An important safeguards issue related to uranium enrichment plants was omitted from David Kramer’s Issues and Events story, “Controversy continues to swirl around uranium enrichment contract” (Physics Today, January 2020, page 22).
Kramer notes an assertion by Centrus president and CEO Daniel Poneman that nuclear nonproliferation policy includes a red line requiring a “strict divide between civilian and military programs and materials.” Kramer observes correctly that the line has already been crossed with the production of tritium in US civil nuclear reactors.
As an office director in the Nonproliferation Bureau of the US State Department, I was involved in the interagency decision to allow that production. It was predicated on two assurances from the Department of Energy: that reactors serving that purpose would remain on the list of US facilities subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, and that if the facility were selected for inspection, the agency’s safeguards approach would be the same as used for comparable facilities in non-nuclear-weapons states that participate in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Note that the US sends the IAEA a list of all US nuclear facilities, excluding those associated with activities having direct national security significance. The IAEA is permitted to apply safeguards to any facility on the list, but it need not do so.
An important nuclear nonproliferation issue is whether the Centrus facilities would be eligible for the application of IAEA safeguards under the US–IAEA voluntary offer safeguards agreement. The answer should be yes. One reason is that during the negotiation of the standard NPT safeguards agreement, Australia introduced into the record a statement, which was uncontested, that all enrichment plants in non-nuclear-weapons states would be subject to safeguards regardless of the intended end use of the product material.
Brazil’s enrichment facility uses that safeguards approach even though it produces fuel for its naval reactors. The US–IAEA safeguards agreement, in turn, specifies that the IAEA “shall” follow the same procedures in the US that it uses in applying safeguards “on similar material in similar facilities in non-nuclear-weapon States.”
A second point also bears on the relationship between civil nuclear and military activities. In his story, Kramer writes, “US policy stipulates that uranium used for any military purpose, including nuclear fuel, must be enriched using US-origin technology.” He goes on to say that a corollary would seem to require that all US commercial reactor fuel be enriched using US nuclear technology since US military bases draw power from the grid.
While that might seem so, in the course of negotiating agreements for nuclear cooperation, the US and its partners have consented to permit transfers to be used for specified military purposes. More precisely, supplying power to military bases is excluded from the definition of military purposes. The agreement with Russia states, for example, that “military purposes shall not include provision of power for military bases drawn from any power network, production of radioisotopes to be used for medical purposes in military hospitals, and other similar purposes as may be agreed by the Parties.” Provisions with the same effect are included in other US agreements for nuclear cooperation.
