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Savannah River nuclear plant connected to unsuccessful diplomacy

Officials in Washington thought they had clinched a deal with Moscow to ensure that the Russian plutonium stockpile would shrink, only to discover after years of delay that Russia had other plans

How a Massive Nuclear Nonproliferation Effort Led to More Proliferation, The Atlantic,  More than a decade of negotiations with Russia produced a clear winner, and it was not the United States. DOUGLAS BIRCH AND R. JEFFREY SMITHJUN 24 2013 SAVANNAH RIVER SITE, South Carolina “……The huge new nuclear fuel plant at Savannah River reached this shaky stage via a convoluted path. The idea behind it grew out of a crisis. Arms control agreements in the 1980s had left both the U.S. and the Soviet Union with huge stockpiles of fissile materials from dismantled warheads. The collapse of the Soviet economy left workers at vast weapons production complexes without heat, power or paychecks, a circumstance that threatened security and raised the risk of nuclear smuggling.

At least four times between 1994 and 2000, small amounts of smuggled plutonium were recovered by law-enforcement officials in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency –all at the height of the Russian economic meltdown.

The United States and its allies worried these cases were the tip of an iceberg. Princeton physicist Frank von Hippel, a key player in the early push for a disposal agreement, recalls his surprise on visiting the huge Mayak nuclear complex in western Siberia in 1994. There, he found 30 metric tons of plutonium oxide from civilian reactors capable of being fashioned into bombs, stored in 12,000 tea-kettle-sized containers. A fence surrounded the reservation, but inside the gates all that stood between a thief and the plutonium was a padlock on the warehouse door and a nervous conscript guard.

A distinguished panel concluded in a special 2001 report for the Energy Secretary that the threat of diverted weapons materials from the former Soviet Union “is a clear and present danger, to the international community as well as to American lives and liberties.”
Nor has the risk of nuclear terror diminished since then, U.S. officials say. “Two decades after the end of the Cold War, we face a cruel irony of history –the risk of a nuclear confrontation between nations has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up,” President Obama warned on the eve of an April 2010 global summit on nuclear security in Washington. Former vice president Dick Cheney told the American Enterprise Institute the following year that a terrorist with nuclear materials and know-how was “the most dangerous threat” the U.S. faced.

But even though the United States and Russia worked together to stem nuclear security problems in the 1990s, the two countries disagreed from the start about controlling plutonium. The U.S. view, initially, was that the best way to prevent the explosive from being used in new bombs was to lock it away in ceramic and glass.

Russia, though, was eager to tap the vast riches locked in its Cold War detritus. The country pressed to use its plutonium as fuel for a type of nuclear reactor that can actually produce more plutonium than it burns, in a form that is more easily used in nuclear explosives – a reactor known as a “breeder” that many Western experts say can promote a dangerous international trade in the nuclear explosive.

In a long struggle to resolve this disagreement, the Russians got the better of Washington, according to some experts who followed it closely. As a result, the South Carolina plant’s troubles partly reflect the fact that soaring U.S. national security ambitions were brought to earth by unsuccessful diplomacy. Officials in Washington thought they had clinched a deal with Moscow to ensure that the Russian plutonium stockpile would shrink, only to discover after years of delay that Russia had other plans…….” http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/how-a-massive-nuclear-nonproliferation-effort-led-to-more-proliferation/277140/

June 25, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, USA