What Steps Should Be taken to Increase Nuclear Safety and Security?

Today's top nuclear policy stories, with excerpts in bullet form.

Stories we're following today - Thursday, March 24, 2011:

How We Can Reduce the Risk of Another Fukushima - Matt Bunn for The Washington Post [link]

• In 2006, a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended two simple steps to prevent spent nuclear fuel from catching fire: putting old, cool fuel next to the new, hot fuel discharged from a reactor, and adding sprayers that could dispense water if the cooling water in the pool was lost. But no such action has been taken, either in the United States or in Japan.
• The radioactive steam that rose over Fukushima should be a searing reminder of the costs of failing to identify such dangers and fix them. A serious blow has been dealt to public confidence in the nuclear industry and its overseers.
• Every country operating nuclear facilities needs to undertake an urgent review — by an independent international team, not by the companies that own the plants or the agencies that have long regulated them — of whether there are risk-reduction steps as compelling as those the academy recommended that have not been taken.
• The European Union has announced that its member states will work together to review the safety of all E.U. reactors in the coming months. The rest of the world must do likewise — as well as invite separate teams to review security.
• Nuclear facilities around the world are much less prepared for security incidents than for accidents. While U.S. reactors are required to have armed guard forces, many reactors abroad — and even some sites with potential nuclear bomb material — have none...Everyone in the civilian nuclear industry is taught to focus on safety from day one, while on security, nuclear workers and managers might get a half-hour briefing once a year. All this needs to change.

The True Legacy of ‘Star Wars' - Reid Pauly for "The Prague Project" [link]

• President Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on March 23, 1983, twenty-eight years ago today. Part of a vision for a future without the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, SDI became a hot-button issue between the United States and the Soviet Union. Coincidently, the issue of missile defense is being debated today between the United States and Russia, with Secretary Gates and Vice-President Biden having both visited Moscow in the last two weeks.
• On this timely anniversary, we should all sit down and read “Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons” by Paul Lettow. Perhaps then we would understand that true story of Reagan’s SDI and how hyper-conservative missile defense hawks have abandoned both their history and sensible foreign policies.
• Missile defense proponents, like Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), claim to be continuing Reagan’s legacy. “President Reagan fought to achieve peace through strength,” wrote DeMint in an op-ed on his blog, “And in doing so he led the U.S. to win the Cold War and put in place the beginnings of groundbreaking missile defense technology to protect our nation from rising threats. And ever since, the left has sought to stop, block, and defund our critical missile defenses that are continually proving to be successful and necessary.” DeMint proposes an expensive, technically impossible, and potentially catastrophic plan to deploy hundreds of missiles around the world. This is not at all what Reagan intended.
• According to Lettow’s well-argued monograph, Reagan never let his mind stray from his ultimate goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. SDI was intended as a necessary step forward in order to eventually draw down. “I happen to believe,” wrote Reagan, “that an effective defense weapon could bring closer the day when we could all do away with the nuclear threat.”
• Reagan instead sought defensive weapons as a step on the way to nuclear-zero. So, if we can manage to negotiate treaties that reduce nuclear arsenals without the need to spend billions of dollars on ineffective technologies, why not continue to reduce our stockpiles?
  

It Could Happen Here - Frank Von Hippel for The New York Times [link]

• It will be years before we know the full consequences of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. But the public attention raised by the problems there provides an opportunity to rethink nuclear-power policy in the United States and the rest of the world — and reduce the dangers of a similar disaster happening elsewhere.
• Perhaps the most important thing to do in light of the Fukushima disaster is to change the industry-regulator relationship. It has become customary for administrations not to nominate, and the Senate not to confirm, commissioners whom the industry regards as “anti-nuclear” — which includes anyone who has expressed any criticism whatsoever of industry practices. The commission has an excellent staff; what it needs is more aggressive political leadership.
• Another area that requires review is unrelated to the Fukushima accident, but would benefit from some of the attention generated by the crisis — namely, the need to strengthen the barriers to misuse of nuclear-energy technology to develop nuclear weapons.
• The unintended effect of much of governmental research and development has been to make nuclear proliferation easier. Most notably, over the past 50 years the developed world has spent some $100 billion in a failed effort to commercialize plutonium breeder reactors. Such reactors would use uranium more efficiently, but would also require the separation of plutonium, a key component in nuclear weapons.
• The United States should help shape this industrial model into an international one, in which all enrichment plants are under multinational control. Doing so would make it more difficult for countries like Iran to justify building national enrichment plants that could be used to produce nuclear weapons materials.

Fukushima: Another reason to Ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - Alexander H. Rothman and Lawrence J. Korb for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [link]

• Over the past two weeks, the monitoring system put in place under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has proved useful in helping the international community weather the effects of Japan's massive 9.0 earthquake. Designed to detect nuclear weapons tests, the CTBT's network of global monitoring stations has enabled the international community to track Fukushima's radioactive plume, which reached the West Coast of the United States last week.
• Perhaps even more significantly, in the immediate aftermath of the quake, data from the CTBT's monitoring system allowed scientists to issue tsunami alerts for Japan, Hawaii, and other parts of the Pacific. The utility of this monitoring system during this terrible time should serve as a reminder to the Obama administration and the Senate that ratifying the CTBT would strengthen both US and global security.
• To enter into force, the CTBT must be ratified by what are known as the Annex 2 countries: the 44 countries, including the United States, that possessed nuclear power or research reactors between 1994 and 1996. Thirty-one of these countries have ratified the treaty; another ten have signed without ratifying. Three of these countries have neither signed nor ratified the treaty.
• The CTBT would improve American security by bolstering the global nonproliferation regime, strengthening the norm against nuclear testing, and preventing nuclear proliferation...Moreover, the US has voluntarily refrained from testing since 1992, and testing is no longer necessary to ensure the viability of our nuclear arsenal. As a result, the United States has little to lose and much to gain from ratifying the treaty.