Remembering George Kuzmycz

Nukes on a Blog remembers the contribution of the late George Kuzmycz to the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons on the tenth anniversary of his untimely passing.

During the last few years of his life, George led U.S. Department of Energy efforts to secure weapons usable nuclear materials in Ukraine from theft or diversion.

George’s commitment to his native Ukraine and to nonproliferation are memorialized in the ongoing work of the George Kuzmycz Training Center for Physical Protection, Control and Accounting of Nuclear Material (English translation).

George’s life reminds us that the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation result from human choices and that it is possible, as George did, for each of us to take on more than our share of responsibility for responding to these dangers.

Measuring progress on securing nuclear weapon-usable material

In his op-ed Thwarting Terrorists: More to Be Done appearing today’s Washington Post, Dr. Matthew Bunn, Senior Research Associate in the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and also Member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, announces the publication of his annual report Securing the Bomb 2007.

He notes in the op-ed that:

-“While this is a global threat, Russia, Pakistan and research reactors using
fuel made from highly enriched uranium pose the most urgent dangers of nuclear
theft.”
-“Roughly 140 research reactors fueled by highly enriched uranium exist in dozens of countries -- some of them on university campuses -- and many have only modest security measures in place.”
-While “U.S.-funded security upgrades have been completed for more than half of the Russian buildings with potential bomb material and more than half of Russia's warhead sites…there is still a dangerous gap between the urgency of the threat and the scope and pace of the U.S. and international response. No binding global nuclear security standards are in place. Many nuclear facilities around the world do not have
security measures that could protect against demonstrated terrorist and criminal
capabilities.”
-“Only about a quarter of the world's HEU-fueled research
reactors have had all their highly enriched uranium removed, leaving a major gap
to be closed.”

Bunn’s recommendations include:

-"We urgently need a high-priority global campaign to make sure every nuclear
weapon and every significant cache of potential bomb material is locked
down."
-"We need to forge effective global nuclear security standards."
-"We need stronger efforts to get countries to sustain upgraded security for the long
haul, and to help those individuals who work with nuclear materials to understand that corners can never be cut on security."
-"And we need to expand efforts to completely remove nuclear weapons and potential nuclear bomb material from as many facilities worldwide as possible."
-"To get all this done, President Bush should appoint a senior White House official to take full-time responsibility for policing these efforts, overcoming the obstacles to progress, and keeping the issue a priority at the White House."

One step forward, two steps back

Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman announced this week at the International Atomic Energy Agency that the United States would declare another 9 metric tons of plutonium as excess material, “enough to make over 1,000 nuclear weapons.” The material from dismantled nuclear weapons will be removed over “the coming decades” and will be used to make mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel at the controversial MOX facility in Savannah River, South Carolina.

These 9 MT will be added to the 45 MT tons of plutonium that the United States has declared excess material (34 MT of which is already slated for fuel fabrication at the Savannah River Site [SRS]).

While this announcement is a useful step in further reducing the amount of excess plutonium and furthering the objectives of Article VI of the NPT, Secretary Bodman in the same breath touted the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) which has been one of the Bush Administration’s top energy and foreign policy priorities. The GNEP program would resume commercial spent fuel reprocessing in the United States, separating out tens of metric tons of weapons-usable material per year. The United Kingdom for example has a stockpile of over 100 MT of plutonium as a result of thirty years of reprocessing, and France has accumulated about 80 MT.

Reprocessing is not a necessary part of the fuel cycle, and unnecessarily producing weapons-usable material undermines U.S. efforts to convince other states not to engage in plutonium reprocessing. Another proliferation concern is that reprocessing would create additional stockpiles of plutonium or a plutonium mix that might be diverted by terrorists. In fact, due to proliferation risks and costs, the United States has not reprocessed spent fuel from commercial power plants for over thirty years, when President Ford and then President Carter stopped U.S. commercial reprocessing after India diverted reprocessed plutonium for its first nuclear explosive test in 1974.

So far, the Department of Energy will not make the commitment that the material extracted from nuclear waste will not be weapons-usable.

So while we should celebrate the declaration of additional excess plutonium, it is difficult to ignore that at the same time as Secretary Bodman defends U.S. contribution to non-proliferation, he is promoting the expansion of Department of Energy’s GNEP efforts that will lead to a new plutonium economy.