The trouble with nuclear fuel

>> Saturday, August 8, 2009

Struggling to hold up a bank

When narrow national interests obstruct a noble cause

Alamy

Rods that glow in the darkPAVED it may be with good intentions, but there are many twists and pot-holes along the road to a nuclear-free world. So many, in fact, that the path, tantalisingly opened up by Barack Obama, may yet turn out to lead nowhere.

But to keep things minimally on track, governments that care about the spread of the bomb will make a big effort to shore up the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at next year’s five-yearly review. The Obama administration, unlike its predecessor, talks of ratifying the test-ban treaty. America and Russia are busy cutting warheads. Nuclear officials from America, Russia, Britain, France and China will meet in London next month to explore ways to build confidence for future disarmament.

Yet all will be in vain unless better ways can be found to deal with a practical problem as old as the nuclear age: how to stop nuclear technologies that can be used legitimately for making electricity from being abused for bomb-making. Efforts to tackle it are in a muddle.

Sheer numbers are one problem. Governments from Asia and the Middle East to Africa and Latin America are queuing up to get into the nuclear business, though the financial crisis will probably stop some of them. Of those that press ahead, the worry is that not all will be looking merely for alternative ways to keep the lights on.

The failure to stop countries like North Korea and Iran from bending and breaking the nuclear rules has not helped. Although they had lived with Israel’s bomb for years, Arab governments’ interest in nuclear power seemed to go critical suspiciously quickly as concerns mounted about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Meanwhile North Korea, it was discovered, had secretly been helping Syria to build a nuclear reactor ideally suited for weapons purposes, until it was bombed by Israel two years ago.

North Korea never tried hard to disguise its plans, and now doesn’t bother: it claims to have tested two bombs in the past three years and to be building more. But Iran personifies a more insidious problem: that of separating civilian from military nuclear technology—and intentions.

Iran says its nuclear work is peaceful, and notes that the NPT promises access to civilian nuclear power for all who honour it (theoretically all countries save India, Israel and Pakistan which never signed, and North Korea which cheated and left). That includes sensitive nuclear technologies, says Iran, though the NPT doesn’t specify.

It has the dubious honour of being the only country to have built a uranium-enrichment plant and to be developing plutonium-reprocessing technology without having a single working nuclear-power reactor that could use either. That set off alarms, because a country that has mastered making low-enriched uranium for reactor fuel just has to spin its machines in different formation to produce the high-enriched stuff for a bomb; plutonium can be extracted from nuclear wastes and expensively reused in special sorts of fuel, but it can also be fashioned into the fissile core of a weapon. And instead of throwing open all doors to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear guardian, Iran has stymied them and ignored calls from the UN Security Council to stop its suspicious work.

In order to dissuade others tempted to follow in Iran’s nuclear footsteps, some governments have been working on ways of enticing them down obviously peaceful paths. These have included ideas for “fuel assurances”, so that countries do not feel the need to invest in the most sensitive fuel-making technologies, and also nuclear co-operation agreements.

One such agreement between the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is due to enter into force in October. America hopes it will be a model of good practice for others too. Called a “123 agreement”, after the relevant bit of America’s nuclear export-control laws, it will allow the UAE to buy some American nuclear equipment. In return, the emirates promise not to acquire proliferation-sensitive enrichment or reprocessing technologies and to co-operate closely with the IAEA.

Yet as a model the deal is far from perfect, argues Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Centre, in Washington, DC: no one bothered to ask UAE officials to accept the most up-to-date, near-real-time surveillance cameras, though they probably would have agreed. That would have helped strengthen future 123 agreements with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others. What is more, says Mr Sokolski, there appears to have been no effort to get France and Russia, both bidding for contracts in the UAE and elsewhere in the region, to adopt similar standards.

That is one chance lost. But the Obama team may have done itself no favours either by agreeing to open early talks with India, under a controversial 123 deal negotiated by the Bush administration. This will eventually allow India to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel of American origin. India, which has never signed the NPT, does not yet have any American-built reactors, let alone the spent fuel from them to reprocess. America is creating a muddle by giving India such rights now, when it is telling Iran than it should suspend its work and others that they had better not start.

A quiet change
In the confusion, few will have noticed that the Obama administration has dropped its predecessor’s plans to restart commercial plutonium reprocessing—because it makes no economic sense, even for rich America, and is a proliferation risk.

For most countries, uranium enrichment makes no economic sense either, since reactor fuel can be bought from suppliers in Europe, America and Russia. As added reassurance, the IAEA has been developing ideas for a fuel bank of last resort. Some 30 countries, including America, have chipped in the cash, and Kazakhstan has offered to host it. A country that broke non-proliferation rules would be denied fuel. But if it was refused nuclear fuel for no good reason it could buy some from the IAEA at market prices (though this would still somehow have to be fabricated into fuel rods). Russia, Germany, Britain and Japan have also offered ideas of their own.

But in this area, it seems that no good idea goes unpunished. Hopes that more detailed work could start on the fuel-bank plan were shot down at a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-member board in June. Certain countries (Australia, Canada, South Africa, among others) have reserves of natural uranium and might like to profit from enriching them before exporting them. They do not want any restriction on such technologies to get in their way. Resentment and suspicion still linger, too, especially among developing countries, at the Bush administration’s initial plan (later abandoned) to impose such a restriction.

The proposals being discussed at the IAEA explicitly acknowledge countries’ “rights” to nuclear technology. Yet other rows have erupted. The IAEA’s fuel bank would be open to all its members, but that would offend Egypt, which wants Israel excluded. A Russian plan would in effect be limited to NPT members, so offends India. But if muddle and jealousy win out, nuclear proliferation, not restraint, will be the norm—to enduring regret all round.

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition

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