DISARMAMENT: Plutonium Mountain Grows Under START Treaty Process

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov and Judith Perera

MOSCOW, Jan 12 1996 (IPS) - The ten year programme to scrap some 45,000 nuclear warheads under the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) disarmament treaty is leaving both sides with more plutonium than they know what to do with.

In line with the treaty, Ukraine is to swop the last of the Soviet nuclear warheads left on its soil for Russian nuclear fuel for its power stations, Ukraine’s defence minister Valery Shmarov says. But while Russian defence minister Pavel Grachev welcomed the transfer as confirmation that all was going to plan, the volumes of unwanted plutonium awaiting reprocessing or safe storage is rising.

In 1991 the former Soviet Union and the U.S. ended the Cold War with about 35,000 and 20,000 warheads in their respective silos and stockpiles. Under START this will be reduced to about 3,000 strategic and 2,000 tactical warheads each, requiring them both to dismantle some 45,000 warheads over the next decade.

Each warhead has an average of around three kilograms of plutonium and 15 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU). This leaves the U.S. with some 45 tonnes of plutonium and 225 tonnes of HEU and Russia with 90 tonnes of plutonium and 450 tonnes of HEU.

In addition, each country is estimated to have tens of tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium and hundreds of tonnes of HEU in stored weapons components, metal, and scrap.

At present both Russia and the U.S. are dismantling warheads at the rate of about 2,000 to 2,500 per year. Dismantling is taking place at facilities previously used for warhead assembly. The U.S. has only one facility, at Pantex near Amarillo, Texas.

Russia is using facilities in the once secret ‘closed cities’ of Lesnoy, formerly Sverdlovsk-45, at Nizhnaya Tura and Trekhgorny, formerly Zlatoust-36 at Yuryuzan, both in the Urals. Similar work is being carried out at the Avanguard unit at Saro, formerly Arzamas-16, and Zarechny, once Penza-19, south of Nizhny Novgorod.

Potentially some 6,000 warheads a year could be cleared at these sites, but some are busy modifying existing warheads to make them safer and producing a limited number of new warheads for the SS- 25.

Storage is a problem for Russia which has asked for U.S. help to build a huge central facility to hold all its military plutonium and HEU. Officials at the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy say the ultimate capacity of this facility would be 100,000 containers, each holding 4-5 kilograms of plutonium or 10 kilograms of HEU.

The US has not formally refused help but so far nothing concrete has been agreed. Russia puts the cost at over one billion dollars.

Russia will halt the production of weapons-grade plutonium by 2000, according to nuclear energy minister Viktor Mikhailov. The last three reactors producing plutonium — two at Seversk (formerly Tomsk-7) and one in Zhelznogorsk (Krasnoyarsk-26) — are continuing to operate because they are dual purpose and also provide power to nearby settlements and towns.

The Tomsk reactors will be upgraded to produce power only and will then be replaced by a new design VVER-640 reactor. The construction at Seversk of a high temperature helium reactor is also being considered to burn weapons grade plutonium, Mikhailov added.

The plutonium reactor at Zhelznogorsk is to be replaced by a 350 megawatt (MW) boiling water reactor, he added. In 1994, Russia announced it would no longer fully process weapons-grade plutonium at those sites and would place it in storage.

The disposal of HEU presents no real problems. It can be ‘denatured’ — reduced to low-enriched uranium — and then used in civilian nuclear power plants.

Plutonium, however, cannot be denatured in this way and poses a more difficult problem. Russia’s long-term solution is based on a “closed fuel cycle” developed by the nuclear industry, says Viktor Kushnikov, a specialist at the Russian Institute of Inorganic Materials.

This entails burning the plutonium mixed with uranium — mixed oxide (MOX) — as civil reactor fuel, either in conventional reactors or modified fast breeders. For Russia plutonium is a valuable potential source of energy.

The U.S. arms control community, however, favour vitrification — containing the plutonium as glassified high-level wastes. Paul Leventhal, of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington opposes the MOX option arguing that will encourage the reprocessing of this plutonium, ultimately making the world a less safe place, he said.

Objections to this solution include the poor economics of the process, a worldwide shortage of capacity to fabricate MOX fuel, and fears of diversion by terrorists.

Plutonium must be stored in a high-security facility and will require careful and expensive security. But while safeguarded storage protects against theft by ‘terrorists’, the plutonium would still be available to governments if they felt the need to use it commercially.

Hence the interest in converting weapons-grade plutonium into forms less easily reused in weapons such as MOX or vitrified glass.

Russia only has pilot plants for MOX production at present and a half-built facility at its Mayak reprocessing plant in the Urals.

The German company Siemens has proposed to build in Russia a copy of the MOX-fuel fabrication plant it has just completed — but has been refused permission to operate — in Hanau, Germany. The original plan was to produce up to 120 tonnes of MOX a year, using about five tonnes of weapons plutonium annually.

Siemens put the cost at 500 million dollars but the plan has foundered. One alternative under consideration is for Russia to buy some of the equipment that will be dismantled when the unwanted and unused Hanau is scrapped.

Vitrification is not an option for Russia at present. Its only reprocessing facility at Mayak is already working to full capacity and in any case, the Russian government has so far failed to identify an acceptable site final disposal of high level wastes.

Clearly, whichever route is taken — storage, burning as fuel or vitrification, nothing can be done without substantial additional investment in new facilities. And in the meantime the plutonium mountain continues to grow.