Using plutonium from nuclear bombs as fuel for nuclear reactors is a discredited, rejected, dangerous idea as old as the nuclear age. But it is back again, as a group of tech companies seek billions in government contracts for unproven reactor designs they claim would open up a new era of cheap nuclear energy.
If that promise sounds familiar, it is because nuclear power companies have been promoting that dream for decades. In the 1950s, industry executives testified to Congress that we would soon have nuclear-powered cars, airplanes and homes. Nuclear energy would be so cheap, they said, that we wouldn’t have to meter it.
Now, the Trump administration is planning to give surplus plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs to new nuclear startup companies. Jacob DeWitte, the chief executive of one of these companies, Oklo, says he can build a new kind of small nuclear reactor that can run on plutonium. “This will help us get more nuclear power online faster,” he promises.
The idea sounds fairly reasonable at first: Instead of disposing of the 50 tons of plutonium that the government produced at great expense for nuclear weapons, give it to companies who say they can use it as fuel for a new generation of reactors. Instead of nuclear waste, we would have nuclear energy.
But the entire concept is fraught with danger. At the top of the list is the obvious risk that letting private companies use and store tons of plutonium — the only material besides highly-enriched uranium that can be used in nuclear bombs — opens up a Pandora’s Box of proliferation. Terrorists or states looking for a nuclear shortcut could steal or even buy the small amounts they would need for a bomb.
That is why nuclear experts have long opposed these schemes. The concerns were enough to convince both Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to kill such proposals in the 1970s. Carter wrote that although he favored the expansion of nuclear power, the “further spread on nuclear weapons…would be vastly increased by the further spread of sensitive technologies which entail direct access to plutonium.”
There is a real problem that plutonium reactors promise to address: what to do with the tons of surplus plutonium we produced for bombs but no longer need?
But the idea never died. When the Obama administration funded a project to mix plutonium with uranium to make a new type of reactor fuel in 2015, I was part of a group of bipartisan nuclear experts and former government officials to sign a letter urging them to abandon this plan. “The United States has for four decades consistently opposed the spread of such activities,” we wrote, “because of the obvious proliferation danger of putting nuclear-weapons explosive materials into commercial channels.”
Similarly, former Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz wrote in opposition to the Trump plan when it first surfaced last year that not only did plutonium reactor designs have a poor track record of success, but there were multiple national security risks in opening up a commercial plutonium stream. These include creating new stockpiles of weapon materials; encouraging new states to develop nuclear weapon technologies; producing new radioactive waste streams; and increasing, not decreasing, the cost of deploying nuclear energy; “None of these concerns have been addressed convincingly by new technologies,” Moniz said.
These concerns have not stopped the plans. And to be sure, there is a real problem that plutonium reactors promise to address: what to do with the tons of surplus plutonium we produced for bombs but no longer need?
Plutonium, like a diamond, lasts forever. More precisely, the type of plutonium used in bombs has a half-life of 24,000 years. That means in 24,000 years, half of the plutonium in a given supply will lose its radioactivity and no longer be dangerous. So where do you store unused plutonium for tens of thousands of years?
We have not solved this problem. The most feasible solution is to mix it with other highly radioactive substances, turn it into glass logs, and bury them deep in a geological depository. But it is hard to find a location that will be free from earthquakes and erosion for millennia. How do you even provide warning signs to civilizations that are many generations further into the future than we are from the Babylonians?
That is why the idea of somehow using it has such appeal. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the U.S. nuclear navy, tried to build a compact, plutonium-fueled reactor in the 1950s but concluded that such reactors were expensive to build, complex to operate and susceptible to prolonged shutdowns as the result of even minor malfunctions. Repeated attempts to build such reactors, cooled by volatile liquid sodium rather than water, have failed.
This long history of failure and dangers has not deterred Oklo and similar companies now favored by the Trump administration. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who has spearheaded the new plutonium program, was formerly on the board of Oklo. The company is testing reactors now that it says will be far better than previous designs and be “proliferation resistant.”
That claim is “bunk,” nuclear expert Alan Kuperman wrote in Scientific American. The Trump nuclear initiative “needs to be reversed before it inadvertently triggers an arms race, atomic terrorism or even nuclear war,” he writes.
The best chance of doing that is in Congress. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is one of several opposing the proposal, warning, in addition to his proliferation concerns that “using plutonium in nuclear energy is significantly more expensive than disposing of it as waste.” If Democrats regain control of the House and Senate those concerns may once again rein in a dangerous push for profits over national security.
Joseph Cirincione
Joseph Cirincione is the vice chair of the Center for International Policy Board of Directors.