb.

Customs inspectors at a pier in New York City send a sealed cargo container just taken off a ship from Istanbul through a radiation scanner. A dozen new tractors seem to be inside. Although the detector senses no radiation, the inspectors open the container anyway. Their handheld units show no radiation either, so they allow the container to leave. A private hauler drives it to a small Midwestern city. There terrorist cell members remove what was their final shipment of highly enriched uranium, concealed as 10 metal washers in the tractor engines, together weighing two kilograms. Months later an improvised nuclear device with a yield of one kiloton is detonated in Los Angeles. The blast, fire and airborne radioactivity kill more than 100,000 people. Virtually all shipping into the U.S. is halted, precipitating a financial crisis. Military operations commence in the Middle East after forensics and intelligence efforts trace the plot to cells in Pakistan and Iran.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The authors and editors have been careful to not expose details that could help terrorists or that are not readily available in published sources.

Are these terrible events far-fetched? Twice in recent years the two of us helped an ABC News team that smuggled a soda can–size cylinder of depleted uranium through radiation detectors at U.S. ports. The material did not pose a danger to anyone, but it did emit a radiation signature comparable to that of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which can be assembled into a nuclear bomb. As you read this article, the Bush administration and the U.S. Congress are likely considering spending billions of dollars for additional detectors at ports and other border crossings—detectors that would also fail to reliably spot our cylinder or a similar amount of HEU.

A crude nuclear device constructed with HEU poses the greatest risk of mass destruction by terrorists. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government sought to prevent the smuggling of nuclear weapons and materials. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security instituted what it called a “layered defense,” built largely around costly radiation detectors.

Why focus on detection? The sheer number of cargo containers entering the U.S. is staggering. Containers come in different sizes, so the number is counted as the equivalent of standard, 20-foot containers, or “twenty-foot equivalent units” (TEUs). More than 42 million TEUs entered American ports in 2005. By 2007 Homeland Security had deployed hundreds of radiation portal monitors. It also asked Congress for additional, advanced machines but in October backed off to perform further testing on those units, in light of software problems. Although some federal officials and government contractors claim that the technology will be effective, an analysis we have conducted shows that the machines will not reliably reveal HEU. Instead the government must place a much higher priority on efforts to identify and eliminate or secure known stocks of HEU, stopping the potential problem at its source.

Easy to Hide

To wreak havoc, terrorists could steal, purchase or be given a fully assembled nuclear weapon, but that scenario is not likely. Intact nuclear weapons are generally under greater physical security than the fissile material needed to build one. A more probable route is to illicitly obtain this material—which is now scattered among many civil, military and space power facilities worldwide—and then to smuggle it into the U.S. and assemble a bomb. Two fissile materials are of primary concern: plutonium and HEU.

Less plutonium than HEU is needed to achieve a given explosive yield, but crafting a plutonium weapon requires far more complex engineering. Plutonium is also easier to detect if shipped among cargo. HEU is easier to handle, to form into a crude explosive device and is much harder to detect in a cargo container. Furthermore, a greater amount of HEU exists in more dispersed and less secured places. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 275 confirmed incidents involving nuclear material and criminal intent occurred globally between January 1993 and December 2006. Four involved plutonium, but 14 involved HEU. More than 40 countries harbor HEU, with the highest risk of theft being from facilities in Russia, other former Soviet states and Pakistan. And a recent Harvard University study concluded that U.S.-funded security work had not been completed at 45 percent of nuclear sites of concern in countries once part of the Soviet Union.

Detecting Nuclear Smuggling: Scientific American