Stephens: Bushehr's Nuclear Backdoor for Iran

The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens published a column, "Giving Iran the Bomb" (subscription required), which criticizes a draft U.N. resolution on Iran. According to Stephens, the draft resolution would sanction Iran for failing to suspend its enrichment-related activities, inter alia, by blocking any nuclear or missile-related technology transers, yet -- and here's the kicker -- fully exempt from such embargo Iran's Bushehr reactor, which Russia is working to complete.

Iran, as we all (should) know, was found by the IAEA Board of Governors to be in noncompliance with its NPT and IAEA safeguards obligations (here's GOV/2005/77 in English and, a-hem, in Russian), and ordered to suspend all nuclear activities related to enrichment and reprocessing by the IAEA Board, and later by the U.N. Security Council with Resolution 1696. However, Iranian officials, who rather selectively (yet nonetheless emphatically) cite international law, don't seem to think the IAEA and United Nations matter much, and have publicly and repeatedly rejected any suspension.

Bret Stephen's column -- which cites (my boss) Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) -- draws on the larger arguments of A Fresh Examination of the Proliferation Dangers of Light Water Reactors, an NPEC-commisisoned report co-authored by former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Victor Gilinsky, Marvin Miller and Harmon Hubbard.

Gilinsky and company's report is worth reading because it powerfully challenges the conventional wisdom that light water reactors (LWRs) -- such as Iran's Bushehr reactor, which Russia is close to completing -- are necessarily "proliferation-resistant." As the report argues,

Forgotten from the earlier days of nuclear energy is that LWRs can produce large quantities of near-weapons-grade plutonium, and that a country bent on making bombs would not have much trouble extracting it quickly in a small reprocessing operation, and possibly even keep the operation secret until it had an arsenal.

The possibility of clandestine centrifuge enrichment exists even in the absence of a nuclear power program. Pakistan pursued enrichment before it had any reactors that used enriched uranium fuel. But a nuclear power program provides resources and makes it easier to mask a clandestine enrichment program. There is however one respect in which the presence of an LWR offers added opportunities for clandestine enrichment. Fresh LWR fuel, which typically has an enrichment level (uranium-235 concentration) of 4 percent can, after crushing and fluorination, itself be used as feed for a clandestine gas centrifuge enrichment operation. Use of such low enriched feed,
as opposed to natural uranium with a uranium-235 concentration of less than one percent can reduce the enrichment effort by a factor of five.

In other words, LWRs themselves pose a large security issue if they are in the wrong hands. It would be useful for informing U.S. policy to gain a clearer understanding of the extent to which near-weapons grade plutonium is readily available from these reactors. Two specific examples stand out of nuclear policy inadequately informed by an understanding of the technical possibilities.

The first is the confused and inconsistent policy toward North Korea which included promising, as part of a 1994 US-DPRK nuclear deal, two large LWRs whose plutonium production capacity turned out to be larger than that of all the indigenous North Korean reactors they were supposed to replace. When this came to light the State Department insisted that the North Koreans would not have the technology to extract the LWR plutonium.

The second example involves Iran. The United States opposes Russian supply of LWRs at Bushehr, but does so on the grounds that the nuclear project can serve as a cover for clandestine nuclear activities. There does not seem to be recognition yet that the LWRs could themselves be a copious source of plutonium for weapons, or their possible link with enrichment.

Altogether, underestimating the production capacity of LWRs for weapons-grade and near weapons-grade plutonium and overestimating the difficulty of "quick and dirty" reprocessing have contributed to poor decisions.

If Bushehr will create a backdoor through which Iran can get weapons-usable fissile material, then a resolution which exempts Bushehr from sanctions will constitute another poor decision. By exempting Bushehr to get Russian support, Uncle Sam would be giving up its ends to obtain its means.

Update (November 2, 2006: 9:32 AM, CST): The AP reports that Russia and China won't support the draft UN resolution that would sanction Iran for refusing to suspend nuclear activities related to enrichment and reprocessing. It's not yet clear whether Moscow and Beijing rejected the version of the draft resolution which Stephens had written about, or a revised version.

Posted by Robert at October 31, 2006 3:13 PM