 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Monitoring Stockpiles
IAEA Monitoring of Excess Nuclear Material
Status
![[ click here for larger photo ]](../../../images/cnwmphoto_trilat1_sm.jpg) Monitoring excess plutonium without revealing classified information. |
For nearly a decade, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) has been monitoring some highly enriched uranium
(HEU) and plutonium which the United States had declared excess
to its military needs. Since 1996, under the Trilateral Initiative,
U.S., Russian, and IAEA experts have been working to develop
a new regime to permit the IAEA to verify permanent removals
of nuclear material from the military stockpiles of the weapons
states (including material in classified forms), as part of
verifying ongoing nuclear arms reductions. In September 2002,
the parties announced that the task of the Trilateral Initiative
had been "fulfilled," in the sense that technical,
legal, and financial approaches that would allow the IAEA
to conduct such verification had been developed and demonstrated.
But a range of disagreements continues to complicate actually
placing nuclear material under these trilateral arrangements. With the end of the Cold War, it became clear that the United States and Russia had far more nuclear weapons and far more nuclear material than they needed for any conceivable military requirement. In September 1993, President Clinton announced that the United States would make weapons-usable nuclear material that was excess to its military needs eligible for IAEA safeguards to assure the world that these materials would never again be used for nuclear weapons.[1] |
At the Moscow Nuclear Safety and Security Summit in April, 1996, the assembled leaders of what was then the Group of Seven (G-7) industrialized democracies and Russia agreed that excess fissile material should be placed under international safeguards "as soon as it is practicable to do so."[2] On that occasion, Russian President Yeltsin made a commitment to place the storage facility being built at Mayak, intended to hold some 50 tons of plutonium (and potentially an even larger amount of HEU) under IAEA safeguards.[3] The effort to remove nuclear material from weapons programs and place it under international verification has come to be seen as a key part of the nuclear weapon states' fulfilling their obligation under Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to negotiate in good faith toward nuclear disarmament.[4]
Since then, the effort to place excess nuclear material under IAEA verification has proceeded on two tracks monitoring under existing "voluntary offer" agreements with the IAEA, and the development of a new monitoring approach and legal regime, under the U.S.-Russia-IAEA "Trilateral Initiative," launched in September 1996 following Yeltsin's statement.
IAEA monitoring of U.S. excess material under the U.S. voluntary offer agreement. Following up on President Clinton's 1993 statement, the United States has made some excess nuclear material that was in unclassified forms eligible for traditional IAEA monitoring under its voluntary offer agreement with the IAEA an agreement that allows the United States to designate the facilities and materials that are eligible for IAEA inspection. The United States has made a political commitment that this material, once made eligible for IAEA safeguards, will never be removed from safeguards and returned to weapons though it has reserved the right to remove the material from safeguards for non-explosive military uses, such as naval reactor fuel. Currently, 10 tons of HEU at the Y-12 site and 2 tons plutonium at Hanford and Savannah River are under IAEA safeguards.[5] In addition, the IAEA conducted a verification "experiment" beginning in 1997 that confirmed the blend-down of the last 3.5 tons of 14.2 tons of HEU that was blended down at the Portsmouth gaseous diffusion enrichment plant in 1995-1998.[6] Subsequent downblending of HEU has been taking place at BWXT, in Lynchburg, Virginia, and this operation has been safeguarded by the IAEA. As of September 2002, DOE had delivered 21.8 metric tons of HEU to BWXT for downblending.[7] In addition, the IAEA verified the downblending of the nearly 600 kilograms of HEU brought to the United States in Project Sapphire in 1994.
International monitoring of excess material in the United Kingdom. In 1998, following a strategic review, the British government announced that 4.4 metric tons of its plutonium (including 0.3 tons of weapon-grade plutonium) was excess to its military needs, and would be made available for safeguards.[8] Britain did not declare any of its HEU to be excess, reserving it all for naval fuel. Britain made the facilities where the 4.4 tons of excess plutonium was stored eligible for IAEA safeguards, but the IAEA did not have the resources to implement safeguards on this material. EURATOM, however, the regional European safeguards agency, has been implementing safeguards over this excess material.[9]
Trilateral initiative. In September 1996, the United States, Russia, and the IAEA launched the Trilateral Initiative, whose purpose was to develop a new verification regime for IAEA monitoring of excess materials removed from weapons programs. Continuing to rely only on existing voluntary offer agreements was considered unsatisfactory, as:
- Placing material under the voluntary offer agreements did not represent a permanent disarmament commitment, since those agreements permit the weapon states to remove material from safeguards at any time;
- The existing agreements called for implementation of traditional IAEA safeguards measures, which could not be applied to material in classified forms without revealing proliferation-sensitive information and hence, there could be years or decades of delay in establishing international monitoring, pending the conversion of the material to unclassified forms; and
- IAEA safeguards under the voluntary offer agreements are only implemented when sufficient resources are available (which is rarely the case), an arrangement not suitable for verifying a permanent disarmament obligation.[10]
Fundamentally, the IAEA safeguards system is about verifying commitments by non-nuclear-weapon states not to divert nuclear material for even a single bomb, while verification of excess material in the weapon states focuses on enough material for thousands of nuclear weapons, in a context in which hundreds or thousands of other nuclear weapons remain verification of nuclear arms reductions, rather than verification of nonproliferation. For this very different verification objective, it was agreed that a different verification approach was needed and hence the IAEA never refers to monitoring under the Trilateral Initiative as "safeguards," but as "verification."
Over the six years of work on the Trilateral Initiative, the parties developed a draft legal agreement that would provide the framework for an irrevocable commitment to IAEA verification of material placed under the agreement, and technical approaches that would allow the IAEA to confirm that classified materials placed under verification had certain agreed attributes, without revealing classified information. The IAEA staff also developed approaches to financing the costs of such monitoring arrangements, though detailed discussions of financing were put off until the scope and approach for the verification regime were fully resolved. As in the case of transparency for the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility, the technical measures developed involved machines that would take measurements of certain agreed attributes the material is made of plutonium with at least a certain fraction of Pu-239, it has at least a certain mass, and so on and provide only a "yes" or "no" answer, protecting the classified information in the detailed measurement. The measurements would be made with neutron multiplicity counters integrated with a high-resolution gamma ray spectrometry system. This approach was demonstrated on an actual U.S. plutonium weapon component, with U.S. and Russian experts present, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in August 2000.[11] It was expected that similar measures would eventually be developed for HEU in classified forms.
This work can be seen as an historic first step the first development of a concrete approach to international verification of nuclear disarmament. This development has been successful: as IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei noted to the IAEA General Conference in September 2002, the Trilateral Initiative's "preparatory work" is now "largely concluded," and the parties "have agreed that the technical solutions developed under that initiative could allow the Agency to verify any form of fissile material without disclosing sensitive information." The participants have also made "preliminary estimates of verification costs" and developed a "legal framework for this verification."[12] As nuclear disarmament proceeds in the future, the Trilateral Initiative may come to be seen as a seminal effort. But it will be a much more useful precedent for the future if it is actually implemented and prospects for that do not appear bright at present.
In late 2001, contracts were being let for equipment to be used for verification at specific facilities, and IAEA experts were optimistic that Russia and the United States would soon agree on the specific materials to be placed under Trilateral Initiative verification, and actual implementation would soon begin.[13] But by 2002, the Trilateral Initiative was running up against several unresolved disagreements between the parties:[14]
- What material? Originally, the concept was, as President Yeltsin had announced, that Russia would put the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility and all the material to be stored there under the Trilateral Initiative verification arrangements. Russian agreement to do this was always dependent, however, on a U.S. decision to put material of similar quantity and quality under IAEA monitoring. To date, despite having been the first to announce that it would put excess materials under IAEA verification, and despite the success in developing and demonstrating approaches that would make it possible for the IAEA to verify material in classified forms without revealing classified information, the United States has declined to put any of its excess plutonium in classified forms (the majority of its weapon-grade excess plutonium) under IAEA monitoring. Indeed, by late 2001, the only U.S. facility being publicly mentioned as a likely site for the Trilateral Initiative was an HEU down-blending site in Lynchburg, where no separated plutonium was present.[15]
- What duration? From the beginning, the IAEA has insisted that placement of weapons material under its monitoring must be an irrevocable disarmament commitment the IAEA should not simply be babysitting reserve material that will soon be returned to weapons. That would require that the IAEA be able to continue monitoring the material after it was removed from storage, to ensure that it was converted to civilian fuel and not returned to weapons. The IAEA argued that the legal regime should allow it to continue monitoring the material until it had been completely consumed, and met the standard IAEA criteria for "termination of safeguards" that is, until the material was practically irrecoverable for use in weapons (such as the traces of plutonium that remain in high-level waste from reprocessing, for example). Since Russia planned on using its excess plutonium and HEU as fuel for nuclear reactors, and then on eventually reprocessing and recycling this material as more fuel, accepting this IAEA approach would eventually mean that virtually the entire Russian civilian nuclear reactor and fuel cycle infrastructure would be under IAEA verification, which Russia was unwilling to accept. Russia proposed instead that the monitoring end once the material had been converted into fuel and inserted into a reactor but no agreement on this fundamental philosophical point has been reached.
- Who pays? Another key issue is who would pay for the costs of implementing Trilateral Initiative verification, which would likely run into millions of dollars a year. One option, supported by some non-nuclear-weapon states, would be for the weapon states being verified to pay the costs more or less on the "polluter pays" principle. If that option were adopted, it is unlikely that Russia would be willing to pay which would either prevent inspections or require some arrangements for some other country to volunteer to pay Russia's share. The IAEA staff has argued, with some justification, that verifying disarmament was a benefit to all states, and that therefore a new fund should be established that all IAEA member states would pay into on the basis of mandatory assessments which the staff saw as necessary for funding mandatory verification of a disarmament obligation in much the same way that IAEA safeguards are paid for. But it has never been clear that the IAEA member states would accept such an approach and the issue of whether Russia would cover its own substantial costs of hosting IAEA inspections, or would receive some assistance to defray that cost, has also not been fully addressed. For now, these issues have been put off until the United States and Russia come closer to agreement on what materials will be placed under trilateral verification, with what duration, beginning when.
With the conclusion of the U.S.-Russian Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) in 2000, which calls for each side to permit IAEA verification of the plutonium covered by that accord from the point where weapons plutonium for disposition has been blended with other plutonium, or when it arrives at a fuel fabrication or immobilization facility (whichever comes first), some participants envisioned that a key focus of the Trilateral Initiative would shift from verifying material in storage to verifying disposition of excess plutonium.[16] U.S. managers of the plutonium disposition effort, however, have been reluctant to move forward on IAEA verification until arrangements for bilateral verification (also called for under the PMDA) have been agreed. As of early 2003, the prospects for moving toward actually placing material under the trilateral arrangements remained uncertain. As one unnamed participant remarked to a reporter after the September 2002 discussions: ''We've had 90 meetings so far and right now we're at the point of agreeing that what we have done so far has been a success, but we're not going any further."[17]
Budget
See
budget table
To date, the United States has generally paid the costs of IAEA monitoring of excess materials in the United States. The United States has also budgeted a small amount of money for supporting the Trilateral Initiative technical work and negotiations. These costs are estimated to be in the range of $1.5 million per year,[18] paid from the Department of Energy's International Safeguards budget.
Key Issues and Recommendations
Uncertain prospects for near-term implementation. As just described, if current disputes remain unresolved, there is little prospect that the verification arrangements developed in the Trilateral Initiative will actually be implemented for any substantial amount of nuclear material in the near term.
- Recommendation: The United States, working with Russia, should take the lead in breaking the deadlocks described above and moving toward actual implementation of the Trilateral Initiative. First, the United States should offer to place a substantial quantity of its own excess plutonium perhaps including a portion of the plutonium in "pits" stored in bunkers at the Pantex weapons dismantlement plant under Trilateral Initiative verification, on condition that Russia agree to place plutonium at Mayak and perhaps elsewhere under these verification arrangements. Second, the United States should take the lead in working out a compromise on the issue of how long the IAEA should continue to monitor the nuclear material placed under such arrangements: given that all of the weapon states already have large quantities of plutonium in spent fuel that is not subject to any international verification, it would seem reasonable for the Trilateral Initiative verification to end once the material has been transformed into spent fuel at least until such time as other spent fuel in nuclear weapon states has been brought under IAEA verification. Third, the United States and Russia should work to convince other states to agree to the proposal for a new fund to pay for disarmament verification, with mandatory assessments to that fund. Fourth, the United States should work with Russia to resolve the bilateral monitoring issues under the PMDA and give the IAEA the substantial monitoring role envisioned in that agreement.
Modest contribution to reducing the risk of nuclear theft. In the discussions of the Trilateral Initiative that occurred days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham noted that the need to prevent nuclear terrorism might make the Trilateral Initiative more important than ever.[19] But if Trilateral Initiative verification involved only monitoring visits every few weeks or months, with no monitoring in between, its contribution to real-time detection or prevention of nuclear theft would be modest. (For a discussion of how monitoring measures can make indirect contributions to that goal, see Monitoring Stockpiles and Reductions.) By contrast, if such monitoring visits were combined with real-time surveillance by security cameras, then both the facility management and the international inspectorate would have the opportunity to observe any unauthorized removal of nuclear material as it occurred and potentially intervene to stop it.
- Recommendation: Real-time remote monitoring should be incorporated into the Trilateral Initiative verification arrangements.
Potential value of internationalized control of storage facilities for excess materials. A number of analysts have argued that excess fissile materials should not remain under national control, with international verification, but should be placed under fully international control. Even if the storage site remained the same, it would be controlled by an international organization such as the IAEA (and indeed, the IAEA Charter envisions such a role for the agency, though it has never been implemented). Internationalized control would raise the political barrier to ever removing the material from the control regime even higher and, in some variations, might possible international participation in providing effective security for the material as well.[20] If successful, such an international control approach could be extended from excess weapons plutonium to include excess weapons HEU and large stockpiles of civilian plutonium now under purely national controls as well.
- Recommendation: The United States should explore with Russia, the IAEA, and other interested parties the possible benefits of internationalized control over storage facilities for nuclear material removed from defense programs, and for civilian weapons-usable nuclear material as well. If the obstacles to establishing such a regime do not appear insurmountable, and the benefits appear large, the United States should lead the way in building international support for such an effort and committing to place a large quantity of its own excess material within the regime.
Need for a broader approach to international verification of nuclear arms reductions. Ultimately, if the international community is to have confidence that the nuclear weapon states really are reducing their nuclear weapons stockpiles to very low levels, a much broader set of arrangements for international (not just bilateral) verification will be necessary not only confirming that certain specified amounts of nuclear material are under monitoring, but also how many warheads and how much nuclear material remain. Moreover, such arrangements would ultimately have to include all of the major nuclear weapon states, not just the United States and Russia.
- Recommendation: The United States, Russia, and the IAEA should begin working with the other nuclear weapon states and key non-weapon states to outline what a future, broader regime of international verification of nuclear arms reductions might look like, and what purposes it could serve.
Links
| Key Resources | |
 |
Thomas Shea, Report on the
Trilateral Initiative: IAEA Verification of Weapon-Origin
Fissile Material in the Russian Federation and the
United States, IAEA Bulletin 43, no. 4 (Fall/Winter
2001). Download 69K PDF |
| Article by the head of the
Trilateral Initiative Office in the IAEA Department
of Safeguards on the accomplishments to date and the
future steps foreseen under the Trilateral Initiative. |
|
|
Los Alamos Applied Monitoring Technology Laboratory, Electronic Library |
| The Applied Monitoring Technology Laboratory has a substantial number of publications related to various aspects of IAEA monitoring of excess nuclear material removed from military programs. | |
|
"Appendix 4: Efforts
to Place Excess Military Fissile Materials Under International
Controls," from David Albright and Kevin O'Neill,
eds., The Challenges of Fissile Material Control (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Science and International
Security, 1999). Download 18K PDF |
| Provides a concise table of the quantities and forms of U.S. excess fissile material either under IAEA safeguards, eligible for safeguards that were not yet being implemented, or planned to be made eligible in the future, as of July 30, 1998. Changes since then have been comparatively modest. | |
|
Dirk Schriefer and Thomas Shea, "IAEA Perspectives on Excess Materials," in Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (Northbrook, Ill.: INMM, 1999) Download 69K PDF |
| This paper provides a useful overview of IAEA monitoring of excess material, both monitoring under voluntary offer agreements and development of the Trilateral Initiative, as of 1999.. | |
|
Amy Whitworth et al., "Lessons
Learned in the Implementation of IAEA Safeguards on
Excess Fissile Material," in Proceedings of
the 38th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear
Materials Management (Northbrook, Ill.: INMM, 1997). Download 323K PDF |
| This paper summarizes the steps taken to make U.S. materials available for IAEA safeguards in the early years of the effort. | |
 |
Harold D. Bengelsdorf and Fred McGoldrick, "International Custody of Excess Plutonium," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2002. |
| This paper provides a useful brief summary of the concept of placing excess nuclear material under international control, and its possible benefits. | |
| Agreements and Documents | |
|
International Atomic Energy Agency, "IAEA Verification of Weapon-Origin Fissile Material in the Russian Federation and the United States," PR 2002/13, 46th IAEA General Conference, Vienna, Austria, September 16, 2002. |
| In this statement, the parties declare that the task of the trilateral initiative "has been fulfilled," demonstrating "practical approaches for IAEA verification of weapon-origin fissile material designated as released from defence programmes in classified forms or at certain sensitive facilities," including examination of the " technical, legal and financial issues associated with such verification." Previous joint statements summarizing progress in the trilateral discussions were issued in 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, and 1996, when the initiative was launched. | |
|
Nuclear Safety & Security Summit |
| Provides the full text of all the documents issued at the Moscow Nuclear Safety and Security Summit in April, 1996, including the summit call for excess nuclear material removed from military programs to be placed under IAEA verification "as soon as it is practicable to do so." | |
| FOOTNOTES | |
| [1] | Office of the Press Secretary, "Fact Sheet: Nonproliferation and Export Control Policy" (Washington, D.C.: The White House, September 27, 1993). |
| [2] | For the complete text of all the documents from the Moscow Nuclear Safety and Security Summit, see Nuclear Safety & Security Summit. |
| [3] | Quoted in Dirk Schriefer and Thomas Shea, "IAEA Perspectives on Excess Materials," in Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (Northbrook, Ill.: INMM, 1999). |
| [4] | The 2000 NPT Review Conference, for example, called on the participants to "complete and implement the Trilateral Initiative." See "2000 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons: Final Document," May 24, 2000. Similarly, the statement of principles and objectives for nonproliferation and disarmament adopted when the NPT was indefinitely extended in 1995 called on material removed from military programs to be placed under IAEA safeguards as soon as practicable. |
| [5] | The Y-12 facility was made eligible for safeguards in September 1994, the safeguarded area at Hanford was made eligible in November 1994, and the safeguarded area at Rocky Flats was added in December 1995; the safeguarded material at Rocky Flats was moved to Savannah River in 2002, and the safeguards went with it. For a discussion of the earlier steps, see, for example, Schriefer and Shea, "IAEA Perspectives on Excess Materials," op. cit.; supplemented by interview with DOE official, February 2003. |
| [6] | For the 3.5 ton figure, see Kevin O'Neill, "Status Report on Fissile Materials: Paths to Deep Reductions and Nuclear Disarmament," in David Albright and Kevin O'Neill, eds., The Challenges of Fissile Material Control (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Science and International Security, 1999); for the 14.2 ton figure, see U.S. Enrichment Corporation, "Status Report: USEC-DOE Megatons-to-Megawatts Program," last updated September 30, 2002. Earlier reports, including O'Neill's, indicated that 13 tons of HEU had been downblended during this operation, but the figure has since been updated. This was dubbed an "experiment," because IAEA experts concluded that given the unique process used, traditional IAEA inspection methods for enrichment plants could not meet IAEA verification goals. See discussion in Schriefer and Shea, "IAEA Perspectives on Excess Materials," op. cit. |
| [7] | USEC, "Status Report: USEC-DOE Megatons-to-Megawatts Program," op. cit. |
| [8] | Along with the 4.4 tons of excess plutonium, the UK also declared over 9,000 tons of natural or low-enriched uranium that had been held in military stocks for fueling military production reactors excess to its military needs. These are from declared total stockpiles outside of safeguards of 7.6 tonnes of plutonium, 21.9 tonnes of HEU, and 15,000 tons of natural and low-enriched uranium. All of the HEU is to be held in military stockpiles for use either as weapons or as naval fuel. See Communication Received from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: United Kingdom Fissile Material Transparency, Safeguards, and Irreversibility Initiatives, INFCIRC/570, Vienna, Austria: IAEA, September 21, 1998. |
| [9] | See discussion in O'Neill, "Status Report on Fissile Materials: Paths to Deep Reductions and Nuclear Disarmament,"op. cit., and in Schriefer and Shea, "IAEA Perspectives on Excess Materials," op. cit. |
| [10] | See, for example, discussion in Thomas Shea, "Report on the Trilateral Initiative: IAEA Verification of Weapon-Origin Fissile Material in the Russian Federation and the United States," IAEA Bulletin 43, no. 4 (Fall/Winter 2001); also Thomas Shea et al., "The Trilateral Initiative: IAEA Verification of Weapon-Origin and Other Fissile Material Released From Defense Programs," in Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (Northbrook, Ill.: INMM, 2001). |
| [11] | For detailed accounts of the demonstration (including an overview that provides an excellent introduction to the concepts of measuring unclassified attributes of classified materials, information barriers, and authentication), see Los Alamos National Laboratory, "Fissile Material Transparency Technology Demonstration," last updated March 27, 2001. |
| [12] | Mohammed ElBaradei, "Statement to the Forty-Sixth of the IAEA General Conference," September 16, 2002. |
| [13] | See Shea, "Report on the Trilateral Initiative," op. cit. |
| [14] | See Mark Hibbs, "Trilateral Negotiations in Vienna Stymied Over Scope, Safeguards," Nucleonics Week, September 19, 2002. Also interviews with IAEA and Department of Energy participants. |
| [15] | See Shea, "Report on the Trilateral Initiative," op. cit. |
| [16] | See, for example, Shea et al., "The Trilateral Initiative," op. cit. |
| [17] | Quoted in Hibbs, "Trilateral Negotiations in Vienna Stymied Over Scope, Safeguards," op. cit. |
| [18] | See William Hoehn, "Observations on the President's Fiscal Year 2004 Budget Request for Nonproliferation Programs in Russia and the Former Soviet Union," (Washington, D.C.: Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, February 11, 2003), as well as similar analyses for previous years. |
| [19] | Cited in Shea, "Report on the Trilateral Initiative," op. cit. |
| [20] | See, most recently, Harold D. Bengelsdorf and Fred McGoldrick, "International Custody of Excess Plutonium," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March/April 2002). For a different variant of the idea, in which both the United States and Russia would place their excess plutonium in internationally controlled "plutonium banks," and would receive a financial credit from the international community for each kilogram of plutonium deposited (to create an incentive to deposit large quantities of material in the internationally controlled facility), see Ashton B. Carter and Owen Cot, "Disposition of Fissile Materials," in Graham T. Allison, Ashton B. Carter, Steven E. Miller, and Philip Zelikow, eds., Cooperative Denuclearization: From Pledges to Deeds, CSIA Studies in International Security No. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, January 1993). Such "international plutonium storage" regimes have been discussed for decades, in one form or another, but have never reached fruition. |
Written by Matthew Bunn. Last updated by Matthew Bunn on March 10, 2003.
The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.