Fissile Material Pact Might Be Cheaper Than Thought

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A group of nuclear experts has estimated that the cost of verifying a fissile material cutoff treaty in nuclear-weapon states could be much lower than what the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated in 1995 (see GSN, May 18, 2006).

More than a decade ago, the U.N. nuclear watchdog put the cost of a verification regime at $140 million a year to ensure that nuclear-weapon states were not creating any weapon-usable fissile material.  That figure would be more than $180 million today when adjusted for inflation, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Some were concerned at the time that the additional funds would double or triple the IAEA safeguards budget, but “that may not be the case,” Princeton University international affairs professor Frank von Hippel said yesterday.

The International Panel on Fissile Materials, a Princeton-based study group, believes that the cost might be much less burdensome.

“It looks like that was a great overestimate,” von Hippel, the group’s co-chairman, said during a panel discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In the IAEA estimate, the bulk of the costs would come from inspecting 28 nuclear fuel reprocessing plants worldwide.  However, the treaty would probably need to monitor far fewer sites, according to von Hippel.

The United Kingdom plans to shut its civilian plants in 2112 and all military fuel production plants would be closed under a treaty, he noted.  That would leave just seven:  one in China, two in France, three in India and one Russian plant.

“So that reduces the problem by a factor of four,” von Hippel said.  He also proposed that there would be no need to detect reprocessing within the two-week timeframe used in the IAEA estimate.

Von Hippel proposed 12 one-week, short-notice inspections.  That would reduce costs to roughly $7 million a year, about 8 percent the $90 million needed to inspect reprocessing facilities in 1995, von Hippel said.

Inspecting reprocessing plants is much more time intensive and costly than other forms of safeguards, he said. Von Hippel noted that inspecting a reprocessing facility could take as many as 100 inspector days a year versus just one or two inspector days in a  reactor.

The five nuclear-weapon states designated by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France — are currently observing a self-imposed moratorium on the production of fissile material for weapons.

“It may be that only Pakistan and India are currently making highly enriched uranium for weapons,” said panelist Zia Mian, a Princeton research scientist with the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

The Bush administration is opposed to a verifiable treaty, concluding in 2004 that verification of a treaty was not a realistic or achievable goal.

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