Boston Globe
June 5, 2005

NUCLEAR OPTIONS

Talk of nuclear energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels is back
in fashion, even among some environmentalists. But can the promise of
nuclear power ever be separated from the spread of nuclear weapons?

By Drake Bennett

Nuclear energy is experiencing what might amount to the first
stirrings of a global renaissance. China and India, who see it as
vital to addressing their ballooning energy needs, have announced
ambitious expansions of their nuclear-energy programs. Earlier this
year, the United States, Canada, France, Japan, and Britain signed an
agreement to develop a new generation of reactors. And just last week,
France, which depends on nuclear reactors for nearly 80 percent of its
electricity needs, announced that it would help plan a nuclear energy
program for Libya, a nation that up until late 2003 was scouring the
global black market for nuclear weapons materials.

Throughout Europe and the United States, high oil and natural gas
prices and an increasing public acceptance of the threat of climate
change have spurred a new interest in nuclear energy as an alternative
to fossil fuels. Even among environmentalists, whose movement was
built in no small part on antinuclear sentiment in the 1970s and '80s,
there are a few signs -- albeit highly controversial ones -- of a new
willingness to take another look at nuclear. In the May issue of
Technology Review, for example, Stewart Brand, founder of the
venerable hippie institution The Whole Earth Catalog, declared that
since alternative fuels like wind, solar, and biomass are insufficient
to replace coal and gas, "the only technology ready to fill the gap
and stop the carbon-dioxide loading is nuclear power."

But at the same time, anxiety about the proliferation of nuclear
weapons has never been greater. In February, North Korea publicly
announced for the first time that it possessed a nuclear arsenal, and
both the CIA and the International Atomic Energy Agency suspect Iran
of similar ambitions. In New York last month, the international
conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ended in
embarrassment, with representatives from the 189 signatory nations
unable even to agree on a basic restatement of the treaty's founding
principles.

Any nuclear policy today is therefore caught between two opposing
currents. "You've got two major objectives here, one of which is
preventing nuclear bombs going off in our cities, the other of which
is trying to meet energy demands in a greenhouse-gas-constrained
world," says Graham Allison, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government and a leading campaigner against nuclear proliferation.
"They're both high-order objectives, and you've got to deal with both
at the same time."

In a way, the situation is similar to the one which birthed the NPT
itself. In the years before the treaty entered into force in 1970,
there was enormous concern about nuclear proliferation: Experts
estimated that there would be anywhere from 20 to 80 nuclear-armed
nations by the year 2000 (today, including North Korea and Israel,
whose program is undeclared but almost universally acknowledged, there
are nine). But the era also saw enormous optimism about the prospects
of atomic energy.

Indeed, the NPT guaranteed "the inalienable right of all the Parties
to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear
energy for peaceful purposes." The assumption was that energy and
weapons were two different issues, a belief that has been borne out,
to an extent: Today there are 24 countries that have civilian nuclear
power programs but no nuclear weapons. But both North Korea and Iran
have used the NPT's civilian nuclear power provision to protect
nuclear programs that have distinctly military flavors.

The question, then, is whether it is possible to promote nuclear power
without hastening the spread of nuclear weapons. Among the engineers,
political scientists, and physicists who study the issue, there is a
sense that it is, and in recent years a host of suggestions -
addressing both the technology and the international treaty structure
that shape today's nuclear energy landscape -- have been put forward.
The stakes, it's widely understood, are high, with far-reaching
political implications.

"Put it this way," says John Deutch, an MIT chemistry professor and
former director of central intelligence, "there can't be any
widespread worldwide expansions of nuclear energy unless there are
credible ways of ensuring that there won't be misuse of commercial
nuclear power for weapons programs. It's a necessary condition."

Nuclear reactor cooling towers may be second only to mushroom clouds
in the iconography of our nuclear nightmares. But generating
electricity through nuclear power -- a matter of using the heat given
off by radioactive material to boil water into steam to drive turbines
- has little to do with the process of building a bomb. Moreover, the
radioactive material used in a civilian reactor is 20 to 30 times less
potent than what's necessary for a nuclear weapon. As most leading
nuclear experts, like Siegfried Hecker, former director of the Los
Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, are quick to point out, "It's not nuclear
reactors per se that present a proliferation problem." What's
dangerous, he explains, "is the front and back end of the fuel
cycle."

In other words, it's the processes that bracket the actual production
of power that pose the greatest proliferation risk. On the front end,
enriching raw uranium into reactor fuel is simply a shorter version of
the same process by which one can produce weapons material. And spent
fuel contains plutonium, which, when chemically extracted, can either
be mixed back into reactor fuel or used, as is, to make a bomb.

How, then, to separate energy production from the rest of the fuel
cycle? On one level, it's a technical problem -- and one set of
technical solutions focuses on ways to make spent nuclear reactor fuel
more difficult to reprocess into weapons-grade material. For example,
the pebble-bed reactor, a promising new model that both South Africa
and China are currently pursuing, suspends the uranium fuel as tiny
flecks of uranium oxide in baseball-sized graphite "pebbles," making
the material particularly difficult and expensive to extract for
reprocessing. Another idea, one that's been around for decades, is the
fast-spectrum reactor, which can be configured to burn up all the
plutonium it produces. Still another possibility is the use of the
element thorium instead of uranium as fuel, since it doesn't create
any plutonium.

Each fix has it shortcomings, though. Fast-spectrum reactors require
more highly enriched uranium than normal reactors, so that in
addressing the back end of the fuel cycle one exacerbates the risks
from the front end. Spent thorium fuel contains u-233, a uranium
isotope that, while not as dangerous as plutonium, still can be used
as bomb material. And even a country that built an entire pebble-bed
reactor fleet wouldn't address the risks presented by uranium
enrichment.

According to Neil Todreas, an MIT nuclear engineer, with any of the
technological fixes currently under consideration, the best one can do
is "increase the difficulty of working with the nuclear material so
it ups the technical barriers, so it requires a lot more money and
facilities. You basically move it out of the terrorist zone into the
committed state zone."

Ultimately, as Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate and retired Stanford
University nuclear physicist, puts it, a durable solution will have to
be more than a matter of clever gadgetry. "No matter what solution
you're choosing," he says, "it will have to have a political
dimension to it. I can't see anything working out without an
international agreement."

The proposed political solutions, whether they come from the Bush
administration or the United Nations, tend to share one goal. In
essence, the right to nuclear energy would be defined down to mean,
specifically, a right to generate electricity by nuclear reactors, not
a right to the nuclear material used in the process. In Hecker's
words, such proposals offer "a slightly different deal from the
sovereign god-given right to all aspects of nuclear power that is
presumed to be there in the non-proliferation treaty."

In place of the NPT's bargain, which ensures non-nuclear nations
assistance with their civilian nuclear energy programs as long as they
refrain from pursuing weapons, those same nations would be offered
assistance in all things reactor-related while reserving for nuclear
powers the right and capacity to enrich and reprocess nuclear fuel.

There are also several plans floating around for how to ensure that
countries with nuclear energy programs not be tempted to enrich or
reprocess. Both President Bush and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, have proposed moratoriums on
uranium enrichment. (Bush's would apply only to countries that don't
already have enrichment programs. ElBaradei's, lacking such an
exemption, is opposed by the dozen or so countries that currently
enrich -- including, ironically, both the United States and Iran --
and
stands little chance of implementation.)

But perhaps the most detailed such proposal was published in the
quarterly policy journal Survival last winter. Called the Assured
Nuclear Fuel Services Initiative (ANFSI), its gist was that countries
currently lacking uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing
facilities would agree not to develop such facilities in exchange for
assurances that they would receive cheap and reliable enriched-fuel
and fuel-disposal services from the enriching countries.

As Ernest Moniz, an MIT physics professor and one of the coauthors of
the plan, described it in an interview, ANFSI would be "a great deal
for smaller countries." Not only would they get cheap reactor fuel,
but the system would "relieve them of a big headache in terms of
spent fuel management."

John Deutch, another of the plan's authors, said in a recent interview
that a country like Brazil could be a prime beneficiary of ANFSI.
Brazil abandoned its nuclear weapons program 20 years ago but
maintains two civilian power reactors. Last December, however, the
country began enriching uranium for what it claims are purely civilian
purposes. As Deutch sees it, Brazil's decision was "totally
uneconomic," and ANFSI, with its promise of convenience and savings,
would only highlight the waste of resources Brazil would face by
pushing ahead with a domestic enrichment program.

One wrinkle, however, is that economic incentives might not do much to
convince a country to change its nuclear plans. Brazil's enrichment
program may not be the product of poor economic thinking, but of non-
economic thinking -- of calculations based on the inescapable fact
that, in today's world, nuclear weapons, or at least the ability to
make them, confer a certain geostrategic status.

In the end, ANFSI shifts the terms of the debate, but preserves the
global status quo, leaving unaddressed the resentment engendered by
the current two-tiered global arrangement, where non-nuclear powers
are kept from getting weapons while nuclear states get to keep theirs.

To address this political reality, scholars such as John Holdren, a
physicist and professor of environmental policy at the Kennedy School,
point out that one would have to internationalize the enrichment
process -- for everybody. "If the uranium enrichment plants were run
by an international consortium," Holdren argues, "then the countries
running it would all be watching each other to make sure they weren't
cheating." Giving up control over something as vital as uranium
enrichment, however, would be unacceptable to existing nuclear powers.

No nuclear expert pretends that any measure short of military action
would stop a nation with sufficient resources and determination from
joining the nuclear club. Moniz himself admits that something like
ANFSI "will not solve your hard cases." But, he counters, it could
help determine whether countries are merely using nuclear energy
programs as a cover for more military ends. "It would cast a
spotlight on why Iran doesn't in some sense want to take the money and
run," he says. "That in turn will lead to much more coherent
international action, which you didn't have until very recently."

Of course, it's also worth remembering that the problem of loose
nuclear materials hardly depends on whether the world embraces nuclear
energy on a larger scale. As Hecker puts it, there's plenty of fissile
material already rattling around the world, and "you don't have to
create any more to create problems from terrorists."

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail
drbennett@globe.com.

Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.