ANFSI: Meeting two challenges of the nuclear fuel cycle
Daniel Poneman, president and CEO of Centrus, a nuclear enrichment facility, presented an interesting idea in his book “Double Jeopardy: Combating Nuclear Terror and Climate Change”. The idea is simple: the United States should launch an assured nuclear fuel services initiative (ANFSI). I’d like to amplify this idea.
Leading nuclear suppliers from around the world are supposed to team up and offer comprehensive nuclear fuel services to all nations that live up to global nonproliferation norms.
This could help resolve the tension between an two conflicting goals: ensuring broad access to nuclear fuel services to combat climate change by providing reliable, firm energy and the international goal of minimizing access to potentially critical nuclear facilities that enrich uranium or separate plutonium.
Countries already in possession of fuel-service capabilities, including the potentially critical uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing facilities, would form a coalition and agree to offer guaranteed nuclear fuel delivery and used fuel removal at competitive prices. In exchange for this, participating countries without such facilities, commit to not seeking either enrichment or reprocessing technologies or capabilities for an extended period of time, maybe ten to fifteen years.
All transactions and facilities within this agreement would be subject to IAEA safeguards. The actual fuel-cycle transactions would be arranged through commercial contracts among the providers and customers. This initiative would provide a reliable source of nuclear fuel services while simultaneously sparing the participating governmenst the extensive technical challenges and enormous financial costs of developing, building, and operating an indigenous fuel cycles and also reducing the spread of potentially critical nuclear technologies.
To make access to nuclear fuel through the ANFIS credible, multiple levels of guarantees are envisioned. The IAEA itself would be the “guarantor of last resort”. The first levels are the binding contracts between suppliers and consumers and then other member states. If countries with a tradition of rivalry, like the US, Russia and China or internationally more restraint countries like South Korea, Japan, UK and the Netherlands joined, it doesn’t seem too plausible for an individual state to be found in violation by all of them to ever trigger the last line of guarantee. In a sense, energy would cease to be a political weapon. At least a little bit.
These guarantees would be voided, if the IAEA determined that a beneficiary state violated nonproliferation commitments or international safeguards. This also means that political issues unrelated to the nuclear transaction would not be permitted to enter into the consideration of whether to honor a fuel delivery contract.
If a guarantor declined to honor its guarantee, without the IAEA finding violations, the IAEA guarantee would be invoked. The existence of a IAEA guarantee would deter a guarantor government from refusing to honor its guarantee for inadmissible grounds while also providing a safety net if needed.
The IAEA fuel bank in Kazakhstan, launched in August 2017, could provide a starting point for the IAEA guarantee, but the agency could also contract separately with other supplier nations to step in if required.
The IAEA would not need to engage in any enrichment or reprocessing activities itself; it would just need to be able to contract with the existing providers.
Participating ANFSI states would also be invited to participate in an international research and development program for proliferation-resistant fuel-cycle technologies and advanced reactors. This is supposed to ensure that they would also be assured that their nuclear researchers would keep pace with advances in nuclear technology and that they would not suffer for their commitment to self-restraint in not pursuing enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.
An ANFSI could also be applicable for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, after irradiated fuel is removed from the reactor. Used-fuel storage, reprocessing facilities, and geological repositories, like deep borehole storage, could all be included. Such aspects of an ANFSI could for example appeal to Japan, which continues to struggle with the completion of the Rokkasho reprocessing facility. It’s currently running two decades behind schedule with costs reportedly soaring to $25 billion.
The facility was designed to process up to 800 tons of spent nuclear fuel per year, corresponding to approximately 40 1GWe LWR reactors.
Japan could offer Rokkasho as part of its contribution to an ANFSI, given that post-Fukushima not as many reactors are active domestically. A member of the ANFSI without reprocessing facilities, but a desire to close its fuel-cycle could enter into a contract to tap into the vast and unused potential of Rokkasho to get that service.
It would be pretty obvious that that state would not need and could not easily justify, investing billions of dollars into building its own plutonium-reprocessing facility while the ANFSI still had spare capacity. The economics of scale do not spare the nuclear fuel cycle and illustrate how market realities are favoring uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing as a Service. The ANFSI would provide these with exceptionally strong safeguards against proliferation provided by the IAEA.
There is a massive glut of capacity in the uranium enrichment sector, which will likely persist into the 2020s.
There not too many rationales that justify investing in a new enrichment plants. Among them are creating nuclear weapons and achieving autarkic self-sufficiency in enriched uranium supplies, no matter the cost.
The first is not accepted under international norms, and the second seems implausible, given that there is scant evidence of countries not having excess to commercial, enriched uranium.
On the reprocessing side, the analysis that kept the United States from reprocessing plutonium in the mid-1970s remains valid forty years later: it is just cheaper to use fresh uranium mined from the ground for fuel than it would be to use reprocessed plutonium.
To see some of the benefits of the ANFSI, let’s look at the Iranian nuclear challenge. “Many of the critical constraints that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) imposes on Iran’s uranium and plutonium activities expire by 2031. Moreover, the JCPOA allows Iran to continue research on some of its more powerful centrifuge designs and to replace older centrifuge technology with more advanced methods at various points during the course of the intervening period.” [PONEMAN]. Once the restrictions run out, it is feared that Iran’s “break-out time” will be reduced to two to three months.
An ANFSI could offer reliable, attractively priced enrichment services to Iran. This would hollow out Iran’s argument that it “needs” to build uranium-enrichment or plutonium-reprocessing facilities once the JCPOA constraints expire. Not only should Iran be offered membership to the ANFSI, but it could be offered the opportunity to make equity investments in the initiative. Any claim that a country “needs” to build its own commercial enrichment plant to have access to a reliable supply of enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power, isotope and research reactors would then be far less credible.
In summary, this initiative seems like a low-cost option to work towards two important international goals: non-proliferation and low-emission energy.
It doesn’t seem to necessitate more than diplomacy. There are no technological challenges towards establishing this international body. The infrastructure and know-how to monitor the nuclear facilities is already institutionalized in the IAEA.
Why there is no drive to establish ANFSI as obvious solution is beyond my comprehension. It seems like the clearest instance of “free money on the table” in the realm of nuclear proliferation that ever existed.
REFERENCES:
[PONEMAN] Poneman, Daniel B.. Double Jeopardy (Belfer Center Studies in International Security) . The MIT Press. Kindle-Version.