The Bush administration has decided to support plans to dispose of excess weapons-usable plutonium by burning it in nuclear reactors as mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. This support comes after a year-long review and is a welcome development in efforts to secure, control and dispose of nuclear materials in the United States and in Russia. The U.S. program is part of a bilateral agreement signed with Russia, with each country committed to eliminate 34 tons of plutonium. Without U.S. action, Russia's stocks of plutonium will remain in place, and vulnerable to theft or diversion.
Nevertheless, a very important question still remains: What will be done with the rest of the excess U.S. plutonium? In 1996, President Clinton declared 50 tons of plutonium to be in excess of defense needs. This amount was subsequently raised to 52.5 tons, when even more unneeded plutonium was found in the U.S. stockpile. The previous plans would have taken this less pure plutonium and immobilized it in highly radioactive glass to be made from the huge stocks of liquid nuclear waste in underground storage in South Carolina. This path, however, has experienced unanticipated technical problems, and it is not known if the waste can be turned into the glass needed to immobilize the excess plutonium. The two paths adopted in 1996 anticipated such problems, and the decision to pursue MOX and immobilization was made so that a technical glitch in one track would not derail efforts to dispose of excess plutonium.
The Bush plan, then, leaves a critical question unanswered: what about the other 18.5 tons of plutonium? The administration's decision to drop the immobilization path was done to save costs, by some counts $2 billion. But the U.S. spent some $6 trillion to build and maintain its nuclear arsenal during the cold war. Getting rid of the excess legacy is a small, but important price to pay to preserve the peace and continue to process of irreversible nuclear reductions begun in the 1990s. Now is not a time to be penny-wise and pound foolish. To be used as MOX, the additional 18.5 tons would have to be purified in reprocessing facilities in South Carolina. Taking impure plutonium, in a form very unattractive for making weapons, and purifying it into bomb-making gold, simply to then get rid of it is highly counter-productive and a path rejected by the previous administration after years of review. Nothing should be done to make this material MORE attractive to a would-be thief, or make it more usable in a nuclear weapon.
The Bush administration has backed a critical national security program by deciding to fund plutonium disposition. But baking half a loaf in the area of excess plutonium is not enough. A complete solution must be pursued, or weapons usable material will continue to remain at risk to our own detriment.
Related Resources
Energy Department to Convert Plutonium Associated Press, 23 January 2002.
Plutonium Disposition Roundtable a joint event hosted by the Non-Proliferation Project and the Monterey Institute for Interational Studies, 14 March 2001