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Tritium & US-Russian Pu agreement

Nuclear Monitor Issue: 
#418
16/09/1994
Article

(September 16, 1994) On June 23, 1994 Al Gore and Viktor Chernomyrdun signed an agreement on the shutdown of Russia's remaining three plutonium production reactors by the year 2000. (see WISE-NC 409.4050).

(418.4142) WISE Amsterdam - In return, the USA agreed not to restart its own shutdown production reactors and to help the Russians to rind alternatives for generating the heat and electricity still provided by the production reactors. In addition the cessation of use of newly produced plutonium for nuclear weapons is agreed. Within six months of signing of their agreement, the US. and Russia want to develop procedures necessary to assure compliance with the obligations of the agreement.

This agreement makes no mention of tritium. In its Annex a list of plutonium production reactors is given which makes no mention of the shut-down K Reactor at Savannah River Plant and of the two still operating light water reactors at Ozersk, named Lyudinila and Ruslan, which both have some 1000 MW(tb) and are used to produce tritium and special isotopes, e.g. Pu-238. This constitutes a severe loophole with respect to verifying compliance with the agreement.

In principal all tritium production reactors can easily be used for plutonium production as well. In fact, the K Reactor is nearly identical to the plutonium production reactors L, P, R, and C at Savannah River Plant and it has been used since 1983 for several years for the production of supergrade plutonium (3% in Pu-240). The mission of this reactor was changed to tritium production, after the shut-down of the C Reactor in 1986 which was dedicated to tritium production. In April 1988 the K Reactor was shut down and in August 1988 it was decided that all remaining production re-actors would have to undergo significant upgrading for safety reasons before it could be restarted. The U.S. spent $ 2.345 billion during FY 1989 to FY 1992 trying to restart tritium production. On March 23,1993, DOE Secretary Hazel O'Leary announced that the K Reactor would not be restarted but placed in 'cold stand-by status'.

The non-production of plutonium can only be verified by checking that tritium production is not used to cover up plutonium production. The most unambiguous and the easiest way to do this is the additional cutoff of tritium production. The operational status of the declared production facility could be verified by remote sensing using national technical means.

If tritium production would be continued under a verified fissile material cutoff agreement, the non-production of plutonium in the tritium production facilities had to be verified. Inspections are required at least during the phase of reloading the core. All fresh fuel and target elements have to be non destructively checked against natural or depleted uranium, the raw material used for plutonium breeding, by determining the uranium content and enrichment using neutron coincidence counters. Any such targets would have to be safeguarded by containment and surveillance so as to verify that they are not reprocessed to extract plutonium. All fuel and target elements will be tagged to be identified again at the next shutdown. In order to verify that all neutrons are used for tritium production and no left f or covered plutonium production, inspectors will have sufficient information to assess the rate of tritium production. This information has always been considered highly sensitive to the national security in all nuclear weapon states.

As a conclusion, the verification of a cut-off agreement would be much easier and less intrusive, if tritium is included in the ban.

Source: Martin Kalinowski, JANUS, do Institut für Kernphysik, Schlossgartenstr. 9, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany.
Tel: +49-6151-163016 Fax: +49-6151-164321. E-mail: IANUS@-HRZPUB.TH-DARMSTADT.DE
Contact: IPPNW USA. Bas Bruyne & Taya Portnova. 126 Rogers Street, Cambridge MA 02142 USA.
Tel: + 1-617-868-5050; Fax: + 1-617-868-2560