Plutonium Overview The Plutonium Challenge Avoiding nuclear weapons proliferation oday, the basic knowledge about building and manufacturing an atomic bomb is within reach of any industrialized nation. During the Gulf War T(1991), for example, there was little doubt that Iraqi scientists and engi- neers could duplicate the Manhattan Project feats of more than half a century ago. And so, the main uncertainty before that war was whether the Iraqis had obtained sufficient weapons-usable nuclear material to build nuclear weapons. Limiting Access to Weapons-Usable Materials Along with political dissuasion, denying access to weapons-usable materials is the best barrier to the spread of nuclear weapons in aspiring states and among rogue leaders and terrorists. As Saddam Hussein discovered, clandestine efforts to produce weapons-usable material are costly. They are also difficult to conceal for long. Uranium has to be enriched to high levels of the isotope 235 (highly enriched uranium, or HEU) by industrial processes whose signatures are clearly visible. Production of substantial quantities of plutonium requires construction of nuclear reactors—an undertaking that is large, visible, and expensive. Production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the five original nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China—has been stopped except at three remaining production reactors in Russia that generate much needed heat and electricity as byproducts. It appears that production in Israel, India, and Pakistan continues. In North Korea, it is currently frozen. South Africa has taken its HEU out of military programs. Table I lists stockpiled amounts of weapons-usable materials. An obvious alternative to the clandestine production of weapons-usable nuclear materials is theft or diversion from existing HEU or plutonium stockpiles. Kilogram quantities of plutonium or HEU pose a significant proliferation concern. However, materials produced for the nuclear weapons programs of the original five nuclear powers have been well protected for many decades. The United States and the western powers developed nuclear safeguards—a stringent system of President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech has become a landmark in the history of international cooperation. To ensure that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life,” President Eisenhower proposed setting up an international atomic energy agency whose responsibility would be to protect fissionable materials and develop methods whereby those materials “would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind.” 28 Los Alamos Science Number 26 2000 Plutonium Overview Table I. Stockpiles of Weapons-Usable Materialsa Plutonium Uranium Equivalent Country (tonnes) (tonnes) United States 99.5 635 Russia 130b 1000 United Kingdom 7.6 15 France 5 24 China 4 20 Israel ~0.5 Not known India ~0.35 Small quantity Pakistan Negligible 0.21 North Korea 0.03 None South Africa None 0.4 aAdapted with permission from The Challenges of Fissile Material Control, David Albright and Kevin O’Neill (Eds.), Washington, DC: Institute for Science and International Security Press, 1999. b Hecker believes this amount could be in the range 125–200 tonnes. Located at Technical Area 55, the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility is a protection, control, and accounting for nuclear materials. When the Atoms for state-of-the-art R&D facility for plutonium processing and handling. Activities con- Peace Program and the 1954 amendment to the Atomic Energy Act cleared ducted here range from chemical and the way for the United States to export nuclear materials for peaceful purposes, metallurgical research to surveillance our government stipulated strict safeguards measures to be enforced by the recipi- of plutonium pits from the U.S. nuclear ent nations. In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was stockpile and from small-scale produc- established under the umbrella of the United Nations to promote peaceful appli- tion of pits to pilot-scale demonstration cations of atomic energy and to help safeguard civilian nuclear materials from of technologies that support arms control military use. The role of the IAEA has been increasingly important and assertive agreements. The facility is surrounded in safeguarding civilian nuclear materials around the world. The agency, by barbed wire fences and has portal however, has no jurisdiction over defense nuclear materials. monitors equipped with neutron and gamma-ray sensors that detect nuclear The United States has exercised its own rigorous nuclear safeguards system materials. Strict assaying and accounting intended to prevent, deter, detect, or respond to attempts at unauthorized posses- procedures protect nuclear materials sion or use of nuclear materials. This system provides physical protection, from outsider and insider threats. personnel security, control and accountability of nuclear materials, and adminis- trative controls. To be effective, the system is backed up by federal government laws. In the United States, nuclear materials have never been diverted or stolen. The IAEA has adopted a civilian safeguards system very similar to that practiced in the United States. We believe that the United Kingdom and France operate similarly effective systems. The robotic nondestructive-assay system includes a large overhead gantry robot to move plutonium to and from several instruments, such as the large cylindrical calorimeter pictured here. With this calorimeter, Los Alamos personnel measure the heat generated by the radioactive decay of plutonium At the Los Alamos Plutonium Facility, A security police officer controls access and thus determine the quantity of rigorous assaying and accounting proce- to a secure area by verifying a photo plutonium present. dures within the glove-box system record ID badge. plutonium as it is moved from one loca- tion to another. 29 Number 26 2000 Los Alamos Science Plutonium Overview Vladivostok A I Zheleznogorsk S Murmansk S Seversk U Novosibirsk Severodvinsk R Trekhgorny Ust'Kamenogorsk Lesnoy Semipalatinsk Yekaterinburg ONIA St. Petersburg ST Novouralsk E Chelyabinsk IA TV Dubna Snezhinsk A N L Salaspils Moscow Ozersk/Mayak A IA Ignalina Dimitrovgrad T Almaty SS RU NIA S S UA R U ITH L A H N L B E Obninsk Sarov Zarechny TA K ZS Minsk A Y G Z R Y Kiev Kharkiv A K E K I N Tashkent R A Konstantinovsk N U K I S TA A I K OV E K I S T A J LD Aktau Z B N TA MO U Sevastopol RKMENISTAN IA Tbilisi U RG T EO N G A IJ A B IA R EN ZE M A AR A Clear and Present Danger in Russia Russia inherited the Soviet system that had been designed for a centrally con- trolled police state. It was often called the system of “grave consequences” or “guns, guards, and gulags”—that is, anyone who might dare challenge it would face serious personal repercussions. Based on rigorous personnel scrutiny and physical protection backed up by impenetrable borders, this system did not rely on modern technology in case the other protective means failed. The Chinese government also appears to have adopted the Soviet safeguards system. Only in the past few years has China begun to learn about more rigorous systems from the West. Nevertheless, the Soviet system worked during Soviet days—its record for pro- tecting weapons-usable materials was impressive. Today, the dramatic political, eco- nomic, and social changes resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union pose a new The BN-350 fast breeder reactor outside and serious proliferation threat—some of Russia’s 125 to 200 tonnes of plutonium or Aktau in western Kazakhstan is one its 1000 (or more) tonnes of highly enriched uranium are at risk of being stolen or of the sites where the United States has diverted. When the police state was dissolved, the gulags disappeared and the borders helped install advanced nuclear materi- als protection, control, and accounting became penetrable, but the custodians of the nuclear materials and the guards protect- (MPC&A) systems. The output power ing the storage facilities were seldom paid, suffered severe personal hardship, and (350 MW) of the reactor is used to became demoralized. Not surprisingly, the breakdown of a system that relied mainly desalinate Caspian seawater for drinking on the conduct of people ushered in the ingredients for potential disaster. and industrial purposes, to generate Generally, weapons-usable materials are more difficult to protect than nuclear heat for commercial and residential weapons. Unlike the weapons, which have serial numbers, nuclear materials exist in use, and to generate electricity for forms difficult to analyze, account, and protect. Waste and scrap are two examples the local area. The BN-350 achieved of such forms. In Russia, some nuclear sites—such as those of the nuclear navy— first criticality in 1973 and was opera- became particularly vulnerable because financial support for the entire program dis- tional until mid-1999. solved almost overnight. Many of the vessels, storage facilities, and transportation 30 Los Alamos Science Number 26 2000 Plutonium Overview (Opposite page): The map of the former Soviet Union shows the main sites with nuclear-material inventories—nuclear weapons facilities (including nuclear materials, nuclear military R&D, and Manager’s Office weapons assembly and disassembly), naval fuel-cycle facilities, and civilian re- actor and R&D facilities. All these sites have been involved in the cooperative Personnel U.S.-Russian MPC&A program whose Entry Key Access mission has been to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism by Entry/Exit Assembly/ improving the security of all weapons- Control Disassembly γ usable nuclear materials in Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet N N Union. (Left): This is a conceptual diagram of the Arzamas-16 (in Sarov) Conveyor belt demonstration system for nuclear MPC&A. The United States has helped Controls Accounting Russia set it up. Controls (shown in γ Gamma-ray Materials green) limit and monitor access to mate- spectrometer Balance Metal/radiation rooms rials.