Lies, damned lies and nucleonics

Transportable nuclear microreactors, a godsend for nuclear terrorism

Khalil Haqqani at Friday prayers at the Pul-i-Khishti mosque in Kabul.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times Biden Defends Afghanistan Evacuation as Thousands Besiege Kabul Airport Partial transcript of Kabul sermon—unsourced: “To power their evil oppression the invaders—cursed be their name—flew in small nuclear reactors. They had to leave them behind as we chased them off and took back our sacred land, our sacred mountains, and our sacred skies. Find those reactors and Allah shall shower his blessings upon thee, in this Life and the Hereafter.”

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Nukes have a long history of lurid lies, compulsive secrecy, and murderous mores. In 1946, David Lilienthal became the first chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, the parent of the current US Department of Energy. Lilienthal understood that military and civilian nuclear technology are inseparable. Everybody gets it, but most of the power elite pretends otherwise. Even the reputable US National Academies agrees. A 2023 Consensus Study Report Laying the Foundation for New and Advanced Nuclear Reactors in the United States sums reality up as follows:

In the United States, managers of the nuclear enterprise now stress the value in “distinguishing the sunny side of the atom from its more sinister one.” The fact of the matter is that the military applications of nuclear technology and the civilian applications have a connection to each other: the two enterprises have a common origin and clearly rely on one another's strengths, most clearly in the connection between civilian suppliers and the naval reactor program, as well as the revolving door that exists between civilian nuclear power and retired Navy personnel. David Lilienthal famously said that research on the two was “virtually an identical process: two sides of the same coin.” Social scientists in the UK recently documented the close links between civil and military nuclear industries resulting from pressures to ensure a steady stream of skilled workers in the nuclear weapons and nuclear submarine sector. This connection does not engender confidence among those parts of the broader population for whom the association is problematic. [I left out the references and highlighted Lilienthal’s observation.]

In recent years, there has been a lot of sunny side talk about small modular reactors and nuclear microreactors small enough to be transportable by truck or airplane. The same National Academies report says:

Some of the proponents of microreactors claim that the risks are so small that they may be placed in middle of urban areas to provide power to microgrids or to power vehicle charging stations.

Nuclear microreactors will have trouble dealing with the wildly fluctuating charging load on a microgrid. Never mind. Far more dangerous are the proliferation and health risks posed by these gadgets. The urban nuclear microreactor is an idea whose time will never come. The same ought to apply to military microreactors, as the Kabul impression at the top of this post illustrates.

What is the origin of the microreactor craze? A couple of years ago, revolving-door General Jim “Mad Dog”Mattis declared that the military must be “unleashed from the tether of fuel.” Wouldn’t transportable microreactors be ideal for future Arctic resource wars with Russia and China?

Indeed, in “All Hell Breaking Loose” Michael Klare wrote about Cold Response 2016, one of the biannual NATO exercises in the Norwegian sub-Arctic. It was “the largest multinational maneuvers conducted in Europe's Far North since the end of the Cold War.” Klare concluded that “the mock aggressor force was unmistakably Russian.”

The national “security” enterprise invites a thermonuclear holocaust and provides lavish life support for the dying civilian nuclear power sector. These resources could be used for programs of social uplift and to stave off climate chaos.¹

Always actively helping to expand the nuke racket are our Rhode Island US Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse. Their perverse priorities are shared by most nuclear weapon governments across the globe.

Senator Jack Reed always pushes increased funding of the US war economy and militarism. By now, the yearly national “security” budget exceeds the $1.3 trillion. Per year that is a little over $3,800 per US person from young to old. Over a life time, it adds up to close to $300,000.

Here is a summary of the money wasted in Rhode Island on the war economy, militarism, and false national security. The Poor People's Campaign: a National Call for Moral Revival collected the data in Rhode Island 2023 facts.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse persistently provides the ailing nuclear industry with the mock climate mitigation promise of clean, carbon-free energy. Just look at the following (incomplete) list of bipartisan legislation with live links to the senator's never-flagging, nuke-friendly emanations:

• The Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act of 2017 (NEICA), signed into law in September 2018

• The Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act (NEIMA) signed into law in January 2019

• The American Nuclear Infrastructure Act (ANIA) of 2020 and 2021

• The ADVANCE Act of 2023

The American Nuclear Infrastructure Act of 2021 had seven US Senate cosponsors:

1. Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI]

2. Sen. Barrasso, John [R-WY]

3. Sen. Booker, Cory A. [D-NJ]

4. Sen. Crapo, Mike [R-ID]

5. Sen. Manchin, Joe, III [D-WV]

6. Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC]

7. Sen. Sinema, Kyrsten [D-AZ]

The legislation is truly bipartisan in the sense of George Carlin: “some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”

Always absent from the senatorial sunny side talk is the bit about socializing risk and privatizing profit. In this case, that is the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the damages the nuclear industry will have to pay in compensation for loss or injury in case of a nuclear disaster. See Sec. 302, Extension of the Price-Anderson Act, of the pending legislation.

The best characterization of the legislation goes back to former Vice President Cheney:

“It needs to be renewed,” Cheney said. “If it is not,”he said, “Nobody's going to invest in nuclear power plants.”

In other words, if the People don't pay the insurance bill for the nuclear industry, the venture capitalists won't play.

Andy Stirling and Phil Johnstone, the social scientists referred to in the National Academies report cited before, in their Hidden military implications of 'building back' with new nuclear in the UK provide additional, reputable sources that make the nuclear two-sides-of-the-same-coin point:

Recent statements from high-level officials confirm the industrial interdependencies between civil and military sectors—for instance French President Emmanuel Macron's blunt statement in 2020: “to oppose civilian nuclear and military nuclear in terms of production...[and]...research, does not make sense for a country like ours...without civilian nuclear, no military nuclear, without military nuclear, no civilian nuclear.”[emphasis added]

Some of us, over the years, have followed former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and his energy exploits such as his report with the telling title The US Nuclear Energy Enterprise: A Key National Security Enabler. Moniz also specializes in promoting assorted kooky greenhouse gas emission reduction schemes designed to extend the life of the fracked oil and gas industry such as production of hydrogen, the ‘new natural gas’ and carbon capture. Indeed, Moniz and his Energy Future Initiative get a well-deserved shout-out from Stirling and Johnstone:

Perhaps most significantly, former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz launched a report in 2017, which stated that “a strong domestic supply chain is needed to provide for nuclear Navy requirements. This supply chain has an inherent and very strong overlap with the commercial nuclear energy.”

Accordingly, a memorandum leaked under the Trump administration in June 2018, reveals that recent regulatory measures to protect nuclear power, are a reflection of high-level perceptions that the civil nuclear industry is essential to national security, specifically including naval propulsion.

As to nuclear power, nobody can accuse former Secretary Moniz of a foolish consistency. He was a co-author of a 2009 report of which former CIA Director John Deutch was the first author. The report concluded that:

nuclear power will diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would constitute a material contribution to climate change risk mitigation.

Department of Energy Communications

In December of 2022, Secretary Jennifer Granholm vacated the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission decision to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. The timing of the vacating order might have been a coincidence, but that Nolan was working on Oppenheimer was known in January of 2022. Was the Department of Energy inoculating itself against an Oppenheimer publicity debacle? Hard to know; but it can't be ruled out.

Section 327 of the National “Defense” Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2019 directed the Secretary of Energy to develop a report on nuclear microreactors. According to the law, the report was due in August of 2019. It appeared almost three years late in June 2022.

In what might be yet another Oppenheimer coincidence, a couple of weeks ago I received the microreactor report from the Department of Energy. That was the result of a February 2020 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed when I got no response from Senator Reed and former Congressman Langevin. For years I had been told that the report was ready to be signed by the Secretary of Energy. Then there was a long silence. Being fed up, I filed another Freedom of Information Act request. The latter was for information that might explain why the Department of Energy appears to be exempt from US law. Within minutes a FOIA officer called and told me that they had sent the report on August 3. I never saw it, but that could have been me. He resent the report. Having accomplished what I had in mind, I dropped my second FOIA request.

A critique of the report is a waste of time. Its very existence is the result of a variant of what John Manley, a close collaborator of Robert Oppenheimer, observed decades ago about about how government works:

You don't do staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then you do staff work.

Consistent with a Generalized Manley Dictum (GMD), the microreactor report was an exercise in futility. The production of microreactors has been a done deal for years. The Department of “Defense” already in 2020 awarded contracts for their construction as part of Project Pele, named after the Hawaiian goddess of fire.

Regulatory issues are being addressed by the ADVANCE Act. If all else fails, the President will direct the US Department of Energy “under section 91b of the Atomic Energy Act to authorize DoD to manufacture, produce, or acquire the reactor for military purposes,”as the microreactor report mentions.²

Department of “Defense” Fails to Respond

Former Secretary of “Defense”William J. Perry has nuclear nightmares. One of them is about terrorists exploding a crude nuclear bomb in Washington, DC.

To appreciate the nightmare perspective of microreactors, it is crucial to understand that:

1. Most run on TRISO pellets containing more highly enriched uranium than regular reactors;³

2. They contain plutonium; and

3. “All grades of plutonium can be used as weapons of radiological warfare which involve weapons that disperse radioactivity without a nuclear explosion.” (See Physical, Nuclear, and Chemical Properties of Plutonium.)

In other words, nuclear microreactors come with very serious proliferation risks. Dr. Waksman is Program Manager at the Strategic Capabilities Office of the Office of the Secretary of “Defense.”About 21 minutes into a presentation Dr. Waksman gave about Project Pele, he sings the praises of the TRISO pellets. He mentions “kinematic impact testing” that is used to address the question of how many of these pellets would be busted open if a nuclear microreactor is hit by a missile.

Pellets must be broken open when the time comes for reprocessing spent fuel. If that can be done, one would think that it can also be done by "bad guys" who manage to capture a mobile microreactor. I sent Dr. Waksman an email and asked for comments on how difficult is would be to bust open the pellets and what he had to say about the resulting proliferation risk.  That was a couple of weeks ago and I'm still waiting for an answer.

No need to wait any longer. It turns out that there is a 2012 paper written by researchers at a Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology and the China Institute of Atomic Energy in Beijing .⁴ The pellet busting is quite simple, as a couple of pictures from this paper show. Recovering the contents of the TRISO particles is a feat that can be accomplished sophisticated kitchen table set-up.

Left: graphite nuclear fuel element containing uranium oxide pellets; right: table top crusher to break open the pellets

Alan Kuperman of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin wrote a scathing report about Project Pele and its mobile nuclear reactors. As he documents in great detail, these gadgets are not up to their pretended purpose and vulnerable to missile attacks.

Possibly worst of all, one of these days “the greatest fighting force in human history” will once again precipitously withdraw from one of the operations in its enduring quest to garrison the globe. The fighting force in retreat might leave behind equipment that is found fodder for nuclear terrorists. It wouldn't be the first time that US military gear ends up in the hands of unintended recipients.

1. This is an update of an August 20, 2020 Uprise RI editorial “Nuclear power plants on federally subsidized life support”

2. Microreactor Pilot Program, Report to Congress June 2022 p. 17. The report is dedicated to Senator Reed and others. Follow this link for A 2019 presentation on the report before it came out is here.

3. Uranium as it occurs in nature consists mostly of U-238 with a small fraction of U-235. Natural uranium has a U-235 concentration less than 1%. To be usable power reactors that fraction has to be increased by enrichment to about 4% or 5%. Research reactors typically use a 20% enrichment. Weapon grade uranium consists of 90% U-235. The effort required for an addition 1% enrichment drops precipitously as one goes from 5% to 20% and on to 90% enrichment, as explained in detail by on the Uranium Enrichment web page of the World Nuclear Association. The TRISO fuel of most mobile reactors contains uranium enriched to close to 20%. This relatively high enrichment level adds to the proliferation problems of microreactors.

4. Liyang Zhua, Wuhua Duana, Jingming Xua, Yongjun Zhua Uranium extraction from TRISO-coated fuel particles using supercritical CO2 containing tri-n-butyl phosphate.