Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Chapter 3: Criteria for Comparing Management and Disposition Options
Chapter 3: Criteria for Comparing Management and Disposition Options
Pages 61-86
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From page 61... ...
CRITERIA RELATED TO SECURITY, TIMING, AND CAPACITY As described in Chapter 1, the goal of minimizing security risks from excess weapons plutonium can be divided into three objectives: 1. to minimize the risk that either weapons or fissile materials could be obtained by unauthorized parties; 61
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From page 62... ...
Moreover, what is done with excess weapons plutonium in the United States and the former Soviet Union could affect, for good or ill, the fate of the substantially larger (and still growing) quantities of separated and unseparated plutonium discharged from civilian nuclear power reactors worldwide.
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From page 63... ...
. Those potential proliferators who lack the technology and knowledge associated with a large nuclear weapons complex or an advanced civilian nuclear program would not have as many options.
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From page 64... ...
In particular, one significant component of the risk of theft is likely to be theft by parties who do not have the capability to process the material or fabricate it into weapons, for sale to those who do. Forms of plutonium that would be quite difficult for unsophisticated parties to remove, store, and transport such as those emitting intense radioactivity are likely to pose major obstacles to this form of theft, even if they would pose significantly smaller barriers to parties with the sophistication required to fashion a nuclear weapon.
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From page 65... ...
~4 At of At D a' 3 - o Coo o Ct 3 Ct .= 5 ._ X ,0 X £ ._ £ ~'C .° .
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From page 66... ...
Other materials require progressively lower levels of protection. Table 3-3 shows some of the relevant characteristics of different forms of plutonium, ranging from intact pits at the top of the table to various forms of spent fuel or high-level waste (HLW)
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From page 67... ...
so o so o lo o o o ~ s~ o Id of 'e ad v)
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From page 68... ...
RPu metal sphere, 8-phase PuO2 powder, WPu Same, RPu MOX fuel pellet, WPu Same, RPu MOX fuel rod, WPu Same, RPu MOX fuel assembly, WPu Same, RPu MHTGR WPu fuel block Irradiated MOX fuel assembly. WPu ca.4 (powder @ 1 g/cm3)
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From page 69... ...
Standards Characterizing the security risks of the various disposition options in the ways just described will provide insight into the areas of greatest risk within each option and a basis for comparing overall risk among options. These comparisons will inevitably be judgmental because they involve different attributes and classes of risk and opportunity, many of which can only be characterized in a general way.
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From page 70... ...
The security risks associated with this material are so great that it is difficult to imagine choosing an approach that was significantly riskier than another because it would save money-all the more so because the total sums involved are unlikely to be nearly as large as those that the United States and the former Soviet Union routinely invested in the past in attempts to buy security against nuclear weapon dangers. Nevertheless, the economic dimension of alternative disposition approaches should be examined to assist in ranking approaches that are not readily distinguishable on security grounds, to facilitate planning for the investments that will be required for the approach chosen, and to correct some of the misimpressions put forward in recent years concerning the economic merits of the various approaches.
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From page 71... ...
. Variations and inconsistencies in the treatment of these factors make it practically impossible to derive informative conclusions about costs of alternatives from direct comparison of final cost estimates obtained in different studies of the individual disposition approaches; rather, it is necessary to reconstruct a consistently based set of estimates starting from the building blocks (such as estimates of direct construction costs, or of labor and materials requirements)
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From page 72... ...
7In DOE's Plutonium Disposition Study, for example, government construction of advanced reactors to consume weapons plutonium was found to make a substantial profit for the government, in large part because the assumed low real cost of money (4 percent per year) provided a substantial competitive advantage against private electric power plants financed at much higher costs of money.
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From page 73... ...
If a new facility is built to handle weapons plutonium and produces some other needed product or service as well (such as a reactor built for plutonium disposition that also produces electricity) , the cost or benefit attributed to the plutonium disposition mission should be the total cost associated with the facility minus the costs associated with producing that product or service in the way in which it otherwise would have been produced.
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From page 76... ...
The committee believes that the goal of reducing the security risks associated with excess nuclear weapons and fissile materials can and should be accomplished subject to reasonable ES&H constraints. It is very important that the governments involved express in the strongest terms their commitment to respect such constraints and demonstrate this commitment by promulgating an appropriate set of ES&H criteria for the plutonium disposition process.
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From page 77... ...
The third criterion is necessary because existing standards on emissions, doses, and disposition of radioactivity in the environment do not cover all of the ES&H characteristics of potential concern. To argue that the third criterion need not be met that is, that management and disposition of excess weapons plutonium should be allowed to create a significant increase in the ES&II burdens of the nuclear weapons complexes or of civilian nuclear power would also be likely to generate widespread objection and intolerable delay.
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From page 78... ...
With this linear assumption, current 1 l National Research Council, Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, Health Effects of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR V) (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990)
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From page 79... ...
The standards on emissions, doses, and disposition of radioactivity in the environment have been constructed to ensure that the radiological risks to the most exposed members of the public from the routine operation of nuclear facilities in compliance with these standards are much lower than the risks of the same types experienced by individuals in the same population
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From page 80... ...
2. Those radiological risks from plutonium disposition that would not necessarily be adequately limited by criteria 1 and 2 would be confined by criterion 3 to be a small addition to the risks of these kinds that exist or will exist from responsibly managed nuclear electricity generation and cleanup of the nuclear weapons complexes.
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From page 81... ...
. In the second case, if the facility produces no other product, then the total ES&H impact of the operation must be charged against the plutonium disposition mission.
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From page 82... ...
; · mixing the plutonium oxide with uranium oxide (for LWRs and some other reactor types) and fabricating the plutonium-bearing fuel; · storage and transport steps associated with the preparation of the fuel, its delivery to the reactor, and its storage there prior to use; · reduction in the amount of uranium mined, milled, converted, enriched, and fabricated, by virtue of the substitution of plutonium-bearing fuel for some of the uranium-only fuel that would otherwise have been used; · any changes in the ES&H characteristics of reactor preparation, operation, and maintenance as a result of the use of weapons plutonium in its fuel; and · any changes in the ES&H characteristics of waste management that result from the use of weapons plutonium in the fuel including spent fuel storage and transport; further high-level-waste processing, if any; emplacement and residence in a geologic repository (including the potential long-term risks of 1
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From page 83... ...
Among these items, particular attention needs to be given to the possible impacts of weapons plutonium use on reactor safety and on the disposal of the resulting nuclear waste. It should be noted that the additional troublesome ES&H issue in current nuclear power practice the radiation doses to current and future generations from the tailings at uranium mines and mills-can only be diminished (albeit modestly)
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From page 84... ...
Other Policies and Objectives. Management and disposition of excess weapons plutonium should, as with other activities, be guided by the agreements, laws, regulations, and policies of the state carrying it out.
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From page 85... ...
CRITERIA FOR COMPARING OPTIONS 85 scope of this study. The committee also does not believe that whether plutonium disposition options would also have the potential to produce tritium should be a major criterion for deciding among them.
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