U.S. Energy Plan Gains International Support

By Greg Webb
Global Security Newswire

VIENNA — Eleven nations yesterday joined a U.S.-led initiative to promote the use of nuclear power internationally, a plan that is also intended to discourage developing nations from building their own nuclear fuel facilities that could be used to produce weapon materials (see GSN, June 27).

Announced last year, the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership initially involved the United States, China, France, Japan and Russia.  Yesterday, the five were joined by Australia, Bulgaria, Ghana, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Ukraine.

Senior officials from all 16 nations yesterday signed a statement of principles outlining the partnership’s goals, chiefly to “expand nuclear power to help meet growing energy demand in a sustainable manner and in a way that provides for safe operations on nuclear power plants and management of wastes.”

The principles also include a nonproliferation component in striving to support the use of “facilities that do not separate pure plutonium, with a long-term goal of ceasing separation of plutonium and eventually eliminating stocks of separated civilian plutonium.”

The program would still seek to recycle fissile materials created as uranium fissions in nuclear reactors, but would try to do so in a way to prevent plutonium from being easily separated and diverted to nuclear weapons programs (see GSN, July 24).

The partnership has been partly spurred by the nuclear crisis surrounding Iran, which “has pursued military programs under the cover of civilian ones,” U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said today in an address to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s annual meeting.

Several officials described the partnership as a “viable alternative” to nations that might be considering developing their domestic nuclear fuel production sites.

IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei yesterday strongly endorsed the partnership.

“We need energy as an engine for development,” he told the partnership members yesterday.  “Without development, there is misery, there is conflict, and there is war.”

The demand for energy, Bodman said today, is growing rapidly.

“In just 25 years, global energy consumption is expected to rise by over 50 percent,” he said.  “At present, nuclear power is the only mature technology that can supply large amounts of emissions-free base load power to help us meet the expected growth in energy demand.”

So far, the partnership has made all of its decisions by consensus, a key feature of its success, said one U.S. official.

Sticking to that process could cause problems in the future, however, as the group grows and faces potentially controversial issues.

The United States, for example, has not ruled out the possibility that energy recipients would not be required to be members of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or to have IAEA safeguards over all their nuclear facilities, Bodman said yesterday. 

Those conditions had been mainstays of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policies until the Bush administration struck a nuclear trade deal with India (see GSN, Sept. 13).

Asked at a press conference yesterday about what nonproliferation rules might apply to partnership agreements, Bodman said, “We have not reached any firm conclusions.  I don’t want to speak in a dictatorial fashion in any way of responding.  This is something that we decide by consensus within this partnership.”

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