Abstract
Sometimes when you try to correct a problem, you end up digging yourself into a deeper hole. When trying to decide how to get rid of the “excess” plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons, that hole is literal as well as figurative.
This plutonium, once thought to be enormously valuable, is sought after now only by bad actors who would like to build their own stock of nuclear weapons, which makes the secure disposal of excess material essential.
Plutonium was long believed to be valuable because it cost so much to make. The government's figures are classified, but producing the U.S. stockpile of this toxic and radioactive silvery material with the little “criticality” problem—as its propensity to initiate a chain reaction is euphemistically known—certainly cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars. With a little bit of luck, we may be able to get rid of the now-declared-excess amount for a few dollars less.
Right now the United States is considering two ways to dispose of 34 metric tons of the stuff. The first plan involves mixing it with uranium to produce mixed-oxide (mox) fuel that could be burned in a few specially modified civilian power reactors. For safety reasons, plutonium can make up only about 5 percent of the mox fuel, so it could take 20 to 50 years to dispose of the plutonium using this method. It would also cost perhaps $20 billion. And this figure omits two other likely expenses: first, the cost of a tricky PR campaign to persuade the public that it's their patriotic duty to allow plutonium from nuclear weapons to be burned in their local power reactors; and second, a slush fund to cover the bonuses and/or bribes paid to electric utilities to convince them to take fuel that will cost several times as much as uranium-only fuel. The spent fuel would eventually be buried in the ground.
Read more about it
For more information on the problem of disposing of plutonium around the world, see “Plutonium Disposal: The Third Way,” by Allison Macfarlane et al. on page 53, accompanied by “Meanwhile in Britain,” on British plutonium disposal problems by Fred Barker and Mike Sadnicki. See page 58 for “Japan's Nuclear Twilight Zone,” by Shaun Burnie and Aileen Mioko Smith, and page 63 for “Plutonium: Can Germany Swear Off?” by Mark Hibbs.
The second plan involves mixing plutonium with noxious chemical and radioactive wastes (to deter retrieval and re-use) and fusing or vitrifying it into a solid glass matrix before burying it in the ground. This would also cost billions and might take even longer—especially since the new administration's proposed Energy Department budget eliminates the plutonium vitrification program.
But the question of plutonium disposal is a hot issue (pardon the pun) that will not go away. In addition to the U.S. pile of excess weapons plutonium, there is an equivalent Russian pile, and an additional 200-metric-tons-and-growing international mountain of “civil” plutonium—a legacy of expensive and ill-considered decisions by European and Japanese governments to reprocess spent fuel from their civilian power reactors. (Jimmy Carter, nuclear engineer, may have been an unloved president, but at least he led the United States away from that particular morass.)
People have often asked if there isn't some other way to get rid of the stuff. ∗ Recently, several non-governmental organizations have pointed out (using realistic numbers) that it would be cheaper for the United States to buy out and bury Russia's excess plutonium rather than giving Russia money—as it now plans to do—to build a mox factory, rejigger a power plant or two, and spend the next two decades burning mox fuel. And all the while, Russia would continue to produce more plutonium.
Elsewhere in this issue, a “third way” is discussed—a plan to produce something called “storage mox,” which would resemble mox fuel, except that it would contain more plutonium per fuel rod than could be used in a reactor. Storage mox would be manufactured like regular fuel. Then it would be immediately stored in giant casks surrounded by spent fuel rods and lethally radioactive wastes, after which it would be buried in the ground. This plan would provide at least a decade of work for the plutonium reprocessing companies in Britain and France, whose continued existence depends on government support and who would otherwise lobby to continue producing more plutonium.
The worst of all possible worlds—in other words, the most likely outcome—is that some plutonium will be buried, or burned and then buried, at great expense. Meanwhile, the reprocessing companies will continue to produce more (along with the enormous quantities of radioactive wastes that are a byproduct of reprocessing).
Out of hiding
If the public had paid attention to the plutonium problem, would it have come to this? And if given the opportunity, would the public vote for any of the proposed solutions? Admittedly, each has the same advantage/disadvantage: In the end, the plutonium will be buried deep in the ground, far away from us—somewhere that will let us forget any lessons we might otherwise have learned.
Yet inescapably, the solutions are not only cumbersome, expensive, and painfully slow, they are also old-fashioned—so twentieth century, as they say. Each involves mysterious and expensive processes to be conducted in enormous and largely secret facilities, with the end products stored in giant, super-sealed containers, hidden away in the deepest, most inaccessible underground caverns tunneled out of the most remote corners of our countries. Does this remind anyone, just a bit, perhaps, of the Cold War approach to nuclear materials?
Yet we are living in a new era—one that supposedly features transparency and the global dissemination of information. Why follow a Cold War paradigm? Why not opt for twenty-first century openness?
We could put all the excess plutonium in a single giant marble palace—one that was esthetically pleasing, of course, yet designed to separate the plutonium into small aliquots to avoid criticality. It could be built near a major world city, preferably on or near a multinational border.
Okay, maybe marble isn't such a great idea. But it would have to be big. At 16 grams to the cubic centimeter, 100 tons of plutonium would take up only about 6.25 cubic meters (think of a rectangle roughly 7 feet wide and 7 feet long, and 5 feet high), but each small quantity—maybe 25,000 of them—would need to be carefully separated from the rest by empty space and careful shielding to avoid unfortunate “reactions.”
Someone must think putting all that stuff in one building could be safe: The United States and Russia are together paying for an enormous building at the admittedly remote Mayak facility in Russia, where 50,000 separate containers of weapons materials will be stored.
Perhaps a plutonium mausoleum might be powered by the heat of decay. It wouldn't produce much power, but what it did produce would last forever or 24,000 years— whichever came first. We'd always know where the stuff was, and we could go and stare at it any time we wanted. A hundred security cameras (why not a thousand?) could broadcast live on the Internet from every nook and cranny. And the safety and security of the plutonium could be monitored 24/7 by net-surfing high school students in Mali and bored British housewives as well as by U.S. and Russian bureaucrats.
So here's the deal
The idea of the “Plutonium Memorial” may not be any more realistic than flying pigs, universal peace, or a leak-proof missile shield. But just because it's not going to happen doesn't mean that the best and brightest artists and architects shouldn't be idling away their time designing the building.
Accordingly, we at the Bulletin are pleased to announce a contest for the best picture, painting, model, or design plan for a plutonium mausoleum— a representation that captures the spirit of the idea, but with serious accommodations for the safety and security requirements such a structure would have. (See www.thebulletin.org/contest for more about those requirements.)
The creator(s) of the winning entry will receive $1,500, with $750 going to the second and third place finishers. In addition, the designers of the top 12 entries will receive a one-year subscription to the Bulletin, and a memento (e.g., T-shirt, mug) bearing the Bulletin logo, along with our undying gratitude and some modicum of publicity. Entries must be postmarked by November 30, 2001, and received at the Bulletin offices at 6042 South Kimbark, Chicago, Illinois 60637-2806. Electronic submissions cannot be accepted. Winners will be announced in the March/April 2002 issue of the magazine.
All entries will become the property of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and cannot be returned.
Complete contest rules are available on the Bulletin web site at www.thebulletin.org/contest.
We wouldn't have to worry about the human tendency to forget about burial grounds after a couple of centuries. We'd always know where the plutonium was—and if there was a problem, we'd probably be inclined to deal with it in a timely manner.
We could call the structure the “Plutonium Memorial,” and maybe its name could be emblazoned on giant neon signs in all the Big-Five U.N. languages, which might draw visiting families eager to take their children on tours—not to exceed, say, 14 minutes in length—as a demonstration of one of the true object lessons of the nuclear age.
David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, the authors of World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1992, list two other ways to get rid of plutonium that failed to capture the imagination: dispatching it in rockets aimed at the sun, and embedding it in underground rock formations, using nuclear blasts as an explosive fabrication technique. Deep sea-bed disposal has also been suggested.