Nuclear Politics All MOXed Out

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On January 14, 1997, representatives from 171 medical, environmental, and activist organizations in the United States and 18 other countries—including every major nuclear power except China and Israel—sent a letter to President Bill Clinton asking him to overrule a decision by former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to process plutonium from nuclear warheads and "burn" it in civilian nuclear reactors in a hybrid nuclear cocktail called Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX). The president has so far ignored the call.

On January 28, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued a Request for Proposals, asking nuclear utilities to submit plans to convert or build one or more nuclear power plants to produce tritium gas—a radioactive element that boosts the destructive power of nuclear bombs. At least 12 companies have already responded to the request. The DOE request was made despite the fact that there is now more than enough tritium available for nuclear bomb use well into the next century.

Mary Olson of the Washington, DC-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) is the person most directly responsible for organizing the January 14 protest letter to the president. Olson, a victim of radioactive poisoning in a medical laboratory accident, says that Clinton’s new policies are a qualitative leap into a whole new level of isotope idiocy.

"There are at least three major problems with the new MOX proposal," says Olson. "First, the use of a MOX fuel partly derived from bombs vastly increases radioactivity in both high level and so-called low-level nuclear wastes that now poison our environment—and will for thousands of years. Second, the paper-thin wall between the civilian and military nuclear establishments will be totally dissolved so that a small secretive military-industrial-utility complex will absolutely dominate the field.

"Third—because of the impending utility deregulation—DOE will almost certainly end up spending tax dollars to prop up the civilian nuclear power industry under the guise of the MOX program just when these reactors could be phased out."

Additionally, according to nuke watchers, using the bomb-processed MOX fuel in civilian reactors will require ever-expanding national security-level, police-state measures that will take over nuclear plants, public transportation facilities, and other sites that were formerly under some civilian control and somewhat accountable to the public.

As for tritium production, it just is not necessary, according to numerous nuclear experts, including Greenpeace. Using the tritium from warheads already retired under the provisions of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), along with exploiting an existing stockpile of the element, would supply bomb-makers with all the tritium that they "need" until the year 2011—the year when both the U.S. and Russia have agreed to cut their nuclear bomb stocks even further, lessening the demand for tritium and freeing up more for use, Greenpeace reports. According to Olson, Greenpeace, and other experts, using plutonium-oxide processed from decommissioned nuclear warheads in MOX fuel, has never been tried before, and producing more tritium is just plain dumb.

A Lot Of MOX-ie

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), based in Takoma Park, Maryland, has recently issued a comprehensive (and comprehensible) summary of the MOX controversy in its newsletter, Science for Democratic Action<D> (Vol. 5, No. 4). The lead article, by IEER President Arjun Makhijani, breaks down the basic MOX technology and discusses the most important consequences of the dangerous fuel. The publication also proposes the use of a safer and saner alternative to control weapons-grade plutonium—immobilization through vitrification.

The plutonium/MOX controversy began to take off when the DOE announced that it would study a "dual-track" approach to control the 50 metric tons of "surplus" weapons-grade plutonium created by the end of the Cold War, Makhijani writes. That plutonium became surplus after the U.S. and former Soviet Union states agreed to dismantle thousands of nuclear warheads.

(Plutonium makes up the core or "pit" of nuclear bombs. Observers on every side of the nuclear weapons controversy seem to agree that after a weapon is dismantled, the pit remains highly dangerous because it is relatively easy to transport and remake into a new nuclear bomb. The problem is: you can’t get rid of plutonium from bombs; you always create new waste and if you put it in a reactor you generate more bomb-grade material).

Some of the plutonium from the pits, according to the Clinton "dual-track" proposal, would be vitrified—mixed with molten glass and other materials—and immobilized. But the vast majority would be processed into MOX. Here lies the primal sin of the nuclear world—neither of these options solves the fundamental problem of nuclear waste: all control options are extremely costly, create massive amounts of new pollution that last for thousands of years, and are temporary.

But according to Makhijani and others, the nuclear-watch community is unified in supporting immobilization through vitrification over the use of MOX. Here’s why: MOX is created when plutonium-oxide powder is mixed with uranium-oxide powder which is then compressed into pellets. The pellets are loaded into fuel rods that are wrapped in bundles that are placed into nuclear reactors as fuel. After the fuel is "burned," the rods are removed and stored and the reactor is refueled.

Currently, three European plants make MOX fuel—two in France, one in Belgium. A fourth will soon come on-line in Britain. None of these plants uses fuel that has been reprocessed from decommissioned weapons. All use plutonium-oxide already "normally" produced in the operation of nuclear reactors. The French, British, Russians, and Japanese have been proponents of reprocessing plutonium from uranium oxide for decades. But reprocessing plants have the same problems that any nuclear plant has: they expose workers and the public to dangerous radiation and they produce massive amounts of highly toxic wastes that must somehow be safely stored until a technology is developed to neutralize the stuff. No such technology exists.

Also, Makhijani writes, all nuclear plants produce plutonium, even the ones that "burn" it as fuel. While the so-called "breeder" reactors intentionally create enormous amounts of the plutonium poison to use as more fuel, in the end, it is technologically impossible to completely "burn" all weapons-grade plutonium produced in a controlled nuclear reaction in atomic power plants of any kind. So, for the past 20 years, DOE has opposed the creation of "breeder" technology.

The new DOE proposal goes well beyond these "normal" problems. Since bomb-grade plutonium has never been used before in MOX fuels, even by the breeder zealots, nobody knows exactly what it will do or what poisons it will produce. It is a high-tech sorcerers brew.

One problem with using bomb-grade plutonium in MOX is that nuclear bomb pits are laced with an alloying element called gallium which holds them together as a sort of "glue." When the pits are cut in half and processed into plutonium-oxide powder, the gallium must be removed or the powder becomes unusable. The gallium-removal process causes a vast amount of pollution, and it has not yet been totally perfected.

More telling is the fact that the very existence of gallium in nuclear warhead pits was declassified just about a year ago. Plutonium pits contain many other elements that have not been declassified, so only the people who have made the bombs really know what is in them. Objective scientists are left to base much of their work on what the bomb-makers tell them.

Other technical problems associated with the Clinton-proposed MOX system include the fact that plutonium increases certain kinds of radiation in reactors, damaging internal systems even more severely than uranium radiation does; plutonium demands a greater amount of "neutron absorbers" to control the reactor; and in the case of an accident, plutonium radiation, which is even more toxic than uranium radiation, would be released directly into the environment.

In addition, the new scheme poses numerous transportation problems. Since MOX initially can only be made in Europe, the U.S. utilities would have to fly plutonium to the fabricating country, where it would be hauled by truck and/or rail. The general public and workers who process and transport the material would be exposed to new dangers, and more equipment would be contaminated, further increasing waste problems.

In the nuclear world, "cheap fuel" always becomes astronomically expensive. There are production costs, distribution costs, "burn" costs and most significantly, waste costs. Nobody really knows what the overall bill for the nuclear mess ultimately will come to, but consider this: DOE estimates that current civilian nuclear "clean-up" costs run at about $250 billion in the U.S. alone. Nuclear activists in the environmental community say that the true number is closer to $1 trillion. (About 95 percent of all radioactivity produced in the nuclear age comes from commercial reactors, so weapons-related expenses add another $50 billion).

That means, if the commercial nuclear industry in the U.S. were shut down today, we’d be looking at a trillion dollar bill to contain waste until methods are developed to neutralize the vast amounts of radioactive and chemical poisons created by nuclear energy. Every new crazy nuclear idea, like converting bomb pits to MOX, adds to that bill.

Big Dogs On A Dirty Lot

One thing that nearly all industry observers agree on is that the rapidly reregulating utility industry stands to make billions from the MOX scam—about a billion dollars for each reactor that gets with the program (one-third of that coming from waivers of mandated decommissioning fees). "The uncertainties of deregulation are forcing utilities to look for ways to cut costs and raise revenues almost immediately," says Dave Kraft of the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) based in Evanston, Illinois. (According to a report from the competing natural gas industry, as much as 40 percent of commercial nuclear generating power will be taken over by other power sources due to the forces of a deregulated market).

Since the MOX process involves recycling nuclear bomb parts controlled by DOE, taxpayers will subsidize the industry and the public will be stuck with higher utility rates to pay for the long-term costs created by MOX nukes and nuclear plants in general, predicts Olson of NIRS.

The U.S. utility that stands to gain the most from the new moxification process is the Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison Co. ComEd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Unicom Corp., an energy holding company with revenues that approach $25 billion per year. ComEd, which operates 12 nuclear power plants, was the first commercial utility out of the atomic gate with the Dresden 1 reactor. ComEd now produces 80 percent of its power in nukes.

Though ComEd is the largest and oldest commercial nuclear operator in the United States, it has consistently been cited for bad performance by the presidentially appointed atomic power licensing organization, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The world’s premiere commercial nuclear power charges its customers 60 percent more than utilities in neighboring states, according to Barnaby J. Feder of the New York Times<D>. A years-long organizing effort led by public interest lawyer, Howard Learner, recently won back a billion dollars in rate overcharges for Illinois ratepayers that the company had illegally charged.

Worst of all, six ComEd reactors—half of its nuclear facilities—have been put on the NRC Watch List. Each offending reactor has been cited for numerous and dangerous faults (for example ComEd’s LaSalle plant, originally proposed as a MOX reactor, recently received the third highest commercial nuclear fine in U.S. history—$650,000). The NRC has put only seven other reactors on the list throughout the country. (A total of 109 commercial U.S. reactors are currently in operation.)

A closer look at ComEd’s safety history reveals gross mismanagement, negligence, and arrogance since Dresden 1 first came on line. "Illinois nuclear plants (ComEd owns 12 of the 13 in the state), on the whole, are dogs," says NEIS researcher Kraft. "There’s just no other way to put it."

PEACE Spells WAR

On January 28, ComEd presented to the NRC Project PEACE (Plutonium Excess Arms Converted to Electricity) a joint public/private international partnership to fabricate and "burn" plutonium MOX fuel in four reactors at two of its sites. This was the same day that DOE issued its formal Requests for Proposals for new tritium production facilities. (DOE has already selected the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar 1 reactor as the first tritium production site).

"Project PEACE has a likely real outcome of producing WAR, or World at Risk," responded the NIRS publication, Nuclear Monitor<D> (February 1997).

Ironically, until recently, ComEd agreed. The December 12, 1996, edition of the Energy<D> Daily<D>—an industry newsletter published in Washington, DC—ran an article, "ComEd Raises Spent Fuel Questions On DOE Plutonium Disposal Plan." Citing a May 4, 1996 letter from ComEd to DOE, commenting on DOE’s new MOX plan, Energy Daily<D> quotes ComEd as telling DOE: "Spent fuel pools would fill up too fast under DOE’s dual-track MOX proposal; high-level waste transportation and disposal would be negatively affected by MOX; DOE’s environmental impact statement is ‘unrealistic’."

DOE responded to ComEd’s worrisome letter essentially by saying that the problems were all in ComEd’s head, or DOE would eventually solve them and there would be nothing to worry about. Apparently those arguments and the potential multi-billion dollar revenues of MOX convinced ComEd to change its position and propose the PEACE plan. Even more ironically, in a fit of nuclear logic, ComEd used its skeptical letter to DOE as supporting evidence in its PEACE proposal.

The proposal was little more than a high-tech dog-and-pony show performed by ComEd public relations geniuses and cronies at an NRC hearing at the NRC on January 28. With straight faces, ComEd flacks introduced the PEACE acronym. ComEd’s purpose was clearly to whip the NRC in line before they actually began to license facilities. The PR people and technicians-for-hire explained that the "PEACE Mission," would "Effect optimal disposition of excess weapons grade plutonium inventories in the United States and the former Soviet union through the use of MOX fuel technology," according to a ComEd-developed script.

The proposed project team would include ComEd, Duke Power, British Nuclear Fuels, and the French state nuclear company Cogema. The primary purpose of PEACE would be to initiate a "Euro-Fab [fabrication] rapid start." The "secondary" purpose of PEACE would involve U.S. government fabrication and licensing. The NRC would be charged with licensing the reactors to use MOX in the first stage, then to actually produce it later on.

In the course of its presentation, ComEd cited its MOX experience from the 1960s and 1970s at its Dresden and Quad Cities’ facilities as evidence of ComEd’s extensive qualifications. Both Dresden and Quad cities received extremely low ratings in the Critical Mass "Nuclear Lemons," report and have been continually cited by the NRC for numerous violations of safety and procedure. Neither have ever used a MOX fuel fabricated from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

ComEd officials also claimed that "No significant technical issues," remain to impede their MOX program and the "Project PEACE team has the experience and can provide the full range of technical capabilities to meet DOE’s MOX disposition mission." DOE is now mulling over the PEACE proposal. Since they invited ComEd to make the proposal in the first place, their final decision is a given. The NRC—allegedly the nation’s nuclear watch dog—is not likely to do anything but ooh and ah as ComEd and its partners easily seduced them with a slide show and Beltway brunches.

Why Now?

The U.S. and former soviet states have dismantled tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and neither party has the vaguest idea what to do with the detritus. Worse, every nuclear reaction, peaceful or not, creates massive amounts of toxic materials that can "live" for tens of thousands of years spewing death and disease. There is no known way to neutralize many nuclear poisons once they are created. Clearly, the United States is most responsible for the creation of the nuclear horror. Ours is the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons against others. The United States government initiated the arms race and created the myth of the peaceful atom.

The Clinton administration has raised the stakes by reintroducing the production of tritium, proposed a vast new MOX program, and promoted the use of nuclear power world-wide. Clinton appointed a nuclear industry executive, Hazel O’Leary, as his first Secretary of Energy. O’Leary, former vice president of the nuclearized Northern States Power Co., used her term in office to run around the world cheering on the industry, even telling the Chinese that they should buy U.S.-made nukes (with an aside that it will be about 35 years before the industry begins selling new ones here again).

Now Clinton has proposed former U.S. Transportation Secretary and Denver Mayor Frederico Pena to replace O’Leary. Pena has already said that he does not know much about nuclear weapons or energy. He did not even know that DOE is responsible for "peaceful" nukes, as well as the care and disposal of the Big Ones. This is an exceedingly appalling ignorance, considering that Pena’s home town, Denver, is just a few whiffs downwind from the infamous Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. Nuclear triggers were assembled there, but the place became so dangerous and was so poorly managed that—after a series of FBI-led raids initiated by vehement local protests about mismanagement and corruption—DOE decided to shut the place down. It’s one of the most poisonous nuclear sites in the world.

Pena seems to be well liked by Senate Republicans who ultimately control his confirmation. But they support Senate 104 (S.104),—the "Mobile Chernobyl" bill that Clinton has threatened to veto. S. 104 proposes that high-level nuclear wastes be shipped to Yucca Mountain, Nevada for storage.

There are two fundamental problems with S. 104—the ever-present transportation safety and theft issues, which are impossible to solve, and Yucca Mountain is unsuitable as a storage site. It is located in an area as geologically unstable as San Francisco and has water table problems that ensure eventual poisoning of that dwindling Western resource.

@PAR AFTERJ<@191>UB = Russia and former soviet states have created the world’s most disastrous nuclear program, having poisoned millions of square kilometers in the Urals, the North Sea, Khazakistan, the Ukraine, Siberia, and elsewhere. The former soviet nuclear establishment sees the stuff as a valuable resource. It works like this: they have been humiliated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic "reform" program imposed on them by the U.S. through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). (Russian demographers have attributed a million deaths directly caused by economic restructuring, according to the New York Times<D>).

But plutonium is limitless. They can dig it out of the ground. They can manufacture it in nuclear reactors and "breeder reactors." They can salvage it from the thousands of warheads that they dismantled through the SALT and START arms control agreements negotiated with the U.S. They can sell it for cold cash. And its greatest value is blackmail; they still have thousands of bombs. Or they can threaten to sell some to "terrorists." They can use it for MOX fuel. Most importantly, it is a resource that is impossible for the U.S.—or any other power—to take from them. In nuke-think terms, plutonium guarantees their sovereignty as a nation. Plutonium is a god in the nuclear age. MOX is a sacred offspring.

The terror created by the United States and refined by the Soviet Union during the Cold War has now become a global phenomenon. The French and British have been gung-ho on nukes from the git-go. India, Pakistan, and China dance the dance of mutual destruction on a regular basis. Apartheid South Africa and Israel jointly worked on nuclear weapons and the Israelis are said to have hundreds of war-heads. South Africa probably has a few.

Even Canada developed a fairly extensive nuclear program. Just in case the MOX program runs into political trouble in the U.S., the Canadians are waiting in line to "burn" the stuff in their CANDU reactors—"heavy water" machines that would process MOX easier than the U.S. "light water" versions.

Taiwan has recently cut a deal to send its nuclear waste to North Korea; and the North Koreans have been re-educated in the value of nuclear Stratego by the U.S. (we are helping them develop new reactors that are allegedly safer than their current creaky Russian models).

Because of the hegemony of the global "free-market" economy, the less-industrialized world in general is extremely susceptible to having to trade land for cash simply to eat (and buy weapons). Africa, which is almost nuke-free, is certain to become a dumping ground for some of the new MOX-created waste. And so it goes.

On March 1, Michael Mariotte, director of NIRS, emailed the following report from Gorleben, Germany: "15,000 people rallied peacefully Saturday in the small city of Lueneburg against the transport of six Castor high level nuclear waste casks. The casks are traveling by rail from southern Germany to the northern town of Gorleben...The casks will be transferred from train to truck for the final eight miles into Gorleben—an ‘interim’ storage site. Thousands of protesters are now camped along the final few miles of rail routes and the last eight miles of highway. Their goal is to try to prevent the casks from reaching their destination.

"More than 25,000 police from all over Germany have been mobilized to escort the casks—the biggest mobilization of German police since WWII. The German government has warned protesters not to interfere with the shipments—a warning that has already fallen on deaf ears...The issue is front page news in Europe and the lead story on TV news....Congress is now considering a bill (S. 104) that would begin such radioactive waste transport [in] the U.S. The confrontations near Gorleben this week may be our future as well."

Shortly after Mariotte sent his report, news organizations reported that anti-nuclear protesters challenged 30,000 police in and around Gorleben and pelted them with bottles and rocks. The police turnout was the largest since the Nazi era. Farmers parked tractors blocking roads, say the reports, and burning barricades were erected on railroad tracks and across roads. Thousands, among at least 10,000 protesters, sat on the tracks until police forcibly removed them. Others dug up roads and blocked them with logs. Some Molotov cocktails were reportedly thrown, and police accused demonstrators of exploding a pipe bomb.

The German Green Party has been active in the protests, which have been escalating for years. "It is irresponsible to carry on with nuclear energy when we don’t know what to do with the waste," said national Green leader, Joschka Fischer. "There is only one alternative—to abolish nuclear power in the face of popular protest," concludes another Greens leader, Gunda Roestal.

The German nuclear waste—which had been reprocessed in France—finally reached its destination on March 5. Protesters say that the massive police presence and obtaining worldwide publicity once again drew serious attention to the nuclear nightmare that all of humanity lives in—and will die in, if we don’t abolish nuclear weapons and nuclear power.   <S>Z<D>

Tom Johnson is a freelance writer and photographer specializing in labor-related issues.