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Is an International Nuclear Fuelbank a Good Idea?
An anonymous reader writes "A roundtable at the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences explores the notion of nuclear fuel banks which would offer nations a guaranteed supply of low-enriched uranium if they renounce the right to enrich on their own. From the article: 'The basic idea behind an international fuel bank is that it would, in a reliable and nondiscriminatory way, make emergency supplies of market-priced low-enriched uranium available to states that sign up to participate. States that opt for membership in a fuel bank would gain increased confidence that their access to reactor-grade fuel would not be interrupted. In return, they would renounce the right to enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel on their own. Such an arrangement could be appropriate for a number of states. But for others, it might be less than ideal.'"
Those that sign up, will be at the mercy of the UN (useless nations), bank on it.
What you would essentially be asking states to do is give up energy independence. It's a nice idea if you strongly trust every other nation in the world. The trouble is, even most allied nations these days harbor low-level suspicion of each other. That is to say nothing of all the ongoing conflicts and near-conflicts that exist. We're still living in a time of independent nation states that look after their own interests and try to avoid getting too pissed off at each other, so compulsory use of a central fuel repository is asking a lot of your average nation.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
The basic idea behind an international fuel bank is that it would, in a reliable and nondiscriminatory way, make emergency supplies of market-priced low-enriched uranium available to states that sign up to participate.
How is this different that the markets that exist today for NPT signers?
States that opt for membership in a fuel bank would gain increased confidence that their access to reactor-grade fuel would not be interrupted.
Greater confidence than doing it in their backyard and having the ability to buy it on the market? C'mon!
Now, who wants it?
Better yet, let every participating country believe they have the fuelbank, and have only one of them really have it.
So states will line up for their handouts and conduct enrichment programs in secret, denying that they do so. Where's the difference from today ?
Nullius in verba
How would this work? We can't monitor Iran properly with them continuing to claim it is research/power they are refining for, difficulties even finding where their nuclear facilities are etc. How would this work with 10's or 100's of nations? Is the UN or whatever send monitors into 100 countries? How about countries that the west has decided it is okay to have nukes (US, UK, Russia, China, France)? If a nuke becomes obsolete are they allowed to replace it with a newer model with a new warhead?
Just as long as it's centrally located in Washington D.C. and it's required to take in, store and recycle anything that is generated by the use of such fuels. (I'm sure this proposal would get the Libertarian vote.)
I've dreamt for quite some time about a national policy requiring all corporate executives, board members, government officials and military officers to live with results of their policies. This would be a beautiful beginning.
If the United States, or the UN in a pinch, will give me $2Billion in aid money, for food of course, then I hereby agree to not make nuclear weapons. And just to show how serious I am I will not explode a bum at an undisco site on Saturday.
Worked for North Korea so I figure, why not?!
Sounds like a pretty dumb idea to me.
If a country is a real threat deal with them. If they aren't then shut about about it already. Seems everyone want to run everyone else's lives whether it be at the individual or country level.
No, obviously not.
Oh wait...
And in which country do they plan to enrich and store said nuclear fuelbank?
I've yet to hear of any part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty that would prevent Russia or China from transferring fuel-grade material to Iran. The current international regime is as follows:
Pick any two.
Iran wants to have their cake and eat it too; it doesn't matter what you call their potential fuel suppliers, they want it in-house regardless.
As a species, we get together (good luck on that) and relinquish uranium and plutonium for any use on planet, and instead create a thorium based nuclear economy. Take all the uranium and plutonium and use it to build and power cities on the Moon and Mars. The cities on Moon can then beam collected solar energy back to earth in the form of microwave, collected by a network of geosynchronous satellites. Anyone who agrees to using Thorium now get's a share of the solar power coming from the moon so they have abundant Nuclear power now. Abundant Solar power later, and the threat of global thermonuclear war is eliminated (at least until the folks on Mars decide to nuke earth for holding back on the cream puff shipment or whatever.)
The problem is simple. People claim to want clean, unlimited power. They don't. They want bombs. They want to make certain that if you nuke them, they can nuke you back. The solution is to give up the right to nuke anybody, so everyone can live with the threat of having ones home converted into a blue ashtray eliminated. Sadly there is a certain amount of trust required for this to work, and nations with good sources of yellow cake need to trade these for free thorium technology. Its really simple. Society is sick and we can either cure or perish from the illness together.
Why exactly are we talking about uranium instead of thorium again?
With it all in one place it kind of reminds me of Bain raiding the batcave etc- if the security fails with no redundancy? Maybe they wouldn't have to keep it all in one place - just thinking out aloud :P
Yes the USA could become a consumer of this service and sign the agreement that they would not longer create enriched uranium and the world would become a happier and safer place.
Guaranteed supply. Really? So who is going to guarantee the supply? The fuelbank will have to buy their uranium from somewhere and what if the country supplying the uranium decides to stop selling it? Or ups the price? Unless the fuelbank has it's own inexhaustible supply of uranium it cannot guarantee anything.
TWR allows us to burn unenriched or even depleted uranium, which is sitting around in huge stockpiles all over the world. Other people have also mentioned liquid thorium, which is a good idea as well. We should start looking past the most primitive and inefficient way to use our fissile fuels. Plus, enrichment is a proliferation risk, as many have noticed.
Guaranteed by whom? What are they offering up as collateral; their firstborn sons? Yeah right. Why would any sane nation accept (i.e. Iran) such a proposal?
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a left-wing publication that makes pretenses to be based around the scientific expertise of their scientists, many of whom aren't even atomic scientists. Remember some months back where Slashdot had an article about them moving the doomsday clock and Slashdotters managed to figure out how nonsensical it is?
Having an international nuclear fuel bank will fail for one simple reason: countries such as Iran want nuclear weapons. Their peaceful use of nuclear fuel is a cover for the development of nuclear weapons, not the other way around. When Iran tells us that all they want is peaceful nuclear energy and they aren't interested in nuclear weapons, they're lying. A nuclear fuel bank that actually promotes peaceful nuclear energy and avoids nuclear weapons is going to be rejected by Iran because, hey, lie.
It's just that given the political bias of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, they assume that Iran is telling the truth and so they think this hair-brained scheme will actually work.
The issue with countries like Iran isn't that they are worried that their supply of nuclear fuel will be cut off. They want to build nuclear weapons. They aren't interested in guarantees of actual fuel. If Iran was truly interested in nuclear fuel, the deal would have been done by now. A fuel bank is solution to a non-problem.
The solution is to give up the right to nuke anybody, so everyone can live with the threat of having ones home converted into a blue ashtray eliminated.
Excellent idea, then we can go back to the good old days of industrialized total warfare! By taking away nuclear weapons you remove the only thing that places limitations on the willingness of nations to use force to meet their political objections. What do you purpose to replace MAD with? History tells us that political/international institutions won't preclude war, recall the League of Nations. Nor will treaties that purport to limit the allowable conduct during war remain effective once the balloon goes up. As a random example, unrestricted submarine warfare was outlawed after WW1, so naturally both sides employed it to maximum effect during WW2.
Mutually assured destruction is the only thing that will prevent war, or at the very least manage it to the extent that it doesn't turn into total warfare. The proxy wars of the Cold War era weren't a lot of fun, but they beat the hell out of out of the alternative of total war between east and west.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Mod parent up! I want to read a response to this.
It was a yes/no question. So.. No.
The fact that they want to make a another makes me oppose this idea.
A nice idea, but all that will do is make it easy for certain countries to stockpile Uranium now, and pretend to play along until they have enough, tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves while they start building nuclear bombs. It would also make it difficult to limit Uranium access to countries suspected of making nukes in secret.
Yes, some countries are going to get screwed, but anyone with the technology and resources to have nuclear reactors will likely also have the capacity for nuclear weapons. How many countries have gone from western allies to western enemies, and back, and forth again, in the past 30 years?, have gone from stable to insane?, how many people's revolutions have turned into tyrannies? This is Nuclear Bombs we are talking about, you don't have much room for error.
This sort of botting is getting worse around here. We have the moderation system which is meant to keep actual people in-check and civil but it may be nice to have a "Report Spam" option available to all non-AC at all times to help against this sort of thing. It could be meta-moderated as well, if deemed necessary, to avoid people using it as a, "I don't have mod points but don't like you button". The person receives a ban, is given the reason, and hopefully clues up that they're infected and do something about it. If they can then answer a captcha and change their password they can have their account back.
No. For two reasons.
1. It goes without saying both western sensitives and eastern indifference precludes any actual deterrent to dictators and theocracies playing with uranium. As such, they will pay no attention.
2. Relying on a globally governed uranium bank gives leverage to statists to indulge anti-nooks, enviro-nazis and any other moonbat constituency that wants to play politics, collect rents, etc.
3. Wealthy western nations will be expected to fill the bank at monumental expense to be doled out for free to everyone else. Another giant wealth transfer around which staggering amounts of corruption will flourish.
Who controls this "fuel bank"? The United States?
That makes me feel instantly safer...~
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Like the Internet, the USA would "naturally" want to run the henhouse. And about 180 countries should object. But for a start, the already nuclear-capable giants would protest. This idea may have worked at the end of WW2 and maybe diffused the Cold War, but its 60 years too late now. Nice romantic idea, but 100% "will never happen".
Isn't it interesting that the US constitution entrenches the right to bear arms, but the US wants to deny the vast majority of people in the world exactly this right.
In 1791, sticks and stones, knives, swords, muskets and cannons were the weapons of choice. Today, one needs assault rifles, stealth bombers, sattelites and supersonic nuclear armed cruise missiles. But the principle is the same.
So why doesn't the US support democracy and constitutional rights for everyone?
Unless this is going to be dispensed from a boat in international waters, I really don't see this monopoly working. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that neither the US or Russia is going to sign-onto this goat rodeo.
The game.
Even the US government (a first world nation with as many 'alies' as any in the world) is so over the top suspicious of everyone that they are breaking the law and violating their own constitution to spy on the vast majority of their own people, let alone the people of other countries. They say openly that the people of other countries have no rights and are subject to indefinite incarceration without explantion and murder either individually or on mass scale, at the whim of the president or, it seems to me, any functionary of the military or civil administration down to janitors and private milita.
Independent nation states? you are seriously out of touch with reality. There is occasional lip service to the concept but nothing more. The US says there is no impedement to them invading the Ecuadorian embassy (their 'sovereign' teritory by pre-US Democracy precepts) in London (which is somewhere within the 'sovereign' territory of England last I knew, or has the US annexed that too?), and they don't need anyone's permission to do it.
It would in "reliable and nondiscriminatory way" give USA total dictatorship over world energy resources, since there's no doubt that US goons would be in total control over it.
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty guarantees the right to enrich for every signator. Also Iran.
ABSOLUTELY NOT!
And with a few more words: single huge point of failure. Whichever failure.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Looking at the corruption in the banks, I can't imagine the consequence if it's about uranium instead of money.
I nominate China and Russia to be the enricher countries. The rest need to stop this practice. Do we have a deal?
Seriously, a fuel bank seems nice and all, but the one off design problem leads to a fuel rod sourcing issue if you tick off the supplier host country, even if the bank actually had stored rods rather than being a clearinghouse/marketplace. Well, unless you could guarantee that all suppliers to the fuel bank must license the rod fabrication IP on FRAND terms so there is no sole source issue. Would that be part of a fuel bank certified reactor design consideration then?
Better to have an international reactor bank, delivering barges with reactors mounted on them. Instead of swapping fuel, swap whole reactors via barge exchange. The russians are building nuclear powerplant reactor barges right now too. This keeps not only the enrichment infrastructure out of the hands of third world states, it keeps most of the nuclear fuel cycle infrastructure out of the hands of nuclear states. It also provides a rather convenient way to repo the reactors if payments aren't on time. I mean, if you want to disenfranchise lesser countries from the nuclear party, why not go whole hog? Ultimately, they need electricity/heat first, and cheaply, and nuclear technology itself is largely a national pride/war/defense/e-penis issue. Keep the barges cheap on a lease arrangement, and all those african nations will jump on (they already lease fossil fuel powered powerplant barges). If middle eastern countries aren't interested, then they have ulterior motives regarding nuclear fuel cycle technology, but we already knew that.
Beside the politics who controls the bank, this sounds like a Idea to use the overcapacity of countries that are stopping with nuclear power. Germany is stopping, Japan is reducing it nuclear power industry. And this might happen to other countries as well.
So this is just a plot to keep using the expensive nuclear power enrichment running where it was before.
In other words, export it to third world countries. Is that a good idea? especially since they to not have the expertise to get rid of the nuclear waste?
And I don't mean "energy" power.
Central banks of any kind are simply a means for politicians to take more power away from the people. Whether it be central money banks, central food banks, central anything - they put people in line to ask someone else's permission to do what they want or need to do.
Sounds like a real-world honeypot for evil geniuses.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
You can click on the flag and report as SPAM (as I did).
In a word, no it is not. Effectively, policies like these create cartels and oligarchies of sorts. This creates opportunities for pricing manipulation and corruption. Effectively, this creates a kind of OPEC. It isn't a perfect analogy but I can see a Nuclear Fuel Bank as heading down a similar path.
Nuclear refinement is not inherently an evil thing, as long as it doesn't go beyond a certain point. The problem is with nations that cross that line, and they aren't going to sign up for this anyway.
Besides: where do you put the bank?
Isn't that what the flag is for?
Is this how the ARM gets started?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Deterrence/Deterrence.shtml
do you want me to get another speech from his soviet counterpart?
or do you just want to admit now that you're an idiot who doesn't understand a rather simple concept?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What if all the countries that sign up are ones that only want to make withdrawals? Who puts the uranium in the bank vault, and why would they want to do so? Sounds like a uranium supply company, not a bank. Perhaps set it up as an international public utility, if we can't stand to have more than one supply company. If we *can* allow competition, then how is that different from what we have right now? Maybe we should review the nuclear non-proliferation rules, and see if we can ease some restrictions that pertain to reactor fuel. I can't be the first to think of that, so that's not do-able, for some reason. Maybe they think the fuel consumers can't be trusted to refrain from enriching new fuel into weapons-grade material. Wait, if that is our fear now, how is this bank going to be any different? A country uses the bank to get fuel, and then they enrich it. We tell them to stop, and then we get the Saddam Hussein run-around, where our inspectors can never find the fuel we think they have. That or the fuel gets stolen, lost, or buried in the desert somewhere. I think we can see why this won't work.
Words, words, words
They'll only sign away the ease of obtaining enriched uranium. Thorium reactors could power them just fine.
Oh, but those are boring, they don't make stuff that goes BOOM.
What kind of power was it those nations wanted again?