As the Biden administration pushes advanced nuclear reactors as a weapon against global warming, including export of US technology, the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) is warning that the Department of Energy should eschew export of sodium-cooled, fast breeder reactors.
In a Nov. 29 letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Henry Sokolski, NPEC executive director writes, “If they are successful in becoming an export product—which the Department of Energy and the companies designing them advertise as a desirable goal—they will provide easy access around the world to nuclear weapons-grade plutonium.”
President Gerald Ford in 1976 concluded that the U.S. should not advance this technology until the nuclear proliferation consequences are eliminated. That has been US policy ever since. Sokolski asks, “Does anyone think we are anywhere near meeting this test and that we should now reverse that policy? The short answer is no.”
The desire to export fast reactor technology and the weapons-grade plutonium that results “is in direct conflict with the Pentagon’s trepidation about these reactors’ utility as nuclear weapons material production plants. In specific, Pentagon’s latest China military power report, released earlier this month, spotlighted two Chinese fast reactors and their associated reprocessing plants under construction and their role in helping to supply China with the weapons plutonium Beijing needs to acquire more than 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030,” the letter says.
Sokolski also cites Senate Armed Services testimony earlier this year where Adm. Charles Richard, head of the US Strategic Command, said, “With a fast breeder reactor, you now have a very large source of weapons grade plutonium available to you, that will change the upper bounds of what China could choose to do if they wanted to, in terms of further expansion of their nuclear capabilities.”
Sokolski said that “our government’s support for advanced reactors should not be extended to fast reactors, much less their export, which would make it much easier for those so inclined to manufacture nuclear weapons. At a minimum, our government should not push their export unless and until it can certify that it can technically assure timely warning of possible nuclear military diversions.”
Sokolski teaches graduate-level classes on nuclear policy at the University of Utah and the Institute of World Politics. He is also a Senior Fellow for Nuclear Security Studies at the University of California at San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
He has worked in the Pentagon as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy, as a consultant to the National Intelligence Council, as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Senior Advisory Group, and as a Senate military and legislative aide.
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)