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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.
And in which country do they plan to enrich and store said nuclear fuelbank?
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.
Iran is being fully monitored by the IAEA and the IAEA continues to confirm absolutely no diversion of any Iranian nuclear material to any weapons-related program.
There is absolutely ZERO evidence that Iran is doing anything not permitted by the NPT. There is almost zero evidence that they have EVER done anything not permitted by the NPT.
The sole reason for suspecting Iran had a nuclear weapons program was, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency position (which did not make it into the 2007 Iran National Intelligence Estimate, but is undoubtedly correct), when Iran was concerned that Saddam Hussein had one. Apparently the Ayatollah Khamenei authorized a "feasibility study" to see what Iran would need to do to develop a nuclear weapon if Iraq did. Iran was unconcerned about both Israel's nuclear arsenal and the US nuclear arsenal, because they knew those arsenals were "constrained" by international consensus. Saddam's was not.
Once the US destroyed Iraq in 2003, Iran clearly no longer needed even a feasibility program and that is why, as all the intelligence agencies agree, Iran stopped its program in 2003.
For facts about Iran's nuclear program and the real reasons that the US, NATO and Israel are pressuring Iran, follow the following Web sites:
www.raceforiran.com
www.asiatimes.com
www.antiwar.com
www.campaigniran.org
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You basically can't do bomb-level enrichment in complete secret. You have some chance of hiding your bomb program behind a civilian enrichment program, and that's exactly what this fuel bank is supposed to prevent. If it's up and reliable, it takes away any reason for peaceful countries to get uranium centrifuges to begin with.
And they are fully justified in requiring at least some of the processing being done on Iranian soil.
Several NATO countries have reneged on nuclear technology deals over the past thirty years, mostly as a result of US pressure.
Russia itself delayed and delayed the Bushehr project for various reasons.
When the Tehran Research Reactor came up for re-supplying in 2009, the US and NATO refused to supply fuel on the open market as is REQUIRED by the NPT. This lead to negotiations in fall of 2009 which resulted in an ultimatum to Iran to ship out all of its low-enriched uranium stock in exchange for the TRR fuel - WITHOUT any guarantee that Iran would actually get that fuel. Iran naturally refused this offer and made a counteroffer to exchange the LEU at the time of delivery of the TRR fuel, with the LEU being held in Turkey or elsewhere under IAEA seal. The US refused.
So Iran went ahead and began enriching to 20% to produce the TRR fuel itself in January or February of 2010.
Then Brazil and Turkey tried to make a deal with Iran similar to the deal it offered in November/December of 2009. Obama wrote a letter to the Brazilian President outlining the details of a deal the US would accept. The Brazilians and Turks got the deal with Iran. The US then refused the deal under the spurious notion that since Iran's stockpile of LEU had gotten bigger in the meantime that the deal was no longer acceptable.
Iran has every reason to distrust the US because it is clear from the behavior of the US over the years that it has no serious interest in negotiating a genuine resolution of the issue. The nuclear issue is merely an excuse being used by the US to justify extreme sanctions and an upcoming military attack on Iran. The real reasons for this process is the US and Israeli desire for hegemony in the Middle East. Iran (and to a lesser degree Syria which is why Syria is in trouble now) is the only country in the Middle East not beholden to the US for foreign aid, weapons and security. The US and Israel will not rest until Iran, Syria and Hizballah in Lebanon are "brought to heel."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.
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?
Well, any sane nation with a viable enrichment program might be a hard sell(which is an issue, since those are the customers that they actually want); but if I were Benevolent President for Life by the Unanimous and Wholly Uncoerced Assent of the People of some backwater hellhole or other, I could easily imagine that it might make decent economic sense to set up the cheapest, nastiest, scariest-looking bunch of fleabay-sourced enrichment apparatus that I could knock together, and then oh-so-magnanimously agree to halt the project in exchange for cheap, premade nuclear fuel and perhaps a little bit of 'development aid' for my fourth-best palace...
They want to build nuclear weapons.
Bingo. Iran has already been caught enriching uranium far beyond what is necessary for power plant fuel. They have already been offered a guaranteed supply of fuel from a consortium of countries, including both the USA and Russia, but they have turned it down because they would have to agree to inspections. They are not worried about fuel, they want to build weapons. This proposal would solve nothing, because it is not addressing an actual problem.
Who controls this "fuel bank"? The United States?
That makes me feel instantly safer...~
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Well, the best way would be to get the spent fuel back, and check the amounts. U-238 could be put near the reacting material like with neutron activation testing, but I don't believe that any remotely usable P-239 could be recovered that way (hence why reactors that produce plutonium have to be specially designed). It might be possible (I'm not an expert) to produce dirty bombs by heavily neutron activating a ton of stuff, but a dirty bomb is a far cry from a nuke, and it would be a very slow process. The main problem would be finding a place to keep the spent fuel, as nobody wants to have to keep the stuff.
Dirty bombs don't work except to freak out a gullible uneducated populace. The US Army checked this out decades ago, found there was nothing there, and went on to other things. Doesn't stop the media in the US from hyping it up,though. Gotta sell those advertising slots in the evening news somehow ya know.
Seriously, though, there is no way this 'fuel bank' won't get politicized, and no way the US will stand still and let it be placed anywhere but the US. And if they get built in the US, what corporation is going to run them, for 'the good of mankind', of course, as long as it's profitable as hell. They want something viable, start getting into thorium reactors. At least stockpiling thorium has a chance of working. 'No pourmouthing, El Presidente For Life, how much uranium do you really have?' could become a thing of the past. And since thorium is non-weaponiseable, there'd be no problem for Iran to build thorium reactors for power plants. Win/win in my opinion.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I believed the dirty bomb thing until a Kosmos satellite with an onboard reactor came down in Canada and effectively was a dirty bomb. Very active material turns out to be incredibly easy to detect and clean up (planes with gieger counters) and less active material isn't going to be a problem within the time it takes to find it and clean up. The imagined "weapon of terror" effect didn't happen either and people treated it like any other disaster.
Looking at the corruption in the banks, I can't imagine the consequence if it's about uranium instead of money.
Although it couldn't do anything about the Irans and North Koreas of this world (stable door after the horse has bolted), you could see it as an investment for the future. There are 200 or so nations in the world, 95% of them don't have nuclear programmes. Any one of them could, in the next few years, take a mad one and start a nuclear programme. If you can get them to sign up to this now, while it's not a thought in their mind, you help to head off the problem for the future.