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Science & Global Security-Previous Issues This Year

Online versions of these issues will be available one year after publication.

Volume 19, No. 1
January 2011

Contents

iii Foreword: A Transition - Frank N. von Hippel,

v Editors’ Note

1 Consistency Tests for the Declarations of U.S. Fissile-Material Production – Frank N. von Hippel

15 Plutonium Wastes from the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex – Robert Alvarez

28 The History of Plutonium Production in Russia – Anatoli Diakov

46 History of Highly Enriched Uranium Production in Russia – Pavel Podvig

68 China’s HEU and Plutonium Production and Stocks – Hui Zhang

Editors’ Note :

The five articles in this issue all deal with fissile material production and stockpiles. They cover the history of highly enriched uranium and plutonium production in the United States, Russia, and China. They are drawn from, revise, and in some cases provide additional details to the respective chapters in the International Panel on Fissile Material’s Global Fissile Material Report 2010. The articles show that independent technical analysts using publicly available information are able to make consistent and increasingly detailed estimates of fissile material production even where nuclear weapon states have chosen not to release official data on historical production activities and current stockpiles.

The United States, alone among the nuclear weapon states, has made declarations by site and year of its production of highly enriched uranium (released in 1993 and with an update released in 2006) and for plutonium (published in 1996). While not subject to independent domestic or international verification, it is still possible to assess whether these declarations are reasonable given what else is known of the U.S. production program. Frank N. von Hippel shows that the fissile material declarations are in good agreement with government data separately released much earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, on uranium acquisition, separative work at uranium enrichment plants, and the energy produced by plutonium production reactors . Weapon states that have not so far declared their fissile material production might consider as a first step releasing the kind of data on uranium acquisition, enrichment capacity and production reactor operation that can allow similar consistency checks on possible future declarations.

In Plutonium Wastes from the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex, Robert Alvarez uses recent, more accurate measurements of plutonium in waste streams carried out for environmental remediation purposes to show that almost 3 tons of plutonium were not properly accounted for in the 1996 U.S. plutonium declaration. These waste data have not been part of the official record set used by the United States to account for its plutonium production activities. This analysis of how plutonium losses were underestimated was featured in The New York Times and has led to a government effort to update the official declaration of U.S. plutonium production history. This work suggests other nuclear weapon states would benefit from collecting and integrating accurate measurements on fissile material bearing wastes at production and disposal sites into their national fissile material accounting and management systems.

The two articles on Russia provide the first detailed new estimates for Russia’s plutonium and HEU production histories since the work published by David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker in 1997. Anatoli Diakov and Pavel Podvig use newly available technical data, including government documents on the development of the Soviet nuclear program in its first decade, along with recent official and semi-official histories of the Soviet weapons program and nuclear industry to look at plutonium and HEU production respectively. Their analyses significantly reduce the uncertainties about Russia’s production history and current stockpiles of fissile materials.

China maintains great secrecy about its fissile material production history. It is the only one of the five weapon-states party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to not have formally declared an end to fissile material production for weapons – it has informally indicated an end to such production. These policies often have been attributed to China having perhaps the smallest stockpile of fissile material among these five weapon states. There is, however, increasing openness even about the Chinese program. In China’s HEU and Plutonium Production and Stocks, Hui Zhang uses newly published official information about the early history of China’s nuclear weapons program, memoirs of scientists involved in this program, and recent media reports (especially about a previously secret uncompleted plutonium production complex now turned into a tourist site). This new analysis suggests that China’s stockpile may be significantly smaller even than previous non-governmental estimates and shows that researchers may have more potential resources for further refining this estimate than may have been anticipated.

Volume 19, No. 2

July 2011

Contents

iii Editors’ Note

91 Survivability of China's Sea-Based Nuclear Forces – Wu Riqiang

121 Using the Graphite Isotope Ratio Method to Verify the DPRK's Plutonium-Production

Declaration - Jungmin Kang

130 Climate Change, Nuclear Power, and Nuclear Proliferation: Magnitude Matters –

Robert J. Goldston

Editors’ Note

A recurring lesson of the nuclear weapons age is that uncertainty has often bred insecurity and that this dynamic can be addressed by diplomacy and cooperation rather than arms racing. This was recognized recently, for example, in the United States’ 2010 Nuclear Posture Review call for “high-level, bilateral dialogues on strategic stability with both Russia and China which are aimed at fostering more stable, resilient, and transparent strategic relationships... The goal of such a dialogue is to enhance confidence, improve transparency, and reduce mistrust.”

A good agenda item for a US-China strategic dialogue is offered by Wu Riqiang in his article assessing the survivability of China’s ballistic missile submarines (SSBN) in coastal waters against U.S. anti-submarine warfare and the vulnerability of their ballistic missiles to interception by planned U.S. sea-based missile defenses. He shows why China may be concerned about the possible noisiness of its new Type 094 submarine and may need to improve the quietness of the planned fleet of perhaps six SSBNs to ensure their survivability. Further, he finds that U.S. plans to develop missile interceptors much faster than those available today and deploy them by 2018 on Aegis destroyers close to Chinese SSBN coastal patrol areas could enable the United States to intercept most if not all the SLBMs launched from China’s coastal waters towards the U.S. mainland. To counter these perceived vulnerabilities, China could seek to move its submarines from coastal waters to patrol areas in the deep oceans and closer to the United States and to longer range sea-launched ballistic missiles and add more and better decoys to assure some of its nuclear warheads will reach the United States.

Uncertainty about fissile material production for weapons has long been a source of concern and will likely be a central issue in the move towards nuclear disarmament. Jungmin Kang simulates a verification exercise to determine the accuracy of reconstructing the total amount of plutonium produced in North Korea’s 5MWe Yongbyon reactor using the Graphite Isotope Ratio Method (GIRM). GIRM is an example of an approach for determining the total plutonium production by a reactor first proposed by Steve Fetter in 1993 in this journal. It relies on measuring the changes in trace element isotope ratios at sites in reactor structural material to determine the total neutron fluence experienced at these locations. For low-power graphite-moderated reactors like the one at Yongbyon, the local boron isotope ratio (B¹⁰/B¹¹) in the graphite has proved to be a useful indicator.

Since graphite samples from the Yongbyon reactor are not available for analysis, however, Kang hits on the novel approach of using as mock-GIRM data the B¹⁰/B¹¹ ratios at 200 sites in the Yongbyon graphite generated by a simulation of the reactor core by researchers at Seoul National University and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). Kang uses these simulated B¹⁰/B¹¹ values to independently calculate plutonium production in the respective reactor fuel channels. His estimate of the cumulative plutonium production by the reactor differs by about 1% from the value determined in the original core simulation.

Emerging and future technologies carry their own uncertainties, which if understood early can inform the debate on whether the costs of pursuing them may outweigh any benefit. Nowhere is this perhaps more important than the issue of what energy production choices can best help limit carbon emissions so as to reduce the temperature increases and other effects associated with climate change. Robert J. Goldston seeks to inform this question by comparing the proliferation risks from the fuel and waste cycles that would be associated with a 12-fold expansion of nuclear energy worldwide by the year 2100 if it were achieved by the light-water reactors in use today, by plutonium-fueled fast reactors, or by fusion energy. He finds the proliferation risks associated with fast reactors appear significantly greater than those associated with light water reactors, while fusion systems still under development constitute an even lower proliferation risk in terms of the diversion of fissile material or breakout production of fissile material from such facilities.