| Blog
by Pavel Podvig, www.russianforces.org/eng/blog/ MOX facility in Russia Tuesday, November, 2005 3:00 PM As Linton Brooks mentioned today, the United States and Russia resolved the legal issues that held back construction of MOX fabrication facilities. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in South Carolina on October 15th. The idea is that the MOX fabrication facilities will help get rid of 34 tonnes of weapon-grade plutonium that Russia and the United States declared excess for their national security needs (68 tonnes total). It's been a long story and Russia has never been really enthusiastic about the deal – it always wanted to keep plutonium for its breeder program . However, as it turned out it is the United States that is eager to keep the MOX program going. It went ahead with the U.S. part of the deal with full understanding that Russia may not follow and in any event the United States will eventually have to pay for the Russian facility. The original program was driven by the idea that we need to get rid of as much plutonium as possible, so it could not make its way to nuclear warheads. But this task is not as urgent as it was thought to be in the early 1990s. 34 tonnes is a relatively small fraction of overall stocks of weapon-grade plutonium (about 125-150 tonnes on each side). The program has ended up being just a boost (and a subsidy) to the nuclear industry. Money would be better spent on making sure that all plutonium is safe and secure. Turning it into MOX would do little to help that. Spent fuel and oil oligarchs in unexpected places Tuesday, November, 2005 12:00 PM In his presentation about the Russian view of the future of the nuclear fuel cycle Valentin Ivanov, a member of the Russian Duma, mentioned that one possibility for a spent fuel storage site that is considered today is Krasnokamensk in Chita region. If you buy the Minatom arguments for storing spent fuel in Russia, this may make sense – Krasnokamensk is considerable closer to the ports at the Far East, where the fuel would be unloaded. The change of site would not necessarily make the spent fuel storage plan any more attractive – just recently Minatom admitted that there are no takers. What’s interesting is that Krasnokamensk was very much in the news lately – this is where Khodorkovsky, the (former) Russian oligarch, is serving his sentence. Aren’t there other places in Siberia? U.S.-Russian Cooperation Tuesday, November 8, 2005 10:30 am The National Academies and the Russian Academy of Sciences released a very interesting study “Strengthening U.S.-Russian Cooperation on Nuclear Nonproliferation”, which they presented this morning. The idea of the study was to look at the impediments to U.S.-Russian cooperation and find ways to overcome them. The list of recommendations looks very interesting. The central recommendation of the study is to bring back the “Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission” (under the title of a Joint High-Level Commission). Which is an interesting idea, but the chances for its resurrection are about as high as the chances of Mr. Gore and Mr. Chernomyrdin getting back to the politics, which are essentially zero. Then the recommendations go to overcoming legal obstacles. This is very telling. The issues here are not legal as in “international treaty legal”. These are taxes, liabilities, and other quite boring lawyerly stuff. To some extent this is a good sign – when issues like these become prominent, it usually means that the relationships between countries are pretty good. At the same time, these issues are the most difficult to resolve. The rest of the recommendations deal with organization and management and scientific and technical cooperation. These are very sensible, which you would certainly expect from people who have been managing a lot of cooperative projects in the past. Overall, the work done by the academies shows that the answer to problems is not necessarily in creating new bureaucracies, but rather in continuing exactly the kind of work the academies have been doing – constantly coming up with new joint projects they find interesting and worthwhile. I'm not sure that the high-level commission they advocate would do a better job. Nuclear taboo Guaranteeing the guarantee Monday, November 7, 2005 11:00 am Assured fuel supply for nuclear power plants, which Mohamed El Baradei advocated in his remarks today, would be a very good idea. If only it was easy to implement. El Baradei was right when he said that unless a country is 100 percent certain that it would get the fuel, the whole scheme will not work. But then he went on saying that countries will get the fuel only if they are in compliance with their NPT obligations. Which is exactly the problem – if a country is in compliance, it does not have to worry about guarantees, fuel banks and so on. It would just buy the fuel on the market. And if there are doubts about the compliance (we are not talking about actual non-compliance yet) then the IAEA, the guardian of the arrangement, won't let it get the fuel from the bank. If the IAEA would act as the primary guarantor of fuel supply, it will become the natural place to apply political pressure in case someone would want to. One can argue that the IAEA track record of resisting political pressure has been quite good so far, but not everyone would consider this a strong guarantee. Centralization (read monopolization) is a wrong way to provide guarantees of uninterrupted supply, even if the monopolist is a respected institution that just won a Nobel Prize. Diversity of suppliers would work much better. But even that might not be enough. To make sure that the assurances of supply are hundred percent reliable, we may have to promise that the supply will continue even if a country is not (entirely) compliant with its NPT obligations. |