Nuclear Fuel Leasing, Recycling and proliferation: Modeling a Global View
On February 11, 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush, in a speech to the National Defense University stated: ''The world must create a safe, orderly system to field civilian nuclear plants without adding to the danger of weapons proliferation. The world's leading nuclear exporters should ensure that states have reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors, so long as those states renounce enrichment and reprocessing. Enrichment and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.'' This concept would require nations to choose one of two paths for civilian nuclear development: those that only have reactors and those that contain one or more elements of the nuclear fuel cycle, including recycling. ''Fuel cycle'' states would enrich uranium, manufacture and lease fuel to ''reactor'' states and receive the reactor states' spent fuel. All parties would accede to stringent security and safeguard standards, embedded within a newly invigorated international regime. Reactor states would be relieved of the financial, environmental (and political) burden of enriching and manufacturing fuel and dealing with spent fuel. Fuel cycle states would potentially earn money on leasing the fuel and perhaps on sales of reactors to the reactor states. Such a leasing concept is especially interesting in scenarios which envision growth in nuclear power, and an important consideration for such a nuclear growth regime is the role of recycling of civilian spent fuel. Recycling holds promise for improved management of spent fuel and efficient utilization of resources, but continues to raise the specter of a world with uncontrolled nuclear weapons proliferation. If done effectively, a fuel-leasing concept could help create a political and economic foundation for significant growth of clean, carbon-free nuclear power while providing a mechanism for significant international cooperation to reduce proliferation concern. This would extend the spirit of President Eisenhower's ''Atoms for Peace'' vision toward solving some of the major international problems of the 21st Century--global climate change and the creation of a peaceful and stable world political regime. Needless to say, this is a very complex problem, encompassing all of the issues involved in nuclear power--economics, proliferation, waste management and safety--and a myriad of public and diplomatic policy issues as well. To gain a better understanding of the leasing concept we have built an interactive system dynamics model, Multinuke, using STELLA software. (STELLA is particularly useful for this type of analysis because of its capability to create user-friendly interfaces.) Multinuke simulates two separate nuclear entities and possible interactions between them, and therefore can be used to investigate the fuel-leasing concept. In this paper we will apply the results of Multinuke to a few simplified scenarios to help understand how fuel leasing might affect the future global growth of nuclear power, proliferation concern and spent fuel management.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 15009811
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-TR-203085; TRN: US0406627
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 10 Mar 2004
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE WASTES, AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
29 ENERGY PLANNING
POLICY AND ECONOMY
45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
ATOMS
CLIMATES
FUEL CYCLE
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
LEASING
NATIONAL DEFENSE
NUCLEAR ENERGY
NUCLEAR FUELS
NUCLEAR POWER
PROLIFERATION
RECYCLING
REPROCESSING
SPENT FUELS
URANIUM
WASTE MANAGEMENT