"The worldwide supply of weapons plutonium is about 250 tons, including that declared 'excess,'" declared John Holdren, banquet speaker for the second international "Plutonium Futures-The Science" conference. He continued, "Reactor plutonium supplies amount to about 1,120 tons. The options for disposition of these materials are to store them in different forms, burn them in existing reactors, save them for advanced reactors of the future, or immobilize them for disposal in waste repositories. There may be other options as well."
Holdren described how a committee of the National Academy of Sciences evaluated the options for weapons plutonium. Holdren was a member of this committee. The committee report was published in two volumes in 1994 and 1995 and concluded that "excess" plutonium poses a danger to the US and the world. "Well-guarded storage is not sufficient," Holdren added; "appropriate barriers are needed as well. The material must be made as difficult as reactor plutonium to reuse; that is, it needs to meet the spent fuel standard (SFS)." The committee also concluded that the difficult disposition decisions need to be made now, before other nuclear energy issues are solved.
The two least problematical disposition methods to use in meeting the SFS, the committee pointed out, are to immobilize the materials in glass logs or to use them as MOX (mixed-oxide) fuels, once-through in reactors. The committee recommended that this option be pursued in parallel by both U.S. and Russia in cooperation. Holdren noted that a U.S./Russian commission came to the same conclusion, but with four nonproliferation conditions: a joint agreement is needed, international funding is needed, the material should be protected as reprocessed plutonium, and we should not delay.
Holdren said the energy supply message is this: at the end of the twentieth century, the world is still dependent on fossil fuels in spite of the work done on renewable energy sources. "Business-as-usual" can be defined as the same rate of population growth and economic growth, the same efficiency of energy sources, and the same percentage of carbon-based fuels. Under business-as-usual, the amount of CO2 in the environment will triple. Holdren stated that the world is not running out of energy. "The essence of the energy problem," he explained, "is that the world is running out of cheap oil, the environment needed to absorb the impacts of business-as-usual, and the tolerance for inequity of who has/doesn't have energy and who is/is not producing waste. The world is also running out of money for better options, the time for a smooth transition to non-carbon-based forms of energy, and the leadership to do what is required."
Environmental issues surrounding the continued use of carbon-based energy are the most intractable, Holdren noted. The most dangerous of these is global climate change, which is involved in 80% of present energy production. Developing countries are becoming the largest part of the problem. As a consequence of business-as-usual, Holdren predicted, the earth will become warmer, as much as 5% warmer. Sea levels will rise, displacing people all over the world who live in coastal areas. There may be some unpleasant surprises as well: disease, storms, shifts in ocean currents, and more. If the world goes beyond double the preindustrial concentrations of air pollutants, these consequences may be expected. "With business-as-usual," Holdren warned, "we will triple these concentrations or more."
Holdren expressed the need for renewable, non-carbon-emitting sources and solutions to the worldwide energy generation needs, and said nuclear fission or fusion sources can help fill these needs. "Capturing emissions from current sources will help as well," he added.
Holdren listed the remaining obstacles to the expansion of nuclear energy: reactor safety, waste management that is acceptable to the public, and minimized linkage to nuclear weapons. "The latter is the most important," he said. "While many include economics as an obstacle," he predicted, "in the long term fossil fuels will be more expensive, equal to the costs of nuclear generation. So economics is really not an issue."
Holdren calculates that if nuclear power were to go from the present one-sixth of total energy production to a one-third share, nuclear plants would have to be ten times more numerous than they now are. But he predicts that by 2050 fission power may be phased/phasing out. He suggested that options that may be viable in the future include "once-through" nuclear fuel, which yields high power generation and low recycling, or some method that yields high generation and high recycling such as advanced heavy metal reactors (AHMRs).
"Waste management complexities interact with other complexities such as threats," Holdren added. Threats he listed include the diversion of materials from power to weapons, theft of materials, and a loss of confidence in the prevention of diversion or theft.
"In the short term, 10 years or so, the materials that pose the threats are separated military plutonium, civilian plutonium, and highly enriched uranium," Holdren enumerated. "These should be put away in SFS forms. Reprocessing and recycling nuclear materials at this time make these threats more credible, make proliferation worse, and are more expensive than the once-through or AHMR options."
Holdren concluded, "For the medium- long- and unimaginable-long terms it is premature to assume that we can reprocess or transmute nuclear materials, but research should continue. If we want to maximize our chances of providing a larger percentage of power generation with nuclear fuel, we need to make it safer, more economical, and more acceptable. Reprocessing will not accomplish these goals."
The above is a summary of the talk "Plutonium Proliferation and Nuclear Power" by John Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.
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