Plutonium End Game

Press Release

Table of Contents

Preface

Summary and Recommendations

Chapter One: Nature of the problem of commercial plutonium

Chapter Two: A Brief History of Commercial Plutonium

Chapter Three: Assessment of the current situation

Chapter Four: Disposition of US-Russian Surplus Military Plutonium

Chapter Five: Alternative Disposition Options

References

Plutonium separation for use in nuclear reactors began in a small way during the 1960s. The two premises of the commercial plutonium program in the United States and elsewhere were:

• Uranium was a scarce resource that would become increasingly expensive, necessitating the use of plutonium as fuel.
• The rapid growth of nuclear power, which would become the primary source of electricity by the end of the century. In the United States alone, the expectation of the nuclear industry in 1970 was that there would be 1,000 nuclear power plants of 1,000 megawatts each by the turn of the century (the actual number was about 10 percent of the projection).

The rapid increase of oil prices during 1973-74 seemed to confirm the prognosis of those who believed that plutonium would be the main energy source of the future. Uranium prices rose along with oil prices. France and Japan in particular, both dependent on oil imports to a far greater extent than the United States, intensified and expanded their light water reactor and reprocessing programs. These programs were complemented by costly breeder reactor programs. Breeder reactors are designed to produce more fissile material than they consume during reactor operation by conversion of non-fissile uranium-238 into fissile plutonium-239.¹⁷ The aim was to replace light water reactors by breeder reactors, which would use at first the plutonium created in light water reactors and separated in commercial reprocessing plants. Eventually, an all-breeder-reactor electricity sector was envisaged. In such an economy, plutonium would fuel the reactors and plutonium produced in the "blankets" of the reactors from uranium-238 would be the source of further fuel supply. However, the hoped-for era of a plutonium-fuelled economy did not materialize. Five crucial problems confronted it that have steadily grown worse over the past 25 years:

1. Uranium turned out to be far more plentiful than anticipated, and the price of uranium declined rapidly (with an upward blip in the 1970s). It is currently at or near historic lows. Table 2 shows some data on historical uranium prices.
2. Sodium-cooled breeder reactors, the technology of choice for creating a plutonium economy, and the one in which the greatest efforts and money have been invested, has turned out to be a very difficult technology to master and make economical. Despite over $20 billion in construction expenditures over more than four decades for just the large completed plants, the technology continues to be plagued by technical problems and high costs. Table 3 shows the approximate worldwide capital expenditures on major sodium-cooled breeder reactors, and the current status of the various reactors.
3. Separated commercial plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons, so that the development of a plutonium economy incurs considerably increased proliferation risks compared to those posed by uranium-fueled nuclear power reactors.
4. Reprocessing proved to be a costly technology, thereby increasing costs of plutonium relative to uranium.
5. Reprocessing results in discharges of large amounts of liquid radioactive waste and also creates other radioactive wastes that pose environmental problems and create safety and health risks.

The cost and proliferation factors have been the most decisive. The United States abandoned commercial reprocessing in the mid-1970s for non-proliferation reasons, as a result of decisions by Presidents Ford and Carter. By the time President Reagan tried to revive commercial reprocessing in the early 1980s, there were no private sector takers, since the economic prospects of reprocessing no longer appeared favorable. Indeed, by the early 1980s, nuclear power itself began to fall out of favor on Wall Street. In France, Britain, Japan, Russia, and India, where the governments subsidize commercial plutonium development, either directly or through policies that cause ratepayers to pay for the added costs, reprocessing has continued. France in particular put two large commercial reprocessing plants into operation. The reprocessing facilities at La Hague in France are now the center of the world's commercial reprocessing industry.

The growth of commercial reprocessing and of global stocks of separated plutonium in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by the increasingly insistent reality: breeder reactor technology would be costly and difficult to master. It could not, in the foreseeable future, use the stocks of plutonium that were growing rapidly as a result of putting commercial reprocessing into operation.

The reprocessing plant owners and the governments that supported a plutonium economy confronted a serious dilemma in the mid-1980s. At the very time that reprocessing plants were beginning to generate large amounts of separated plutonium on a consistent basis, the technology designed to use that plutonium - the sodium-cooled breeder reactor - was escalating in cost, with no definitive resolution to the technical problems. Smooth operation of large breeder reactors with plutonium fuel had still not been achieved. France had built a large 1,250 MW (electrical) demonstration breeder reactor, the Superphénix, which was about the same size as the uranium-fueled commercial nuclear power plants it was putting into operation in the 1980s. But the Superphénix was not only expensive; it never operated at high capacity for any substantial length of time. Its total output from 1986 to 1998, when it was permanently shut, equaled less than one year of output at rated capacity. A commercial nuclear power plant operating would put out almost ten times as much in the same period.

Table 3 shows the relatively large breeder reactors that have been built and their approximate costs. Over 20 billion dollars have been spent on large breeder reactor construction alone for the reactors that have been completed. Roughly $3 billion were spent on the US Clinch River Breeder Reactor, abandoned in the early 1980s. In all, about $25 billion have been spent on large breeder reactor construction worldwide. Significant sums have also been spent on smaller breeder reactors, and on breeder reactor operation. There has been a low return in terms of electricity output, overall, since many breeder reactors have operated far below rated capacity and many reactors operate for a decade or less. While we have not attempted to make a detailed estimate of operating costs versus revenues from electricity, the poor operating record of breeder reactors, including the largest among them, the Superphénix, makes it likely that operating and fuel costs have far exceeded the sales of electricity. In addition, billions of dollars will have to be spent to decommission breeder reactors and manage the wastes. Finally, we have not included research and development costs or the costs of the many reactors under 100 megawatts thermal. Were all these factors to be taken into account, the net costs of the global breeder reactor program would likely exceed the estimates in Table 3 by billions of dollars.

Rather than admit failure and move on to renewable energy sources, advocates of a plutonium economy resorted to the idea of using plutonium as a fuel in existing light water reactors. Plutonium was to be mixed with depleted uranium dioxide to create mixed oxide (MOX fuel, with about five to seven percent total plutonium content. About a third of the reactor core is loaded with MOX fuel; the rest is conventional low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel.

However, the use of MOX fuel in light water reactors is a technical dead-end so far as a plutonium economy is concerned, since the quality of plutonium in spent MOX fuel from light water reactors deteriorates with each pass through the reactor and soon becomes too low for further use. Moreover, most light water reactors were not designed for plutonium fuel use, since plutonium fuel requires more control elements that uranium fuel, other things being equal. Some reactors do have the room for modifications. In France, for instance, only the first generation of 28 nuclear reactors has been deemed suitable for MOX fuel use. Subsequent designs cannot be modified to accommodate the needed additional control elements.

The large-scale use of MOX fuel, it was hoped, would use up the growing plutonium stocks and allow more time for the development of breeder reactors. In France, the government-owned utility, Eléctricité de France (EDF), arrived at an agreement in the mid-1980s with Cogéma, the government-owned reprocessing company (now 19 percent privately owned) to use of MOX in its reactors, assuming that it would be economical. But by 1989, the situation had changed and EDF had concluded that MOX was "not competitive" with uranium fuel and that its use could impose additional costs on EDF of billions of francs during the 1990s. EDF estimated that the additional cost of using MOX fuel over the decade of the 1990s would amount to 2.3 billion francs (discounted to 1990) compared to uranium fuel. But EDF felt that it was necessary to go ahead nonetheless, since it had already signed the contracts with Cogéma, since continuing with reprocessing would keep options open for what types of rectors might be built to replace the existing generation of light water reactors, and because abandoning MOX would have "detrimental consequences for the nuclear option as a whole."

Table 3: Capital Costs of Breeder Reactors Larger Than 100 megawatts-thermal (MWt)

Japan embarked on a similar course. Some other countries, notably Germany, not wanting to store growing stocks of spent fuel at the their reactor sites, also saw advantages in simply exporting their spent fuel to France, and in the 1990s, to Britain for reprocessing. In this way, Japan and Germany have become the largest foreign customers of the French and British reprocessing and MOX industries. (Belgium also has a small plant, which exports MOX fuel.)

Global MOX fuel use has not grown enough to consume the plutonium separated as a result of commercial reprocessing of light water reactor spent fuel. This has resulted in a rapidly growing stock of separated commercial plutonium stocks. The other major factor in the rise of global plutonium stocks has been the continued reprocessing by Britain of the spent fuel from its Magnox reactors and its Advanced Gas Reactors (AGRs), neither of which use MOX fuel. The ostensible reason for reprocessing Magnox spent fuel is that it is in metal form and corrodes when stored wet. However, Britain failed to develop dry storage for its Magnox spent fuel, preferring to reprocess it.

The net result of failure in, and cancellation of, breeder reactor projects and of insufficient MOX fuel use due to high cost and other factors in light reactors has been a rise in commercial separated plutonium stocks. The total amount of plutonium separated from commercial spent fuel and breeder reactor fuel projected to the end of the year 2000 has been about 280 metric tons, with about 15 to 20 metric tons of additional plutonium being separated per year, mostly at La Hague and Sellafield. The inventory of commercial separated plutonium, excluding the separated plutonium used as MOX fuel, at the end of the year 2000, is over 210 metric tons (see Table 4).

The rise of commercial separated plutonium stocks is now about 10 metric tons per year after accounting for MOX fuel use. This far outstrips the growth of military stocks. The growth of military stocks for military purposes is presumably occurring in India and probably Israel. There is possibly a small nascent program in Pakistan. Both the United States and Russia are operating military reprocessing plants as part of management of irradiated fuels and (in the case of the US) target rods. While they claim that these operations are needed for safety and materials management, the end result is a growth in separated plutonium stocks in the military sector. However, even when all of these elements of the growth of military stocks are taken into account, the growth of plutonium stocks in the commercial sector far exceeds that in the military sector. We estimate that the global growth of plutonium stocks in the military sector (independent of the purpose of plutonium separation and grade of separated plutonium) is on the order of a 1 metric ton per year.¹⁹

Table 4: Estimated separated commercial plutonium stocks in country of storage, metric tons (see note)

Sources, Table 4: Estimated from various sources, including Walker and Berkhout 1999 and Albright, Berkhout, and Walker 1997. British data are from Barker and Sadnicki 2000. The French estimate was made using information from the Plutonium Investigation web site, www.pu-investigation.org and a personal e-mail communication, Xavier Coeytaux, of WISE-Paris, 11 Sep 2000, for the end of 1998 French plutonium stock of 75.9 metric tons. Japanese data are from the Science and Technology Agency (STA) of Japan for the plutonium inventory of Japan at the end of 1999 (see http://www.sta.go.jp/genshi/nuclear/pu_kanri.html or http://www.cmc.jca.apc.org/english/data/pu_inv..html), forwarded by Satoshi Fujino (CNIC, Tokyo). Data for the other category are from Albright 2000, Table 1.

The total worldwide separation of commercial as well as breeder reactor plutonium amounts to about 280 metric tons, including all plutonium that has been used as a fuel in commercial, demonstration, and research reactors.²⁰ While there are no official figures for total military plutonium production worldwide (only the United States and Britain have declared their production and/or inventories),²¹ it is estimated to be between 270 and 300 metric tons. Of this, some has been expended in over 2,000 nuclear weapons tests, and a considerable amount is present in radioactive waste. The current global military stock of all grades of plutonium is about 250 metric tons, which is modestly larger than the commercial stock of about 210 metric tons.²² If commercial reprocessing continues unabated, total separated plutonium stocks for commercial reprocessing are set to surpass those resulting from all military programs in the next few years.

Roughly $40 billion or so has been spent on reprocessing of commercial spent fuel and fast reactor spent fuel.²³ Reprocessing should be considered a net cost of development of the plutonium economy. The US National Academy of Sciences study of military plutonium disposition concluded that MOX fuel use in existing reactors is more costly than low enriched uranium light water reactor fuel even if the plutonium were free. ²⁴ Even the Russian ministry of atomic energy, Minatom, which is arguably the most determined agency in the world to want to create a plutonium economy, acknowledges that plutonium is currently uneconomical as a fuel:

In the context of MOX fuel production from separated commercial plutonium, the processing steps are fewer since the plutonium is available in oxide form at the end of the reprocessing line, but the cost of MOX fuel fabrication still appears to be somewhat higher than that of acquiring LEU fuel.²⁶ As a first approximation, we have assumed that the costs of MOX fuel fabrication after reprocessing has recovered the plutonium would approximately offset the costs of LEU acquisition in order to estimate the net worldwide costs of the attempts to use plutonium fuels.

It should be noted that much separated stored plutonium cannot be used for MOX fuel fabrication without being reprocessed again. This is because the build-up of americium-241 (due to the decay of plutonium-241) renders it unfit for MOX fuel fabrication.²⁷ Hence, this plutonium must either be immobilized and stored as transuranic waste, or it must be reprocessed again, at considerable cost, to be made fit for MOX fuel production. Until then, the plutonium must be stored, the costs of which are estimated to be on the order of two million dollars per metric ton per year.²⁸ Hence, many billions of dollars will have to be spent in any case on management of surplus commercial plutonium. The overall cost will depend on what management methods are chosen. The more spent fuel that is reprocessed, the larger will be the costs for plutonium management, whether or not the separated plutonium is used as a fuel.

Overall, roughly $70 billion have been spent on the attempt to develop a plutonium economy so far by the time most of the direct, monetized costs have been taken into account. This estimate does not include many important costs. The single largest element among them is the cost of the still incomplete Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant in Japan. The plant is scheduled to be completed by 2005, at a total cost of about $20 billion.²⁹ If we include the cost of this plant, research and development costs, the costs so far of storage of separated but unused plutonium, and the net operating costs of breeder reactors costs,³⁰ the overall net costs of the plutonium fuel and breeder reactor program can be estimated to be roughly $100 billion. A summary of these costs is shown in Table 5.

The future costs of past plutonium policies will include:

1. disposition of already separated plutonium but so far unused
2. decommissioning of breeder reactors and commercial reprocessing plants,
3. breeder reactor waste management
4. Extraordinary costs, such as those associated with transoceanic MOX fuel shipment and the costs arising out of the BFNL MOX data fabrication scandal (see Chapter 3). The latter costs alone are estimated to be about $300 million.³¹

The largest portion of the world's total expenditures on plutonium is accounted for by Japan, which has the single biggest cost item in the form of the incomplete Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant. The country with the most ambitious plutonium program, France, has accounted for a significant portion of the rest. When French reprocessing costs and breeder reactor costs to date are added up, considering reprocessing as a net cost, France has spent a total of about $20 billion, or about 130 billion francs (1999 francs)³² on its plutonium program so far (net costs)³³. They do not include R&D costs for breeder reactors and reprocessing, the net operating costs of breeder reactors, and the costs of modification of light water reactors to use MOX fuel. Future costs, including future reprocessing and decommissioning costs of reprocessing plants and breeder reactors will add to this total.

An official French government report to the Prime Minster of France has now conceded that reprocessing and MOX are imposing huge costs on the French economy. Table 6 summarizes some of the results of the study. The costs are un-discounted costs in constant 1999 French francs. Scenario S7 in the table is a hypothetical one, which calculates the cost of electricity had France never gone done the reprocessing, MOX fuel route. Compared to an entirely non-MOX nuclear power sector, the study estimates that the additional costs of using MOX in 28 reactors over the lifetime of the reactors amount to 164 billion francs (1999 francs), or about $35 billion.

By comparing the hypothetical non-MOX scenario, S7, with the maximum MOX scenario, S6, which is the actual current policy, and keeping all other factors constant, it is possible to derive the French government's own estimate of the costs per reactor per year of the MOX program.³⁴ The total additional costs in scenario S6 compared to S7 amount to 164 billion francs. This entire additional cost is attributable to reprocessing and MOX fuel use. This yields an additional cost per year per reactor using MOX of about 260 million francs. This means that for the twenty reactors now using MOX, the French government's own estimate of additional annual cost is over five billion francs, or about 800 million US dollars. For a program involving 28 reactors using MOX, the annual costs amount to over $1 billion per year.

Next: Chapter Three: Assessment of the current situation