A VERY PERSONAL ASSESSMENT OF THE PLUTONIUM DISPOSAL PROBLEM AND SOME PERTINENT FACTS THAT YOU WON'T FIND IN YOUR NEWSPAPERs

By

Karl H. Puechl

January 26, 1997

You can either thank or blame A. J. White for this talk. He sent me a newspaper article on the subject and asked me to comment. Following are my comments.

Since almost my entire working career revolved around plutonium, to save me writing out a talk, what I am eventually going to present to you today is a broad-sketch biography with events in chronological order. Actually, after making this decision, I ended up writing the talk because I was unable to predict its length if I spoke off-the-cuff.

Also, since I intend to be rather unkind in this talk, I think I owe you a synopsis of my qualifications so that everyone knows where I am coming from. But first let me bring you up-to-date on the news relative to plutonium disposal.

On January 14, it was announced that the Energy Department gave final approval to its two-tier plan for the disposal of the 50 tons of plutonium previously contained in nuclear warheads, I'll explain this is more detail later.

Before this was announced, the LA Times carried a guest editorial by Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, like myself, and an arms control consultant. I, more-or-less, agree with everything that Zimmerman says, but I'll go into the background to explain how we got into our present predicament.

Then, for more general education about terrorists getting their hands on weapons material, from the publication PHYSICS & SOCIETY, I have here a review of a report prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Affairs entitled: "The Nuclear Black Market, Global Organized Crime Project".

Turning away from this specific subject to one that is of more general interest, on January 19 the Press Enterprise carried an article with the headline: "Nuclear Power's Legacy is its High Cost". I can't argue very strongly relative to what is said in this article, but, again, the interesting part is the background which led to our present situation.

The road that the nuclear industry was forced to take was largely plowed out by President Carter. Some of my friends in the audience may have heard me say, at some time or another, that I believe Jimmy Carter to have been one of our worst Presidents. Whenever, I have a strong opinion on a subject, I always have some doubts that I may have been too close to a situation and thereby not been able to "see the woods for the trees". Consequently, I was almost elated when there recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal a review of Jimmy's latest book. This review was by Gabriel Schoenfeld who is senior editor at Commentary magazine. Let me quote from this review:

"The decade began with the demon-driven Richard Nixon. After he resigned in

disgrace, we were led briefly by an out-standing mediocrity, Gerald Ford. Then, from nowhere, came Jimmy Carter, arguably one of the worst presidents of this century, and, as we see again in his book, "Living Faith", an excruciatingly trite thinker. --- How a great country came to be led by someone like Jimmy Carter is a historical puzzle that is likely to remain unsolved."

Frankly, I don't think Jimmy was quite as bad as Schoenfeld makes him out to be. As I see it, he had one particular failing in that he always tried to do good. To him, this meant to distrust anyone who had more knowledge in a particular field than he did. To him, knowledge meant bias, which made the person holding such knowledge ineligible for a governmental position that had decision-making responsibility in his or her area of expertise. Accordingly, relative to ERDA (the Energy Research and Development Agency), the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission and predecessor to the Department of Energy, Carter appointed sociologists and their ilk rather than engineers and scientists. Accordingly, billions of dollars were wasted on hare-brained energy development schemes. This is enough about Jimmy Carter for now, but I'd like to make a related comment that has somewhat broader implication. A similar attitude is sometimes held by people whom I'll call "do-gooders". Some individuals with lofty, sometimes even admirable, pet crusades won't listen to experts if the views of these experts contradict their basic beliefs since, after-all, "experts are biased". The experts may even agree with the do-gooder's end objective, with only the approach to getting there being different; nevertheless, good advice given by experts is much too-often mistrusted and thereby ignored.

Finally, here are some exhibits to illustrate my qualifications for giving this talk:

Here is a patent, filed in 1961 and awarded in 1963, for a Pressurized Water Reactor Core with Plutonium Burnup. This patent was assigned to the Atomic Energy Commision since they paid for the background research.

Then in 1965, I was asked to testify on the subject in Congress to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. This book contains my testimony.

Also, in 1965, I was asked by the International Atomic Energy Agency to present a paper in Stockholm, Sweden to let the world know that plutonium can be safely handled in an industrial environment.

Then here is a later patent filed in 1974 and issued in 1980 for a Nuclear Fuel Element, Core for Nuclear Reactor, and Nuclear Fuel Material. I also have here my associated applications filed in Japan and France. I brought these along, because I was somewhat bothered when I received them from my patent attorney; since I couldn't read either, how did I know what was being filed?

As a result of all this, in the late 1970s, I was asked by the editors to write a chapter on plutonium utilization for inclusion in Volume 11 of the Plenum Press' annually-published series of books entitled Advances in Nuclear Science and Technology; this appeared in 1979.

I also could have brought in the five volumes of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Environmental Impact Statement on the Use of Plutonium as a Fuel in Commercial Nuclear Powerplants since they hired me as a consultant to provided much of the technical information.

Now, to scare you, here is a chart with lots of numbers on it. During my talk, I won't go into much detail, but I will want to point out a few things.

Now to finally get to my work experience. In 1950, after getting out of Columbia U., having spent about 10 minutes on fissioning in a graduate course in nuclear physics, I accepted a job with an engineering firm; the one that had built the research reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. This firm was located at 19 Rector Street in NYC; about 2 blocks from Wall Street. I mention this to illustrate that one does not need laboratory facilities to practice physics. All I needed was pencil and paper and a Monroe or Marchant calculator; there were no textbooks on the subject, so one didn't need much in the way of library facilities, nor did one have to learn how to use a computer since there weren't any.

My first assignment was to design reactors for aircraft propulsion. The navy was designing reactors for submarines so the Air Force needed them too! This nonsense was stopped about 10 years later, after more than $2 billion dollars had been spent. But for me, my assignment slowly changed to the design of reactors and the associated paraphernalia needed for the production of electricity. My preferred reactor design is essentially that of most reactors operating in this country; I could have gotten the patent for that also, but at the time all our work was classified and therefore the AEC believed that patents were not important. This brings me to some of the numbers on the chart.

Note that all the heavy elements are composed of more than one isotope. Each isotope behaves chemically like any other but there may be a different number of neutrons in the nucleus. The elements are said to be fissionable material, but the real valuable material is that which is called "fissile material"; which includes only the isotopes that have an odd number of neutrons and protons in the nucleus, thereby giving them an odd "atomic weight". Note that natural uranium is composed mainly of two isotopes, U₂₃₈ and U₂₃₅, over 99% is the non-fissile U₂₃₈, and only 0.72% is the fissile U₂₃₅. It is extremely costly (much more difficult and costly than chemical processing) to change the isotopic composition of an element; but it can be done. Uranium A-bombs, for example, contain almost 100% U₂₃₅; as does the fuel for nuclear submarine reactors. This is a requirement since both devices must be small. More extraneous, non-fissile, material content inevitably results in larger and more intricate devices.

Now note that the fuel for our electricity-producing reactors is not natural uranium but is enriched so that about 3.3% of the uranium is U₂₃₅. The next column is extremely interesting in that it shows that the spent fuel which is removed from a reactor, after about 3-years of power production, still contains an appreciable amount of odd-numbered isotopes, of fissile material. Specifically, it contains about 1.5% U₂₃₅ and also about 1.5% fissile plutonium (2% total plutonium which is about 75% fissile). In other words, the heavy element content of this spent fuel is approximately 3% fissile, which is not far different from the initial unirradiated fuel material which was 3.3% fissile. This end-product material would be almost as valuable as the initial feed if it did not contain the highly-radioactive fission products that were produced by the fissioning of about 3.5% of all the original heavy atoms present. If anyone wants to do the arithmetic, they will find out that by the time of discharge almost as much plutonium will have fissioned as uranium; that is, the plutonium immediately starts being produced, and the fissile components immediately start to fission. This is why our present reactors are called "converter" reactors. A later generation, which we know how to build but which are not yet economical, actually produce more fissile material than is destroyed; hence, these are called 'breeder" reactors. Substantial experimental work on these is underway in France and Japan. Our effort, which previously was also substantial, is now minimal.

I already mentioned that some A-bombs are made of almost 100% U₂₃₅; now since Pu₂₃₉ is also a fissile material, A-bombs can also be made out of plutonium which is composed of almost 100% Pu₂₃₉ and such "weapons grade" material can be produced in reactors wherein the fuel is irradiated for only a short period of time so as not to allow for the grow-in of Pu₂₄₀. For military applications, therefore, reactors are operated for a short time period, like a month; the fuel is then discharged and chemically "reprocessed" to remove the fission products and to recover the plutonium. When the electricity-producing reactor fuel cycle was contemplated in the 1950s, it was naturally assumed that similar reprocessing would be done on the spent fuel and that the valuable plutonium and residual, still slightly-enriched, uranium would be recovered and reused. The discharged plutonium could be mixed with fresh natural uranium to achieve the required concentration of fissile atoms, as shown here in the chart; or it could be similarly mixed with the recovered, or any other slightly- enriched uranium. When plutonium is so used we say that the plutonium is "recycled". Before explaining the rest of the chart, let's get back to my career.

In 1958, the AEC decided that it was time to investigate the technical and economic feasibility of plutonium recycle. Accordingly, they asked industry for proposals. Also, shortly before, three scientists who worked on the nuclear submarine program broke away from their employer, Westinghouse, and formed their own company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), whose initial endeavor was to set up to supply fuel elements for the submarine reactors. Zalman Shapiro, the President of this company, heard about the request for proposals and approached me to help write such a document. I don't recall how he became aware of the fact that I had the knowledge to help with this. At any rate, we wrote a proposal, and, to our surprise, were awarded a contract. This meant designing and building a plant plus all the equipment necessary to handle the highly radioactive, toxic, and expensive plutonium. Similar things had been done in our National Laboratories but never in private industry. As this preliminary work got underway, Shapiro asked if I would join his company as Associate Director of Plutonium Operations; in essence, he asked if I would be interested in guiding the experimental work from a theoretical viewpoint, but leaving the responsibility for performance of the experimental work to his chosen Director. I eventually accepted his offer since reactor design was fast becoming an engineering discipline rather than a scientific endeavor; textbooks were beginning to appear, and some universities were setting up nuclear engineering departments. Also, it seemed to me that the remaining problems were not theoretical, that they were associated with finding and testing the appropriate materials that could be safely utilized in the reactor environment.

After going to work at NUMEC in Apollo, Pennsylvania, I immediately hired someone to assist me and I purchased my first computer, an LGP-30 which meant that it had a total memory of 30,000 bits and cost $30,000; a year or so later, I purchased an RPC-4000, which had somewhat greater memory and was manufactured by Rockwell here in southern California. It was in this environment that I did the work which resulted in the first patent that I put on the table, and which served as guidance for the forthcoming experimental effort at the plutonium laboratory. (Incidentally, now one can get more computational power in a pocket calculator for less than $50.)

Now there developed an interesting aside to all of this. For safety reasons, which was of great concern to all of us, the director of the lab appointed a safety committee to review all proposed equipment designs and operating procedures, and he gave this committee final authority on approvals. Things went rather smoothly, and progress was good, until it became time to start operations. Then the committee repeatedly found safety systems and interlocks, etc. that could be added to further improve the safety. Almost continuous discussion and review by the safety committee, led to no approvals to begin operations with plutonium; only with stand-in non-radioactive materials. Both Shapiro and the AEC became increasingly unhappy. As a final solution, Shapiro asked me to take over the Directorship with complete responsibility for all aspects of plutonium operations. I kept the safety committee, with the same membership, except for my replacement, but made it into an advisory body with me having final approval responsibility. We went "hot" the week after I took over; and during my 8-year stint as director, we had only one serious accident, and this had only minor consequences. By 1965, we had plutonium-bearing fuel elements under irradiation in test reactors and the total technology was rapidly becoming well-proven and accepted. The Belgians and the Germans had in operation similar, but smaller, facilities than ours; and we had designed a plant for Japan and one of my associates was in Japan supervising construction.

Now, chronologically, this brings me up to 1968. By that time, many of the large oil companies were calling themselves "energy" companies and they were buying up coal companies and were entering the fringes of the nuclear business. As a consequence the Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO, bought NUMEC with the intent of eventually becoming a major supplier of reload fuel to the utilities who were ordering reactors at a rapid pace from Westinghouse, General Electric, Babcock and Wilcox, and Combustion Engineering. ARCOs other intent was to become a reprocessor of spent fuel in order to recover the residual values and to reuse these in the reload fuel elements. I was given the responsibility for getting us into the reload fuel business, and someone else was given responsibility for getting established in the fuel reprocessing business.

The latter endeavor is more closely related to the subject of this talk. It started out more as a business development effort than a technical effort. We tried to get the utilities to sign long-term contracts for reprocessing at a very attractive price of $30 per kilogram of spent fuel, with provisions to allow price increases for inflation and regulatory actions. Our chief competitor was Allied-Gulf, a joint venture between Allied Chemical Corporation and Gulf Oil, and they were trying a similar business approach. Eventually, they dropped their offering price to $28 per kilogram, which we thought was ridiculously low, and they won over most of the utilities. Accordingly, they went ahead and designed an appropriate plant, based on the technology developed under the weapons program. The plant was eventually built near the Government's Savannah River Laboratory outside of Augusta, Georgia. With many intermediate cost over-runs, it was completed at a total expenditure in excess of $1 billion. Because of all these cost over-runs, and additional regulatory requirements whose costs were not completely covered in their contracts, Allied-Gulf was set to lose substantial money on each kilogram of fuel that they reprocessed.

Now, in the interim, Jimmy Carter had been elected President. Prior to hot start-up of the Allied-Gulf plant, he announced that fuel reprocessing was too hazardous an undertaking since the recovered plutonium, in its pure form, would be accessible to theft by terrorists who could then manufacture atomic bombs. We, in the business, were stunned by this announcement. The Government, under the weapon's program had been reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for 30 years without a major accident or loss of fissile material. We could only conclude that Allied-Gulf had gotten to Carter and had more-or-less asked for some such policy in order to cut their losses. Also, we presumed that this policy was supported by the "do-gooders" in the Carter administration who were against nuclear power in any form because they were willing to believe people like Margaret Mead rather than us experts regarding the health hazards associated with the handling of radioactive materials. We were triply confused since the British, French, Germans, and Japanese were going ahead with plans to reprocess, and since there was no way in which even a reasonably knowledgeable terrorist could make a bomb from reactor-grade plutonium.

This brings me back to the numbers on the chart. First, note that the plutonium discharged from commercial nuclear powerplants contains higher isotopes than Pu₂₃₉. Pu₂₃₉ does not always fission when it captures a neutron; sometimes it simply becomes the heavier isotope, Pu₂₄₀, and then Pu₂₄₀ does the same going to Pu₂₄₁. Eventually a sort of equilibrium is reached at about the percentages shown. These percentages are far different from the weapons-grade material which, as pointed out before, must be almost 100% fissile. I don't know how to make a bomb out of reactor-grade material, and I don't think anyone in Khadafi's organization has the know-how either; in fact, I doubt that it is possible to do so.

With one stroke of the pen, Carter made nuclear power uneconomical. Today in this country, no spent fuel is being reprocessed; hence no credit can be taken for the contained fuel value. Further, the spent fuel assemblies are being stored in pools at 73 powerplant sites scattered throughout the country. The utilities are bearing the costs associated with this storage, and the public is saddled with the potential hazard of having such highly-radioactive material in a relatively uncontained condition. Congress has been trying to get a central storage site for this fuel, but it has not yet been able to overcome all the objections even though 20 years have elapsed since Carter's decision. Further, we have no manufacturing plants capable of producing fuel elements that contain plutonium, fuel elements having a composition such as shown on the chart. As I mentioned before, the chart shows mixing of the plutonium with natural uranium, but uranium of any slight- enrichment may be used with a commensurate reduction in plutonium content.

If we had a viable nuclear industry that included the recycling of plutonium, there would be no dilemma about destroying the plutonium weapons stockpile. The weapons-grade plutonium could be immediately blended with the available reactor-grade plutonium in order to increase the non-fissile isotope content, thereby destroying its weapons value; and then, using this material, fuel elements could be fabricated to refuel our nuclear powerplants, thereby, for a rather long period of time eliminating the need for using newly-mined uranium. Now we do not have a reprocessing plant to get at the reactor-grade plutonium, and we do not have the fabrication plants for producing fuel elements that contain plutonium. Under the policy recently announced by the Department of Energy, we will, on government reservations to insure security, build the manufacturing plants necessary to produce fuel elements that initially contain weapons-grade plutonium and then we will introduce these into reactors, also on government reservations, in order to increase the non-fissile content of the plutonium. The total cost of this exercise is estimated to be about $2 billion, to say nothing about, in effect, throwing away about $1 billion worth of valuable fuel material which, if properly utilized, could produce about one trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to supply all U.S. electricity needs for about a year.

As an alternative to this, the DOE has also proposed to blend the plutonium in some sort of grit and then melt this to make glass or ceramic logs that could be buried in temporary storage facilities. The cost of the two approaches would not be greatly different. DOE plans to begin working towards both approaches. The Russians do not like the latter approach, since the plutonium would still be weapons-grade and could be recovered rather easily by some sort of melting and extraction process. An alternative, also considered, would be to send this material to our allies so that they could mix it with their recovered reactor-grade plutonium; but this was deemed to make the plutonium too accessible to terrorist intervention.

One stupid decision can certainly bring about a major headache!

Since I started this talk on a biographical note, let me finish up by briefly describing my later career. By 1972, it had become obvious that the nuclear industry would not develop as rapidly as contemplated in 1968; accordingly, the oil companies lost interest and began to sell off their nuclear holdings. ARCO sold NUMEC to one of the reactor manufacturers, Babcock and Wilcox. I decided to join another small, newly-formed outfit, Nuclear Assurance Corporation located in Atlanta. It's primary function was to gather and decimate information around the world; mostly information about safety aspects but also about uranium cost. As Vice President, I had the company open an office in Zurich, Switzerland; this provided some interesting trips to Europe.

Later, in about 1975, when I saw that plutonium recycle might be imminent, I quit my job and founded my own company Energy Concepts, Inc. Primarily, I worked on a business plan for building the facilities and establishing the company as the primary manufacturer of replacement fuel containing plutonium. But to provide some income, I also consulted for others: ARCO, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Westinghouse, Kerr-McGee Oil Company, United Engineers and Constructors, etc. After Carter torpedoed this effort, I folded the company and went to work as Director of Advanced Development for one of the reactor manufacturers, Combustion Engineering, in Windsor Connecticut. In this capacity, I was in charge of many things including their on-going fusion research. Then in 1980, I joined ARCO here in Los Angeles, as Director of Energy Projects. ARCO hired me because they, like others, thought that the price of oil might go to $40/ barrel and that this would severely reduce the amount of gasoline that they could sell. Accordingly, they were interested in alternative energy resources to keep up their cash-flow. I staffed up and built a laboratory in Woodland Hills; research work was initiated in solar energy (photovoltaics), hydrogen storage mechanisms for fuel cell application, superconductivity materials, electric storage battery materials, and other related subjects. One thing interesting about this job was the staffing. By 1980, the majority of PhDs coming out of our universities were foreigners; therefore, I ended up with a great mixture of talents and skin colors; some were excellent, some were good, a couple were pretty bad; about the same mix as one would expect from primarily Americans. Then in 1984, when it became obvious to everyone that the price of oil would not go much above $20/barrel, ARCO decided that most of my operation was no longer needed. I therefore told them that if anyone was let go, I would be the first to go---and I went.

Now, any questions?