The long and difficult negotiations with Iran highlight an ongoing problem with nuclear power plants. Every nation that builds a nuclear plants eventually ends up in possession of sufficient plutonium to fabricate a nuclear weapon. This problem is endemic with n-plants and stems back to the faulty decision by President Eisenhower to create the 1954 Atoms for Peace program. This is a long-term issue for the USA but there is a creative way out. If we act in a smart way we can lead the world into a Golden Solar Age.
As the world watches in fascination (and in trepidation) while Secretary Kerry and his partners from the industrialized world negotiate for a n-weapons-free Iran there are some basic nuclear issues that bear examination.
Nuclear fission weapons are made with a core of either plutonium or enriched uranium. Once a nation (or ‘sub-national entity’ read terrorist group) has just a few kilograms of either of these two materials, there is really no further impediment to their fabrication of an atomic bomb. The details of bomb fabrication are widely known and someone with not very advanced knowledge of physics can design one. So, the way diplomats try to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons is by limiting access to these ‘special nuclear materials,’ plutonium and enriched uranium.
The problem comes with nuclear powerplants. These huge reactors are fueled with low-enriched uranium, and they create plutonium in their waste fuel. Immediately once a nation starts operating a nuclear fuel cycle, two routes to n-weapons open up. First, the uranium fuel, if enriched further (by centrifuges, lasers, or gaseous enrichment) is exactly the same as the uranium needed for a bomb. Second, the plutonium in the spent fuel could be separated in quantities sufficient to make multiple nuclear bombs for each year of a large reactor’s operation. Of course, you would not want to dress in your shirtsleeves to ‘reprocess’ this plutonium. But a late-1970’s report from the Oak Ridge National laboratory showed that ‘quick and dirty’ reprocessing is feasible. If you have so little regard for human life that you send young men and women to die strapped with bombs to their chests, why would you refrain from letting them die from radiation poisoning in a clandestine reprocessing plant?
During the current negotiations, Iran insists on its ‘right’ to operate nuclear powerplants. This not a ‘right’ such as those enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is an understanding based, first of all, on the deeply-flawed 1954 US Atoms for Peace Program. President Eisenhower was convinced by some sparkly-eyed nuclear engineers that there could be a separation between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Oops! Then the mistake was repeated in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Article IV of this treaty promotes the use of nuclear power plants by any nation that wants them. (Article VI of the treaty also mandates worldwide disarmament of nuclear weapons, but the powers that be have steadfastly ignored this….)
Despite the wording in this treaty, and as demonstrated by the long and difficult negotiations with Iran, it is virtually impossible to separate a nuclear power program from a nuclear weapons program. Since 1954, proliferation has proceeded in Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea based in each case more or less on their above-board nuclear power programs. Japan with dozens of nuclear powerplants, is said to have the capability to assemble nuclear weapons in just hours. The fact is, the current negotiations with Iran will not prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. Once they have a couple of years’ worth of spent fuel from a large operating reactor, the plutonium will be there in their territory and it will be virtually impossible to stop them, sooner or later, from making a bomb out of it.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons will go on, not just in Iran, and this process is inherently dangerous to us in the USA. As the world’s superpower, we are also the super-target. Yes, we can threaten return devastation on any nation that bombs us, but that doesn’t really help our own quality of life. Some creative action is required.
There is a way out and it doesn’t require high-powered negotiations, military action, or international embargoes. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima have taught us that n-plants have the rare ability to melt down and devastate large areas of land. We can simply decide, as a nation, to shut all our nuclear plants as too dangerous and too expensive. The solar technologies are poised to take their place anyway. As the world’s leader in the dominant industrial culture, once we declare that nuclear power plants are unwanted, other nations will follow suit. Some nations are even richer in renewable energies than we are.
Yes, a generation of tenacious worldwide negotiations will be needed to bring the existing nuclear arsenals down to zero. But without nuclear powerplants driving proliferation, the task will be much simplified.
William W. Smith III
Jamestown, RI 02835
31 March 2015