Nukes for Proliferation and Industry Handouts
with a link to the three-year-late Department of Energy report
A previous post mentioned a U.S. Department of Energy report that appeared in June of 2022, three years late and thus in violation of U.S. law. The report doesn’t seem to be available on the Internet. This post fixes that. Here it is: U.S. Department of Energy Microreactor Pilot Program.
The release of the report is mostly an exercise in futility. At the time, the program already was a done deal blessed by an executive order issued by President Trump days before the end of his term in 2021.
Professor Alan Kuperman of the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin in an email exchange provided the following comments, replicated here with his permission and my thanks:
The biggest news (p. 11) is the price tag, which they estimate at $300 million just for the preliminary R&D excluding the cost of actually building and licensing the reactor. So, this is not mainly a program to buy a reactor from a vendor, but rather a massive government subsidy to a private-sector startup for R&D on a speculative reactor technology. The actual building of the reactor would then cost $100s of millions more, for a total cost of perhaps a billion dollars for a single microreactor that would produce tiny amounts of electricity—barely one percent that of a typical nuclear power reactor.
Perhaps most disturbing is the report’s criterion for choosing among the 16 proposed reactors from 14 vendors. According to the report, the Department of Energy (DOE) quickly down-selected to three of the proposed reactors merely because their vendors had initiated discussions with the NRC about licensing (p. 7). Bizarrely, this rewards a company, Oklo, whose licensing application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was rejected in 2022 for “Lack of Information.” In this down-selection, DOE apparently ignored more pertinent criteria such as operational safety during normal operation, consequences of malicious attack, and whether the technology would foster nuclear weapons proliferation, not to mention practical considerations such as fuel availability and the long-term potential for commercialization.
This likely explains why the Air Force recently selected Oklo to develop and build the first reactor under this program, which is a terrible choice on safety, security, nonproliferation, fuel availability, and commercialization grounds. While it is questionable whether any micro-reactor could be economical, safe, and secure on a military base, there are other vendors whose technology has significantly greater chance of working in the long run and that would not undermine U.S. nonproliferation policy. Only the Pentagon has so much money that it can waste a billion dollars subsidizing the private sector on a speculative technology that would also undermine national security.
On the brighter side, many people in Guam will be happy that the report does not support building a reactor there on a military base, which would be a sitting duck for enemy fire.
Irresponsibility and undermining the security of the people, the poor and vulnerable in particular, have been perennial features of U.S. nuclear policy. It is a bipartisan problem, as is clear from this post, also by Professor Alan Kuperman. The title says it all: Biden’s horse-trading on nuclear technology and fuels is an unprecedented proliferation risk. This is the first paragraph:
News media in the United States rarely report on nuclear proliferation until it reaches the crisis stage—as in North Korea and Iran. By then, however, it is typically too late to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Effective nonproliferation must begin much earlier, not only by suppressing demand for nuclear weapons but also by restricting supplies of the fissionable materials necessary to build them in the first place. Sadly, the Biden administration is bungling this latter responsibility.
In 1995, Joseph Rotblat was awarded the Noble Peace Prize jointly with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. This, according to the citation, was “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.” Humanity seems to have forgotten Rotblat’s penetrating, prophetic, and still pertinent words:
I belong to the group of scientists who helped to make the atom bomb during the last war. We did this work because we believed so this was the only way to deter Hitler from using a bomb against us, should the German scientists succeed in making it. So, therefore our aim was to stop using the bomb, but despite this and against the advice of many scientists, the bomb was first used by the Americans in Hiroshima.
A ferocious nuclear arms race developed between the great powers. Plutonium is a material from which atom bombs can be made and therefore, in the course of time, all nations in the world who rely for their energy on nuclear reactors, on fast speed reactors, if such a country goes on to a program for nuclear energy, then it must set up a team of scientists and engineers with the knowledge of assembling a nuclear weapon.
Inevitably, pressures will begin to build up for contingency plans to be ready to manufacture an atom bomb at short notice, should the a defense of the country require it. And if the materials are there, then the next step would be a test of such a weapon under the guise of a peaceful nuclear explosion. What I have outlined now is not such a fictitious scenario. In fact, it happened. It is a contagious disease, a nuclear disease.
And therefore I'm convinced that plutonium economy, in the course of time, all nations will become nuclear weapon powers. And when this happens I'm afraid that mankind is doomed, because sooner or later it will lead to a nuclear war.
Since Rotblat made this prediction in 1977, the number of nuclear bomb nations has indeed been increasing steadily.
Equally prophetic was the even earlier June 1945 Franck Report. It predated the July 16, 1945 Trinity test and warned against the danger of setting the stage for a nuclear arms race and proliferation, as it argued against the use of the atomic bombs on civilian targets such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombed two months later. The Franck Report stated:
It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.
The world was not persuaded and not only did the U.S. never recover from its early, grievous mistakes, it keeps piling up potentially omnicidal stupidities. Is there any country that fails to notice what happened to Iraq and Lybia after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs? Only the U.S., its NATO allies, and more recently Australia feign innocence.