The most recent impasse in closure
prtKeeciings nearly caused a meltdown
in Lithuania's relations with Brussels.
In the course of the October 2004
parliamentary elections, Prime Minister
Algirdas Brazauskas announced he
would keep the plant's first reactor
working beyond its closure deadline at
the end of the year. Voters rewarded
him by returning him to the country's
most powerful office.
Only after the European Commission
coldly reminded Brazauskas that
the decommissioninfi was "enshrined
in Lithuania's accession treaty" did
the prime minister retract the statement
he made weeks before.
Arturas Dainius, the state secretary
at Lithuania's Economy Ministry,
which is in charge of plant closure,
said that "the elections didn't play
the least significant role" in the government's
stance. "You know," he
added, "all sorts of 'interesting' ideas
can pop up from the pt)litical arena."
Yet the conditions that instigated
the eleventh-hour crisis over closing
the first reactor will be dwarfed by
the potentially catastrophic issues
Lithuania wili face as it prepares to
close the second reactor by the end of
2008—another theoretically "enshrined"
date. The energy produced
by the first reactor was almost all
sent abroad, but the final closure will
leave Lithuania able to produce only
2.5 percent of its current electrical
output, leaving a massive void in the
country's energy supply.
With government officials admitting
they have no definite plan to replace
the supply from the second reactor,
the hoped-for on-time closure
seems doubtful. Casual proposals
abound, but precious few official
ideas have surfaced on how to use the
aid from Brussels. "We'll either have
to become an energy importer or
build another plant, in which case
we'll have to decide what type of
plant that will be," said Dainius.
Only nebulous suggestions have been
discussed so far.
Lithuania's power grid has yet to
be connected to the rest of the HU,
meaning imported electricity would
have to come from Russia—an unpopular
move in a country sensitive
to the giant bear's long reach. And
the prospect of bringing a new nuclear
reactor online in less than four
years seems dim given the government's
sluggish pace of decision making.
"Sooner or later the reactor is
going to have to close, so why don't
we make sound plans for its closure
now?" Jasiulionis asked.
In the meantime, even government
officials do not sound confident that
the second reactor will be closed.
"We'll live, and we'll see," Dainius
told me. <*
Steven PauUkas is a journalist based in
Vilnius, Lithuania.
L A S E R E N R I C H M E N T
Separation anxiety
By Jack Boureston & Charles D. Ferguson
N NOVEMBPR 2 0 0 4 , THE ENVlronmental
group Greenpeace
accused the Australian government
of condoning nuclear
proliferation by supporting
the work of a laser uranium
enrichment company named Silex
Systems Limited. "If any other country,
be it Iran, Syria, or Iraq was involved
in this research it would be
taken as a sign of a covert weapons
program," a Greenpeace spokesperson
told reporters.
Nations have been developing
laser isotope separation methods to
enrich uranium for years, but most
have yet to convert research into
commercial success or have abandoned
laser enrichment altogether.
The recent accusations and the diffusion
of laser enrichment technologies
and know-how as part of peaceful
nuclear programs nonetheless again
raise tbe question: How much of a
proliferation risk does laser isotope
separation present?
Analysts have paid relatively less
serious attention to the use of laser
isotope separation (LIS) to enrich
uranium than to the spread of gas
centrifuge enrichment and reprocessing
tecbnology. But certain features
of laser enrichment facilities
would seem to make them ripe for
proliferation—they are typically
smaller, use less energy, are more
easily concealed, and may one day
be cheaper to operate than both gas
centrifuge and diffusion plants. Still,
there are formidable obstacles to
tbeir development.
Some analysts have regarded laser
isotope separation as too difficult to
master by nations lacking highly advanced
technical infrastructures.
14 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March/April 2005
One exception is Stanley
I'rickson, an analyst at
Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, ln an
October 2001 paper F.rickson
warned, "As technology
advances, this
will ntJt remain so." This
observation proved prophetic
in August 2002,
when the dissident group
National Council of Resistance
of Iran announced
at a Washington,
D.C, press conference
that Iran had started an
LIS program and developed
a laser enrichment
facility at Lashkar Ab'ad.
The Iranian laser research
program, which
enriched only milligrams
of uranium, had surprisingly
managed to escape
detection by the Internationa!
Atomic Flnergy
Agency (IAEA). In February
2003, IAEA Director
General Mohamed ElBaradei
acknowledged
that the IAEA would continue having
problems detecting similar "research
and laboratory activities" in
the future. But ElBaradei hastened
to add that the IAEA's improved
technological capabilities would
make it "highly unlikely" that an
industrial-scale LIS program would
go undetected.
Another hidden research effort
using laser enrichment came to light
in September 2004, when the IAEA
exposed South Korean experiments
(for more on this, see "South Korea's
Nuclear Surprise," January/February
2005 Hullctm). In 2000, scientists at
the Laboratory for Quantum Optics
at the Korea Atomic Energy Research
Institute (KAERI) separated about
0.2 grams of uranium 235, an isotope
useful in nuclear fuel or weapons,
and enriched tbem to levels between
10 and 77 percent. While 20
percent is the dividing line between
low-enriched and highly enriched
Is laser enrichment a proliferation risk? Greenpeace says "yes" at this September 2003
protest in Australia.
uranium, enrichment levels close to
90 percent are sought for the purposes
of making weapons. Sufficient
amounts of uranium enriched to 77
percent could fuel a nuclear bomb.
Scientists need tens of kilograms
of enriched uranium, more than
100,000 times the amount enriched,
to make a weapon, and analysts
drew clear conclusions about Seoul's
intentions. "If the question is, could
KAERI have enriched a significant
amount of uranium using the facility
they had in that laboratory, I'm highly
confident the answer is no," Jeffrey
Eerkens, a leading American laser enrichment
expert, told Nucleonics
Week (September 9, 2004). Yet, sci^
entists wouldn't need a commercialscale
US plant to enrich enough uranium
for a single nuclear weapon if
they had one or two years to do so.
This is perhaps why South Korea's
laser enrichment activities were of
some concern to the U.S. government.
In November 2001, Eerkens
gave a presentation on laser isotope
separation techniques at a scientific
conference in South Korea. The next
year, he proposed to the Energy Department
that he work with a
KAERI scientist to investigate laser
separation of zinc isotopes and other
isotopes useful in medical applications.
Energy denied the proposal
"because it was too close to uranium
enrichment," Eerkens told Nucleonics
Week and confirmed for us.
Although the IAEA has reprimanded
South Korea for not reporting
its uranium enrichment activities
in a timely fashion as required by its
Safeguards Agreement, the United
States has not expressed serious concern.
In early November 2004, before
the IAEA Board of Governors
meeting. Secretary of State Golin
Powell said, "I'm quite sure that the
IAEA will see it as a minor problem
with experimentation."
March/April 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 15
How it works
For more than 30 years, enthusiasts have trumpeted the benefits of laser
enrichment of uranium. The energy costs are much lower than traditional
enrichment techniques; lasers can, in principle, target uranium 235, the
isotope useful for fuel and bombs, while leaving uranium 238, the most
prevalent isotope, alone. But because the two isotopes have very similar
excitation frequencies, the laser beams used to selectively excite uranium
235 must be finely tuned and have a narrow frequency spread, which is
technically demanding to achieve.
Scientists have investigated two types of laser enrichment techniques:
atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) and molecular laser isotope
separation (MLIS). In AVLIS, tunable dye lasers target vaporized uranium
metal and selectively excite and charge uranium 235. (Copper vapor
lasers are typically used to pump the dye lasers.) The positively charged
uranium 235 collects on negatively charged plates and is then extracted
in a labor-intensive process. In principle, a single-stage AVLIS plant could
make low-enriched uranium suitable for reactor fuel, and a three-stage
plant could produce about one
bomb's worth {25 kilograms) of
weapon-grade uranium per year.
Inadvertently charging and collecting
uranium 238 is a major
problem with this technique.
In MLIS, an infrared laser is directed
at uranium hexafluoride
gas. The laser excites uranium
235 hexafluoride gas, while not
disturbing the uranium 238 hexafluoride
gas. Another laser
knocks a fluorine atom off an excited
uranium 235 hexafluoride
molecule, creating uranium
pentafluoride, which precipitates
out as a white powder and contains
enriched uranium. Because producing even low-enriched uranium for
commercial purposes is very difficult for a single-stage MLIS plant, cascading
is necessary. Each stage in the cascade requires refluorination of
the uranium pentafluoride, a process that can substantially increase the
costs of MLIS when compared to AVLIS.
Jack Boureston & Charles D. Ferguson
The AVLIS setup at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.
South Korea and Iran were neither
the first nor the last to experiment
with laser enrichment. In fact, more
than 20 other countries have researched
laser isotope separation
techniques. They include Argentina,
Australia, Brazil, Britain, China,
France, Germany, India, Iraq, Israel,
Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan,
Romania, Russia, South Africa,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the
United Stares, and Yugoslavia.
Most of these nations have confined
their LIS work to the laboratory.
Britain, France, and the United
States have developed LIS
programs that could move beyond
the lab into the pre-industrial phase
and ultimately into commercial
production. Australia and Japan are
also known to have invested significant
resources in trying to build
LIS uranium enrichment plants, but
no country currently operates a
commercial-scale laser enrichment
facility for separating uranium, according
to the Uranium Information
Centre in Australia.
AVLIS has left the building
The United States was on the verge
of commercialization, when USEC,
then known a.s the U.S. Enrichment
Corporation, decided in June 1999
to cancel its atomic vapor laser isotope
separation (AVLIS) program.
This came as a surprise considering
USFC^ had spent roughly $100 million
on AVLIS since being privatized
a year earlier. In total, the U.S.
AVLIS program involved 27 years
of research and development
and an investment of
some $2 billion. USECs cost
estimates to make AVLIS
ready for commercialization,
which soared into the hundreds
of millions of dollars,
were a major factor in the
program's cancellation.
U.S. interest in laser enrichment
methods did not
immediately die with the
AVLIS program. In 1996,
USEC had invested in the
separation of isotopes by the
laser excitation (SILFX) technique
being developed in Australia. The
U.S. and Australian governments
demonstrated further interest in the
project on June 20, 2001, when
they announced that they had officially
classified the SILEX method.
But USECs interest in SILEX
proved short-lived, and on April
30, 2003 it terminated SILEX
funding.
In a May 1, 2003 press release,
Michael Goldsworthy, chief executive
officer of Silex Systems, said
that his company disagreed with
USECs view of the potential and
current state of the SILEX technology.
"It is incomprehensible to us that
USEC has decided to abandon the
SILEX program only a few months
short of completing the current test
program and being in a good posi-
16 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March/April 2005
tion to assess the economic perforniLiiicc
of the SIL.EX process/' he
said. As of July 2004, Silex System.s
was srill studying the economic
feasibility of its laser uranium enrichmenr
method.
After abandoning laser isotope
separation methods altogether,
USfiC," is now focusing on plans to
build a centrifuge plant in Piketon,
Ohio, the site of the former Portsmouth
Gaseous Diffusion Plant. In
2005, USHC hopes to begin operating
the American Centrifuge Demonstration
Facility at the site, and by
2010, the company wants to construct
the most efficient centrifuge
plant in the world with an annual
capacity of 3.5 million separative
work units of enrichment. This plant
could provide enough fuel yearly for
hctwcen 30 and JiS 1,000-megawatt
light-water reactors.
Gas centrifuge and diffusion methods
continue to dominate the global
nuclear fuel enrichment market. By
choosing to build a centrifuge enrichiiient
plant, USEC^ went with a
proven commercial method, reducing
financial risks. Although a centrifuge
facility requires iiiore energy
to run than a laser enrichment plant,
it will save substantially compared to
USECs remaining gaseous diffusion
plant in Paducah, Kentucky., which
is approaching the end of its life.
Laser allure
The potential of LIS has attracted
states eager to establish a domestic
enrich inent capability. Like the
United States, Brazil invested in a
laser enrichment program for many
years hut eventually chose to build a
commercial centrifuge plant. Brazil's
laser project aimed to "demonstrate
the technical viability of the laser
processes for isotope separation
using, as long as possible, resources
avaiiabie in Brazil," according to a
199S scientific article hy a research
team centered at the Instituto de Estudos
Avani^iidos. That report cautioned,
"A successful commercialization
of this technology will
threaten well-established fuel-cycle
activities."
Brazilian laser research planning
originated in the United States in the
early 1970s, and was led by Sergio
Porto, a Brazilian scientist and professor
at the California Institute of Technology
and the University of Southern
California who took a special interest
in educating Brazilian students. Porto
returned to Brazil in 1975 to head its
laser enrichment program, which was
controlled by the air force and supported
by the National Nuclear Energy
Commission.
The Brazilian program has had
mixed results. Brazilian researchers
we contacted declined to release details
of how much uranium they
have enriched and to what level of
enrichment, but Eerkens, the laser
enrichment expert, told us that he
believes they probably attained a
level of 50 percent enrichment. Uncertainty
remains about the total
amount of uranium enriched. And
the program has struggled with extraction
and separation of the enriched
uranium.
Brazilian scientists take pride in
both their laser and centrifuge accomplishments,
and Brazilian resistance
to allowing IAEA inspectors
full access to the centrifuge facility
made headlines in September and
October 2004. Eduardo Campos.,
Brazil's minister of science and technology,
has claimed that the centrifuge
technology at the facility is
"100 percent" Brazilian. Outside experts
douht this claim, yet broadening
domestic enrichment capabilities,
in Brazil and elsewhere, present
some concern.
Eaced with stiff competition from
gas centrifuge facilities, laser enrichment
programs may never see largescale
coniiiiercialization. But LIS
might offer a clandestine means for
producing a few hombs' worth of
weapon-grade uranium. According
to Stanley Erickson's paper, "the requirements
for a proliferation facility
usiiig LiS are not as strenuous as
they are for commercial production
of nuclear fuel."
During the past few decades, the
materials and know-how necessary
to build laser systems useful for uranium
enrichment have spread widely.
Eor instance, copper vapor laser
systems, once costly and technically
prohibitive, ore now built by high
school students for science projects
and employed in undergraduate
laser laboratory experiments. Dye
lasers, another essential component
of AVLIS enrichment, are also hecoming
more available. "This diffusion
of laser knowledge and experimental
interest means that expertise
about the finer points of laser construction
is spreading and will make
development of [lasers| easier," observed
Erickson.
LIS facilities could escape detection
more easily than traditional uranium
enrichment plants. They would
be more compact than a centrifuge
plant with an equivalent capacity,
and a lot of LIS research has taken
place at universities, which are typically
not safeguarded facilities.
Moreover, the lasers used in LIS
have several dual-use applications.
This was one of the concerns raised
about Silex Systems' operations in
Australia. In response to the November
Greenpeace report, Australia's
defense minister, Robert Hill, acknowledged
that dual-use materials
from Australia might have been "innocently"
exported and used within
an unnamed country's nuclear
weapons program.
Another worry is that a nation can
hone its LIS skills with elements
other than uranium, while developing
a breakout capability and minimizing
the potential triggering of
safeguards. To enrich other elements
requires the same LIS equipment
used to enrich uranium, only tuned
to different laser frequencies. One
such element is ytterbium, which has
few industrial applications. "If they
knew how to enrich ytterbium, then
they could enrich uranium," according
to Eerkens.
March/April 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 17
Export controls
Nonproliferation analysts have dehated
whether current export controls
could better address the risk of
LIS proliferation. At a 1999 science
and security conference at Eudan
University in Shanghai, David
Daniels, then a Harvard graduate
student in physics, concluded, "The
current international system is able
to safeguard a declared LIS facility,
but it is not able to timely detect the
diversion of significant amf)unts of
uranium to a LIS facility." However,
this international system "may prevent
the construction of new plants
through appropriate export controls."
In contrast, Erickson's paper
warned that advanced technologies
could "outflank" export controls in
"nations with moderate-size economies
during the first decades of the
twenty-first century."
To combat these possibilities, Erickson
recommends creating a comprehensive
map of proliferation that
would require "more labor-intensive"
research on the "training, work experience,
and scientific interchange of
nationals of a possible proliferating
nation." The map would also identify
the "list of technical achievements"
required for each LIS method
and "what scientific knowledge or
engineering know-how is needed for
each." Daniels has encouraged a reexamination
of the ability of export
controls to catch clandestine operation
of LIS plants.
Any steps to prevent the spread of
LIS technologies would require a
greater technical understanding than is
used in establishing conventional export
controls. Eirst, officials should determine
what aspects of LIS can mask
as civilian research and assess where
such research is taking or may take
place. While the IAEA's Additional
Protocol requires nations to declare
LIS facilities, identifying the nascent
phases of LIS research that could eventually
be applied to uranium enrichment
presents another challenge.
The nonproliferation regime also
should guard against an A. Q. Khanlike
theft of LIS uranium enrichment
technology. In the 1970s while working
for the uranium enrichment consortium
URENCO, Khan, a Pakistani
metallurgist, stole designs for
uranium centrifuges. He used this
purloined knowledge to huild Pakistan's
centrifuge enrichment plants,
which supplied the highly enriched
uranium for Pakistan's nuclear
weapons. He also distributed the designs
and centrifuge components
through a nuclear black market.
Today, using US for bomb-scale uranium
enrichment appears out of potential
proliferators' reach, hut the
further spread of LIS expertise and
technologies increases the risk that
someday another Khan will peddle
these tools to the highest bidder. ^
Jack Boureston is managing director
and senior research analyst at FirstWatch
International, a private weapons
of mass destruction proliferation
research group in Monterey, California.
Charles D. Ferguson is a science
and technology fellow at the Council
on foreign Relations.
I D A H O
Nuclear comes home to roost
By Jonas Siegel
S
iNci: 1949, THE ENERGY DHpartment,
other federal agencies,
and the navy have built
and tested .52 nuclear research
reactors in the high
desert plains of southeastern
Idaho; a few still operate today.
Number 53 might be built at the new
Idaho National Laboratory (INL), if
the Energy Department has its way.
INL, formed on Eebruary 1, is a
consolidation of the Idaho National
Engineering and Environmental Laboratory
(INEEL) and Argonne National
Laboratory-West. "Our goal,
within this decade, is to have this lab
emerge as one of the premier applied
research and nuclear engineering institutions
in the world," then-Energy
Secretary Spencer Abraham said in
April 2003.
The renewed emphasis on nuclear
energy research is one aspect of Energy's
expanding Idaho operations.
The laboratory will also continue
playing a greater role in homeland
security-related research, and may
eventually house al! of Energy's work
on plutonium-decay power generators
for spacecraft, including a new
plutonium 238 processing facility.
But INL faces doubts about its new
missions, as well as questions and
criticisms from Idahoans.
Investing in nuclear enerqy
In 2002, the United States and 10
other members of the Generation IV
18 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March/Apri! 2005
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