2. National Academy of Sciences Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium. Committee on International Security and Arms Control, Washington DC, 1994, p.1.
3. Some reactors are dual-use reactors, which generate power for civilian use as well as plutonium for military purposes. Many military reactors have special target rods of depleted uranium which are irradiated to yield weapon-grade plutonium.
4. This estimate is based on the following assumptions: (i) there are, on average, under 4 kilograms of plutonium in each warhead and (ii) there are about 20 metric tons of plutonium in the military inventories of other nuclear weapons powers. To maintain an arsenal at a given size, an additional small inventory (relative to the plutonium in the weapons) is required in order to compensate for accidental or remanufacturing losses. David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists calculates that this would amount to less than one metric ton for the projected U.S. arsenal (Write as cited in IEER 1994, p.2). This amount is much smaller than the uncertainties in the above calculation and so can be ignored in the present context.
5. David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1992, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 204-207.
6. John H. Gibbons, Testimony before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate, May 26, 1994, p.3.
7. NAS 1994
8. Brain G. Chow and Kenneth A. Solomon, Limiting the Spread of Weapon-Usable Fissile Materials, National Defense Research Institute, RAND, Santa Monica, CA, 1993.
9. Frans Berkhout, Anatoli Diakov, Harold Feiveson, Helen Hunt, Marvin Miller, and Frank von Hippel, "Disposition of separated plutonium." Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, PU/CEES Report Number 272, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, September 1992.
10. Wall Street Journal, October 24, 1994. The price is rising toward $10 per pound, perhaps more. We assume, for the purposes of this report, a yellowcake price of $10 per pound. It is expected to be in the $7 to $15 range over the next few years.
11. Chow and Solomon 1993, pp. 35-39. there are various estimates of reprocessing costs. chow and Solomon state that the $1,600 per kilogram of heavy metal is the mid-point of the range of $1,400 to $1,800 in reprocessing charges actually paid to France and Britain by Japan and other customers, as of the time of the RAND study.
12. Berkhout et al. 1992, pp. 18-20.
13. Paul Leventhal and Steven Dolley, A Japanese Strategic Uranium Reserve: A Safe and Economic Alternative to Plutonium, Nuclear Control Institute, Washington, D.C., January 14, 1994.
14. This discussion addresses only security aspects of "energy independence"; we do not consider other aspects such as environmental problems and risks associated with various energy sources.
15. An exception to this is when HEU is loaded into breeder reactor cores as a substitute for plutonium. HEU is also used as a fuel in some naval propulsion reactors and in some research reactors.
16. While uranium-238 is not fissile and cannot sustain a chain reaction, it can be fissioned with fast neutrons to yield energy. This property of uranium-238 is used in advanced nuclear weapons to provide a significant portion of their yield.
17. Chow and Solomon 1993, p.5.
18. The quantity of HEU required for a nuclear weapon is about 3 to 4 times greater than that for weapon-grade plutonium. About 3 to 5 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium are required for a fission weapon, though a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council states that a kiloton-range weapon can be made with as little as one kilogram. Weapon-grade plutonium contains about 93 percent of the fissile isotope plutonium-239.
19. NAS 1994, pp. 144-146
20. NAS 1994, p. 144.
21. Office of Technology Assessment, Staff paper on the Sub-seabed disposal of high-level waste, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1986; Chow and Solomon 1993; NAS 1994; Berkhout et al, 1992.
118.NAS 1994, pp. 196-199.
119. Letter from Joseph Vivon, DOE Chief Financial Officer to Congressman Tom Bevill, Chairman, House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, Committee on Appropriations, September 23, 1994.
120.OTA 1993, p. 122.
121.OTA 1993, p. 13.
122. It should be noted that plutonium-239 decays into another radioactive material, uranium-235. However, uranium-235 is about 30,000 times less radioactive per unit of weight than plutonium-239, and the radioactivity per canister would be correspondingly smaller. Uranium-235, like plutonium-239, is a weapons-usable fissile material. therefore, even the decay of plutonium will not end the security threat. The weight of the uranium-235 would be only about 2 percent less than the initial weight of plutonium.
123. For an analysis of the U.S. radioactive waste disposal program, see: Arjun Makhijani and Scott Saleska, High-level Dollars, Low-level Sense: A Critique of Present Policy for Management of Long-lived Radioactive Waste and Discussion of an Alternative Approach, Apex Press, New York, 1992.
124. K. J. Schneider et al. High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Alternatives, 4 volumes, Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, WA 1974, Vol. 4, Section 9.
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Last Updated April 17, 1996