America's awkward stockpile
A deal with Russia requires the United States to permanently dispose of 34 tonnes of plutonium, but Washington’s one effort to do so has proved a costly snafu. Reuters’ Scot J. Paltrow reports from Amarillo.
IN a sprawling plant near Amarillo, Texas, rows of workers perform by hand one of the most dangerous jobs in American industry. Contract workers at the US Department of Energy’s Pantex facility gingerly remove the plutonium cores from retired nuclear warheads.
Although many safety rules are in place, a slip of the hand could mean disaster.
In Energy Department facilities around the country, there are 54 tonnes of surplus plutonium. Pantex holds so much of it that it has exceeded the 20,000 cores regulations allow it to hold in its temporary storage facility. There are enough cores there to cause thousands of megatons of nuclear explosions. More are added each day.
The dismantling of nuclear warheads at Pantex has grown increasingly urgent to keep the United States from exceeding a limit of 1550 warheads permitted under a 2010 treaty with Russia. The US wants to dismantle older warheads so it can substitute some of them with newer, more lethal weapons. Russia, too, is building new, dangerous weapons.
The US has a vast amount of deadly plutonium, which terrorists would love to get their hands on. Under another agreement, Washington and
Moscow each are required to render unusable for weapons 34 tonnes of plutonium. The purpose is twofold: keep the material out of the hands of bad guys, and eliminate the possibility of them using it again themselves. An Energy Department website says the two countries combined have 68 tonnes designated for destruction — enough to make 17,000 nuclear weapons. But the US has no permanent plan for what to do with its share.
Plutonium must be made permanently inaccessible because it has a radioactive halflife of 24,000 years.
‘More dangerous situation’
Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says solving the problem of plutonium storage is urgent. In an increasingly unstable world, he says, the risk is that this metal of mass annihilation will be used again. William Potter, director of the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told Reuters: ‘‘We are in a much more dangerous situation today than we were in the Cold War.’’
Washington has not even begun to take the steps needed to acquire additional space for burying plutonium more than 610m below ground, the depth considered safe. Much of America’s plutonium is stored in a building at the Energy Department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which used to house a reactor.
Local opponents of the storage, such as Tom
Clements, director of
SRS Watch, contend the facility was never built for holding plutonium and say there is a risk of leakage and accidents.
The Energy
Department has a small experimental storage site underground in New Mexico. The department controls the radioactive materials — plutonium, uranium and tritium — used in America’s nuclear weapons and in the reactors of nuclearpowered aircraft carriers and submarines. In a Senate hearing in June 2017, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the department had been in talks with New Mexico officials to enlarge the site. Environmental groups there have strongly opposed this.
Under an agreement with Russia, the US was to convert 34 tonnes of plutonium into fuel for civilian reactors that generate electricity. The fuel is known as Mox, for ‘‘mixed oxide fuel’’. Plutonium and uranium are converted into oxides, which cannot cause nuclear explosions, and mixed together in fuel rods. But the US effort has run into severe delays and cost overruns.
The alternative method is known as diluteanddispose. It involves blending plutonium with an inert material and storing it in casks. The casks, however, are projected to last only 50 years before beginning to leak, so would need to be buried permanently deep underground.
The Mox mess
President Donald Trump has sided with the Energy Department in wanting to kill the Mox project because of the extreme cost overruns and delays. The Energy Department, beginning in the Obama administration, favoured closing it down for the same reason, but Congress overruled it. The federal budget adopted in February, however, specifies a means for ending the project if a study shows dilute anddispose would be at least 50% cheaper than making Mox.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, the part of the Energy Department that oversees nuclear sites and materials, favours switching to diluteanddispose. In recent testimony before a House of Representatives subcommittee, Lisa GordonHagerty, the new NNSA administrator, said that method would ‘‘cost billions less’’ than completing the Mox plant.
Plutonium is a versatile bomb material. Terrorists would need only 5kg or less to make a bomb, Lyman says.
Its ordinarily limited radioactivity makes it safe for thieves to transport with little risk of radiation injury. The alpha particles it radiates are relatively large on an atomic scale, which means the glass of a test tube or the leather of a briefcasestops them.
The Federal Government now has no solution in sight to dispose of the plutonium permanently. Its one effort to make it unusable for bombs has turned into what the White House and Energy Department say is a costly failure. The Mox project, at the Savannah River site, has been kept on life support by Congress thanks to the influence of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and other lawmakers. The Mox plant employs about 2000 people in Graham’s state.
Graham and other Congressional backers say Mox is the best way to keep plutonium out of the hands of terrorists. They note too that the pact with Russia requires the US to use it as the method for disposal.
A spokeswoman for Graham declined to comment on his behalf but sent a link to a YouTube video of a
Senate hearing in March.
In the hearing, Graham, referring to steps already taken to limit work on the Mox plant, said: ‘‘What I think we’ve done is ended the biggest nonproliferation programme in the world, and I’m going to try and fix that.’’
Today’s plutonium glut is mainly a legacy of the Cold War. The quantities now seem surreal. By 1967, the US nuclear arsenal reached its apex with 37,000 warheads. The Soviet Union’s peak came in the 1970s with approximately 45,000. These were enough to destroy life on Earth thousands of times over.
A radioactive peace dividend
Amid the terror and aggressiveness of government and military leaders on both sides then, little or no thought was given to what to do with the warheads should the risk of mass annihilation ebb.
Daniel Ellsberg, best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers, about the Vietnam War, in 1971, in the early 1960s was an adviser to the Air Force and White House on nuclear policy. He told Reuters disposal of weapons was never considered at the time.
‘‘Noone thought that the Cold War would end,’’ he said.
Treaties that dramatically reduced US and Russian nuclear arsenals were signed soon after the Soviet Union fell. It was then that the magnitude of the disposal problem dawned on the two countries.
Scientists proffered ideas, nearly all involving making the plutonium forbiddingly dangerous for malefactors to transport and burying it deep underground.
Instead, under a 2000 treaty, the US agreed to transform the 34 tonnes of plutonium into Mox. Russia agreed to destroy the same quantity using a special type of reactor. But the US had never before built a Mox plant and no US civilian reactor had ever used Mox as fuel.
This misplaced optimism led to one of the costliest snafus ever in US government construction. Work began in 2007 to build a
Mox plant that was to be operational by November 2016. The Energy Department now estimates that, if allowed to proceed, it will not be finished until 2048. In 2007, the Energy Department said the total cost would be $US4.8 billion. Now it estimates the cost at more than $US17 billion ($NZ24 billion).
Building began when detailed designs were between 20% and 40% complete. But once initial construction finished, the contractor, a consortium called CB&I Areva MOX Services, under instructions from the Energy Department, breezed ahead without architectural plans.
Reports from the Union of Concerned Scientists said rooms were built for laboratories and offices where none were needed. Ventilation ducts and electrical wiring were in the wrong places. Plumbing was a maze of misplaced pipes. The contractor later had to rip out much of its work and start over.
Giving it away
In an emailed statement to Reuters, the consortium said it expected to finish the facility. It said ‘‘the project is over 70% physically complete’’.
But the NNSA’s GordonHagerty testified in March before a House appropriations subcommittee that it was ‘‘nowhere near’’ 50% complete. Government Accountability Office reports criticised the Energy Department for awarding a ‘‘cost plus’’ contract, which guarantees a profit regardless of how much work is done.
NNSA spokeswoman Lindsey Geisler said that in 2011, after the contract had been awarded, ‘‘NNSA recognised the need to institute project management reforms’’ and practices improved significantly.
Echoing other critics, Frank von Hippel, a Princeton University professor who researches nuclear arms control and policymaking, said weak oversight continues. ‘‘The problem at DOE is that the quality of managers, with some exceptions, is quite low,’’ he said. ‘‘Contractors just milk them for money.’’
An Energy Department panel reported in 2016 there was no US market for Mox. To use Mox fuel rods, civilian power plants would have to modify their reactors, requiring lengthy relicensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The report said the best the Energy Department could hope for was to give the stuff away.