Toward heaven or hell? The conflict over plutonium’s future

The book opens with the discovery of plutonium in the early 1940s and the precipitous development of its related technologies—weapons and production systems—during the World War and ensuing Cold War. Its future civilian role was only glimpsed early on. This changed in the 1960s and 1970s when the imagined future of nuclear power, with plutonium at its heart, acquired an extraordinary potency, becoming a source of serious division and conflict within societies and between states. At issue was the great expansion of nuclear electricity supply proposed by research and development labs, industries, and governments in many countries. To sustain the expansion, a transition had to be engineered, it was insisted, from uranium-fueled “thermal” reactors (mainly light-water) to plutonium-fuelled “fast-breeder” reactors, which would “breed” more fuel than they consumed, allowing societies to free themselves from constraints on uranium supply and from price inflation as demand increased. This transition required immediate, resolute, and heavy commitment of resources, starting now, to develop and demonstrate fast reactor technology and establish the industrial means (that is, reprocessing of spent fuel from thermal reactors) of providing the stocks of plutonium needed to charge up fast breeders. The year 2000 was often identified as when the “plutonium economy” had to be up and running.[2]
A future heaven of technological grandeur and deliverance from energy scarcity found itself pitted against an imagined, two-part hell: nuclear weapons proliferation, as separated plutonium became widely available from reprocessing plants that were outside inspection regimes or hard to safeguard; and eternal vulnerability to fast reactor accidents and the release of deadly radionuclides. The debate was enlivened by competing visions of energy futures (“hard” paths that emphasize large-scale, centralized production facilities versus “soft” paths that center on smaller, distributed, renewable sources), of policies towards the management of reactor fueling and discharges (once-through versus closed fuel-cycles) and of approaches to the containment and eventual disposal of radioactive wastes.
The argument over nuclear futures became an international storm when the United States—champion of civil nuclear expansionism and main provider of nuclear technologies and materials—reversed course and mounted a campaign to halt reprocessing and the development of fast breeder reactors. Spurred by oil crisis, the nuclear visions conjured by the World Energy Conference and other seemingly authoritative bodies created panic in Washington after India had used civil plutonium in its test explosion of 1974. Before me is a typical study from the period. Its central scenario anticipated that global reactor capacity of 2,550 gigawatts (GW), including 394 GW of fast reactors, would have been installed by 2020 (today’s reality is 420 GW with no fast breeders).[3] Seventeen countries would require substantial plutonium stocks and access to reprocessing by that date.
The US government’s aggressive discouragement of reprocessing and fast breeder reactor programs was fiercely criticized abroad. The Ford and then Carter administrations, backed by Congress, were accused of striving to kill the nuclear future by imposing constraints, often by extraterritorial means, on civil production, trade, and development in the nuclear sphere, and by encouraging anti-nuclear movements across the world.
In defiance, France and the UK launched ambitious programs to build large-scale reprocessing plants to supply plutonium for fast breeder reactors at home and in other Western industrial countries—notably Germany and Japan—that needed time to establish their own capabilities.[4] By the early 1980s, binding contracts and intergovernmental agreements had been signed. A circulatory system was envisaged in which spent fuels would be reprocessed in France and the UK and their products returned to the countries of origin, enabling the steady distribution of plutonium for the launch of fast reactors.
Unable to prevent this from happening, the United States shifted to a policy of, in effect, containment by gaining agreement on the reprocessing system’s scope and regulation. Being nuclear weapon states, France and the UK were granted de facto recognition as nuclear-reprocessing-states, to coin a term, with Germany and Japan, uniquely among non-nuclear weapon states, granted rights as nuclear-reprocessing-states-in-waiting. Rigorous safeguards and physical protection measures would be applied, no transfers of reprocessing technology would occur to states outside the Western alliance (and some within it, including South Korea), and the US would retain consent rights over the reprocessing of certain spent fuels delivered to France and the UK. France’s agreement to apply strict export controls, including cancellation of plans to transfer reprocessing technology to Pakistan and other “countries of concern,” and to act “as if” it were a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (France did not join until 1992) helped to calm US nerves.[5]
A binary nuclear system was thus instituted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One entailed the “total reprocessing” of spent nuclear fuels from installed thermal reactors. It was dedicated to realization of a plutonium-fueled future, albeit restricted to a limited set of industrial countries with two nuclear-weapons-states/nuclear-reprocessing-states at its hub. The Soviet Union provided another hub in the Eastern Bloc, reprocessing spent fuels from satellite countries while keeping separated plutonium and fast breeder reactor development within the Russian heartland. The other system entailed the end of reprocessing and plutonium usage for civil purposes and the adoption of spent fuel storage and disposal as the standard, in effect creating a voluntary and involuntary community of “nuclear-non-reprocessing-states,” marshalled by the United States.

The plutonium future that so gripped the imagination and drove policy in the 1970s, for and against, soon lost credibility. Nuclear power’s expansion stalled as costs rose and accidents occurred, glut replaced scarcity in fossil fuel and uranium markets, and cheaper sources of electricity (natural gas and eventually renewables) became available. Fast breeder prototypes also performed badly, and most designs’ reliance on sodium cooling became an Achilles heel. In addition, utilities came to realise that increase in the “burn-up” of uranium fuels enabled greater amounts of energy to be extracted in situ from the fissioning of uranium-235 and plutonium, without the rigmarole of separating the latter.
Although the Reagan administration looked more kindly upon reprocessing than its predecessors, nuclear power’s downward trend and the confinement of reprocessing to a handful of allied countries allowed Washington to relax and cease campaigning to end the activity, other than in countries that sought nuclear weapons. Concern also shifted in the 1980s and 1990s from reprocessing to centrifuge enrichment of uranium, and from power programs to clandestine activity, as the likely routes to weapon acquisition.

From creation of a future to preservation of the present
Construction of the British and French reprocessing plants at Sellafield and Cap de la Hague proceeded throughout the 1980s.[6] Their primary justification—preparing for the introduction of fast breeder reactors—had lost all credibility by the time of their completion. The German, British and French breeder programs had been cut back, soon to be abandoned, and in 1988 Germany cancelled plans to build its own bulk reprocessing plant at Wackersorf. Although Japan’s confidence in its fast breeder reactor program also waned, it was kept alive to avoid disrupting construction of the reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura. Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Japan Aomori. Credit: Nife. (CC BY-SA 3.0). Accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Faced by the plutonium economy’s demise, reprocessing was re-purposed by its supporters to provide the industry and its governmental backers with reason not to do the obvious—abandon ship. Creating an essential future was replaced by a rationale designed to preserve and activate the newly established reprocessing infrastructures. It had two strands. A techno-economic rationale: the separation and concentration of radioactive wastes into different streams had adherent advantage, when it came to disposal, over their retention in unreprocessed spent fuel; and plutonium’s energy value could be realised through its replacement of fissile uranium in “mixed-oxide fuels” for use in existing thermal reactors (the practice of plutonium-recycling).[7] And a politico-economic rationale: The costs and risks of extrication from reprocessing commitments would exceed those of continuation, its difficulties aggravated by the political, legal, and contractual entanglements that had developed since the projects’ inception.[8]
Utilities became casualties of this shift in approach. Japanese utilities spoke of the “plutonium pressure” to which they would be subjected as plutonium extracted from their spent fuel was returned for insertion in operating thermal reactors, rather than being held in store for future fast breeder reactors. Reprocessing contracts had been entered into partly to relieve the spent fuel pressures building up at reactor sites and to avert the need to expand storage capacities there. They found themselves compelled by contractual obligation, threat of spent fuel’s return, and state-backed arm-twisting to shoulder the increasingly severe costs of reprocessing and engagement with plutonium recycling.
Thirty years after the Euro-Japanese reprocessing/recycling system’s launch, the experiment can only be judged a failure. The reasons are set out in persuasive detail in von Hippel, Takubo and Kang’s book. It is a system undergoing irreversible contraction after a long struggle, involving heavy expenditure and many troubles. Germany and the UK have already exited, the UK shutting its THORP reprocessing plant in 2018 and delaying its Magnox reprocessing plant’s closure only because of the coronavirus pandemic.[9] Instead, its Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has been given the costly (more than $138 billion) and long-lasting (more than 100 years) task of returning Sellafield and Dounreay to “green-field sites.”
Japan’s engagement with reprocessing and plutonium recycling was already deeply troubled before the Fukushima accident closed reactors: The Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant was operating only fitfully, MOX recycling was not happening, and plutonium separated from Japanese spent fuels in France and the UK was marooned there, probably indefinitely, by inability to manage its return in MOX fuel (cutting a very long story short).[10] The declared intention to soldier on with bulk reprocessing seems increasingly bizarre and is surely unsustainable. Although there has long been speculation that Japan’s plutonium policies have been buttressed by a desire to maintain a military option, von Hippel and his colleagues attribute the stubborn commitment to reprocessing at Rokkasho-mura mainly to utilities’ dependence on the site for spent fuel storage and the matching dependence of the Aomori Prefecture, where it is located, on the income and employment attached to reprocessing.[11]
Among the involved countries, only France can claim success insofar as its reprocessing plants have kept running, and it has displayed, unlike the UK, some command of the technology of MOX fuel fabrication.[12] However, rates of plutonium separation and recycling have seldom matched, leaving growing surpluses, and results have been achieved only through heavy subsidy, higher electricity tariffs and disguise of true costs. France’s national utility EDF, saddled with enormous debts, is striving to reduce its exposure to reprocessing. It is symptomatic that no spent fuel discharged from EDF-owned and -operated reactors in the UK, including those under construction at Hinkley Point, will be reprocessed.
The Euro-Japanese reprocessing/recycling system has therefore shrunk to one country (France) serving only domestic requirements at a gradually diminishing level, and another country (Japan) pledged to persist with reprocessing and recycling but without any real activity. Contraction has become the embedded dynamic. The move away from reprocessing is being accompanied by a transition towards dry-cask storage of spent fuels. It entails their removal from water pools at reactors after a few years’ cooling and their insertion in large concrete or stainless steel containers, the former pioneered by the US and the latter by Germany.[13] The Fukushima accident in 2011 has lent urgency to this transition, long advocated by von Hippel. Many reactors were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s without large spent fuel storage, expecting that spent fuels would be routinely transported to reprocessing sites after initial cooling. “Dense-packing” of water pools became common as utilities sought to reduce reliance on reprocessing. As described in the book under review, it was only luck—a leak of water into the pool from an adjoining reactor well—that prevented a greater catastrophe at Fukushima when a spent fuel store lost its coolant.[14]

Despite Europe’s retreat from reprocessing, von Hippel, Takubo, and Kang express worry that it remains alive, with its centre moving to Asia where investment in nuclear generating capacity is strongest. Reprocessing continues in India and Russia, if fitfully, where fast reactor programmes are still being funded. Japan’s commitment remains. Although none of these programs has significant momentum, they drag on. South Korea has also long expressed a desire, against US and other foreign objection, to embark on pyroprocessing of its spent fuel, a novel technique.
There is particular concern about China’s engagement with reprocessing and its dual civil and military purposes. Its “demonstration” reprocessing plant (twin units each rated at 200 tons of heavy metal) appears to have been designed to serve two 600 MWe fast breeder reactors under construction on the coast that may, like India’s, provide weapon-grade plutonium from uranium blankets besides serving putative civil needs.[15] The military aspect of China’s reprocessing program may explain why its reporting of civilian plutonium stocks to the IAEA under the Plutonium Management Guidelines ceased in 2017, when a pilot reprocessing plant began operating. There is worry that China’s investments in reprocessing and fast reactors are serving desires to expand weapon arsenals, adding to insecurity in East Asia and strengthening Japan and South Korea’s interest in plutonium separation that China has long sought to discourage. As so often in the past, claims of civil requirement can mask military intention, increasing the importance of puncturing the myth of separated plutonium’s economic utility.
Might China become the France of the future, a country with a heavy state-backed commitment to reprocessing and a dogged defender of the separation and usage of civil plutonium? At home, perhaps, but its regional concerns will surely cause it to be circumspect in its advocacy abroad and quest for foreign contracts. Whether it can succeed technologically where others have failed, not least in overcoming the fast breeder reactor’s many difficulties, is also highly questionable.

Separated plutonium is a waste
The authors remind readers of the persistent dangers that reprocessing poses to public safety and international security: the risks of accident and exposure to radiation, the proliferation of weapons, the possibility of diversion into nuclear terrorism, and the undesirable complication of radioactive waste disposal. “In our view, it is time to ban the separation of plutonium for any purpose” (their italics) is their concluding sentence. This may be the case, but the US and other governments are unlikely to respond to their call. They have so much else to contend with—climate change, pandemics, economic distress, arms racing on a long list—leaving a ban on plutonium separation low in their priorities. They are also all too aware of past failures to institute such bans, whether in commercial or military domains, from the Carter Policy in the 1970s to the stalled Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty in the 1990s and subsequently.
Another conclusion cries out to be drawn from this book. Plutonium’s separation and usage for energy purposes was an experiment that can now decisively be pronounced a failure. Experience has shown that separated civil plutonium is a waste. The book’s first of many figures, reproduced here, is the most telling. Up to the mid-1980s, the global stock of separated plutonium was predominately military and held in warheads, peaking at around 200 tons. It now exceeds 500 tons. The increase is due to the ballooning of civil stocks as plutonium’s separation has outstripped consumption. The global stock of separated plutonium now includes material extracted from the post-Cold War dismantlement of Russian and US nuclear warheads that is also effectively a waste.[16]

Global stocks of separated plutonium[17]
The figure tells us that separated plutonium has no market clearing price. Utilities shun its usage because MOX fuel is intrinsically more expensive to manufacture, by several multiples, than uranium oxide fuels because of plutonium’s radioactivity and the consequent need for extensive shielding. This applies even when the cost of reprocessing is excluded from price calculations, as has been customary. Spent MOX fuel also contains a more toxic cocktail of radionuclides than spent uranium fuels, creating more hazards and complicating storage and disposal.

“The Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, both Hanford regulators, were notified Thursday morning that the tank was likely leaking.
“There is no increased health or safety risk to Hanford workers or the public,” the Department of Energy said in a message to Hanford site employees Thursday.

Any contamination from the leak is expected to take more than 25 years to reach the water table, which is about 210 to 240 feet below the tank.
The groundwater flows slowly over decades toward the Columbia River from central Hanford, where Tank B-109 is located.

UP TO 3,000 GALLONS LEAKED

Tank B-109 was initially observed to be leaking up to 3.5 gallons of radioactive liquid a day, but may be leaking far less on many days, according to DOE.
At a maximum it may have leaked about 3,000 gallons of waste, said Ben Harp, the deputy manager of the DOE Office of River Protection.
It appears to be leaking waste at a higher rate than the other single-shell tank that has had a leak confirmed in recent years.
In 2013 when DOE confirmed that Tank T-111 was leaking, it said liquid levels were decreasing at a rate of 150 to 300 gallons a year, or half a gallon to a gallon a day.
From the 1990s to about 2005, DOE removed as much pumpable liquid as possible from the single-shell tanks, leaving radioactive sludge and saltcake in the tanks to address concerns about leaks.
“This is one we did empty out,” Harp said of Tank B-109.
DOE estimates that the tank, which has a capacity of 530,000 gallons, has about 2,000 gallons of liquid waste sitting above the sludge and saltcake solids that it holds.
In addition, an estimated 13,000 gallons of liquids may be held up in the tank’s solid waste, similar to the way a sponge holds water, Harp said.
Tank B-109 is not one of the previously suspected leakers.

HANFORD SOIL CONTAMINATED

But it is in an area that has soil already contaminated with radioactive material.
“Contamination in this area is not a new issue and mitigation actions have been in place for decades,” DOE said in its message to Hanford employees.
The 16 underground tanks that make up the B Tank Farm had 10 assumed leaker tanks previously. They are estimated to have leaked or spilled 157,000 gallons of liquid tank waste into the soil beneath them.
In addition two adjoining Tank Farms, the BX and BY tank farms with a total of 24 single-shell tanks, are believed to have leaked or spilled about 200,000 gallons of waste in the past.
However, the largest source of contamination comes from the historic practice of disposing of radioactive liquids in trenches and tile fields. At the B, BX and BY tank farms, an estimated 51 million gallons of contaminated liquids were poured into the ground.
With some contamination already reaching groundwater in central Hanford, DOE is pumping up contaminated water and cleaning it at the Hanford 200 West Pump and Treat plant.
One of the extraction wells to pump up contaminated groundwater is near Tank B-109.

There appeared to be a drop in the level of the liquid sitting atop solid waste, but monthly checks that started in March 2019 showed the level stable until July 2020. Then another drop was detected.
The level of waste in the tanks can fluctuate as small amounts of liquid from precipitation may enter the underground tanks, liquid evaporates, and waste moves and settles.
In July 2020 a formal leak assessment was launched. It included continued monthly checks of waste levels and lowering cameras through risers, or pipes from inside the tank to the ground surface, to observe the surface of the waste.
The final step in determining that the tank likely was leaking was a meeting of a contractor technical review board on Thursday to review data and findings.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR LEAK
DOE has some possible methods to address the leak and resulting soil contamination, Harp said.
DOE has installed three ground-level plastic or asphalt barriers over areas of two tank farms to prevent rain and snow melt from carrying contamination already in the soil deeper toward groundwater.
A barrier also could be installed over the B Tank Farm.
There is a barrier installed over the T Tank Farm, which was constructed before the leak from Tank T-111 was detected.

An exhauster also was installed in Tank T-111 to help evaporate tank liquids.

Less likely is removing as much liquid waste as possible from the tank and mixing it with a concrete-like grout for disposal, possibly outside of Washington state.
Emptying the tank is possible, but would be expensive.
To date most of the waste from at least 17 of the site’s 149 single-shell tanks have been emptied into sturdier and newer double-shell tanks until the waste can be treated for disposal.
DOE is working to start glassifying some of Hanford’s liquid tank at the $17 billion vitrification plant by the end of 2023, preparing the waste for permanent disposal.
Hanford has 27 double-shell tanks after a 28th tank was emptied and taken out of service when it sprang a leak between its shells, with the waste believed to be trapped between shells as the tank was designed to do.
However, Tank B-109 is in the 200 East Area about two miles from a double-shell tank.
Infrastructure associated with the tank dates from the 1940s. Constructing piping to move the waste from Tank B-109 to a double-shell tank could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Harp said.
Now DOE is working on emptying single-shell tanks with updated infrastructure in place.”