White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Richardson Says We Should Honor Russia Plutonium Deal

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By Llewellyn King

Bill Richardson could teach Donald Trump something about the art of the deal.

He has done a lot of them. Richardson also wrote a book about the art of the deal, the big deal, entitled “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark; Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.”

In a towering life of public service (U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, secretary of Energy, New Mexico governor, and peripatetic hostage negotiator), Richardson confronted Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, two of North Korea’s dictators, and an assortment of international thugs. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The essence of Richardson’s deal-making was that the commitment must be kept by both parties.

At present Richardson sees one of his deals in jeopardy, and he was in Washington last week to raise the alarm, meeting privately with former colleagues and appearing at a press conference at the National Press Club.

The deal in jeopardy involves a commitment he made, when he was secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, with the Russians to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, the long-lived ingredient in nuclear weapons. There are 34 metric tons of the stuff that the United States is bound, by treaty with Russia, to dispose by integrating it into nuclear fuel and burning it in civilian power plants. This is known as mixed oxide fuel or MOX.

But the Obama administration wants to end the program, before a fleck of plutonium has been processed for fuel. It is seeking to pull the plug on the construction of the facility at a Department of Energy site on the Savannah River in South Carolina, which is two-thirds complete and has already cost over $4 billion.

The administration is now looking not at the completion cost, but at the lifetime cost of the facility. And it is saying that it is too high; although that could have been calculated years ago.

The deal was signed by Vice President Al Gore with Russia back in 2000. The Russians, for their part, are burning their surplus plutonium in fast reactors, which we do not have in operation.

The back story may be not about lifetime cost, but about the deployment of federal dollars in the very near future. Nuclear industry insiders believe that the Department of Energy, which makes nuclear weapons and stockpiles them, wants to divert all available resources to its weapons refurbishment program and, in argot of the moment, kick the plutonium can down the road. New funds are harder to come by than re-purposing extant ones.

The department is floating the idea that the plutonium should be “down-blended,” meaning mixed with some secret ingredient that the department believes will render it safe for all time, and stored in a troubled existing facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

“I don’t believe this is a good course of action.” Richardson told reporters at the press club event. He said the WIPP facility was designed for low-level waste … there would be a lot of opposition in New Mexico.” He was involved in that project, too, when he was in government.

On sanctity of treaties, Richardson said, “I think that [closing down the MOX facility] would be a grave mistake across the board.”

Richardson said that he had negotiated with the Russians as U.N. ambassador and as Energy secretary. In the matter of plutonium disposal, he said the Russians have kept their side of the deal. There was plenty of tension over Ukraine and Syria, and “we don’t need any more tension.” He said, “This is one potential area of cooperation that should not be discarded, and it would be, should the MOX facility be discarded.”

If the MOX facility is shuttered, it will be one of many nuclear facilities across the country, paid for by taxpayers, which have been abandoned because of other priorities or political agendas. The price is high in enthusiasm, creativity and commitment from the workforce at facilities, like the MOX one.

The dollars spent have no legacy except a sad, new kind of national monument: structures that have been left forlorn and incomplete as politics have zigged and zagged. These abandoned structures range from the experimental Fast Flux Test Facility in Hanford, Wash. to the Integrated Fast Reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho to the sad, $18-billion Yucca Mountain facility sitting unused in Nevada. There are many more.

As Richardson might tell, in a long life in public service, you have to defend the deal long after it was signed, sealed and delivered. Not so, perhaps, in real estate transactions. — For InsideSources.com

 


U.S. Loves Engineers, Treats Them Badly

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We need more engineers. Go forth and study engineering for the future of the nation. Math and engineering are the keys to maintaining our place in the world and keeping the Chinese, and a few others, at bay.

That is the urging of our political class, whether they are appointed public officials or elected politicians; or whether they are members of the thinking and writing class. Taken collectively, they might be called “the exhortationists.”

But there is a problem: We do not treat engineers very nicely — at least not those who are federal employees or contractors. The very politicians who lead in exhorting our young to become engineers are those who treat engineers as disposable workers.

The government starts many projects and finishes few. A change of administration, a shortage of money, or some other excuse and the government shelves the project.

The impact on engineers is devastating. They have often relocated their families to the site of the project and — wham! — it is canceled.

It is not only that this rough treatment has a huge impact on families – and engineers are not that well-paid (median income is $80,000, and petroleum engineers are the highest-paid) – but also the psychological damage is considerable.

Engineering a new project is exciting but also demanding. Men and women throw themselves into what is a giant creative undertaking, eating up years of lives, demanding the most extreme effort. It is shattering when there is a sudden political decision to cancel a project.

To look at a bridge or a locomotive and say, “I built that,” “I made a difference,” is much of the engineer’s reward. Marc Goldsmith, a fourth-generation engineer, who has worked on 16 projects in nuclear power which have been canceled, says that many engineers get so frustrated they leave the profession and go into law or finance, and never face a logarithm again. He says the government treats highly educated engineers like day laborers: expendable.

Goldsmith, a former president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, says the heartbreak of a canceled project to the engineers is terrible and destructive of the can-do engineering culture.

The hundreds of engineers involved in a big engineering project do not do their job just for the money, but for the satisfaction that they solved a problem and made a thing that worked, whether it was a mega-passenger aircraft, a spindly skyscraper or a flood-control gate.

We now live in a world of project ghosts, where public policy (politics) has said “go,” and has said later, with the same passion, “abandon.”

Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, the genius founder of the Lockheed secret division of engineers, dubbed Skunk Works, in Burbank, Calif., told me before he died in 1990 that some of the starts-and-stops and abrupt cancellations of military projects made him sick. The Skunk Works, which brought us such legends as the U-2 and the SR-71, to name a few, was also instructed by the government to eradicate any trace of other projects that were far along. “Not only were they canceled, but they had to be expunged,” he told me.

Nuclear has been especially hard hit by government policy perfidy. In today’s shame roster, Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste repository and the pride of thousands of engineers, was abandoned by the incoming Obama administration in a deal with Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada and Senate majority leader. Good-bye to $15 billion in taxpayer money; good-bye to a nuclear waste option; and goodbye to all that intricate engineering inside a mountain.

Now the administration is taking its policy sledgehammer to another engineering project: one it supported until it didn’t support it anymore. It is trying to end the program to build a plant to blend surplus weapons-grade plutonium with uranium and burn it up in reactors as uranium oxide, or MOX, as it is known.

The contractor – a consortium of Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and Areva, the French firm – says the plant is 67-percent complete and employs 300 engineers, out of a total workforce of some 1,800, at the Department of Energy site near Aiken, S.C. Now this big engineering project, which is another way of dealing with nuclear waste, is in the government’s sights. — For the InsideSources news service

Obama’s Second Blow to a Nuclear Waste Solution

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When the Obama administration came into power, one of its first actions was to end work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. In so doing, it delivered a shuddering blow to the U.S. nuclear industry, trashing the project when it was nearly ready to open. The cost to taxpayers was about $15 billion.

Now the administration is going through the motions to suspend another costly nuclear waste investment when it is about 67 percent complete. Money expended: $4.5 billion. Shutdown cost: $1 billion.

The object of its latest volte face is the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River site in South Carolina. Work started on the facility in 2007, with a 2016 startup envisaged.

But unlike Yucca Mountain, few people outside of the nuclear industry know about the genesis and purpose of the MFFF project.

The project was initiated as a result of a 2000 agreement with the Russians, later amended, in which both countries agreed to dispose of no less than 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium — the transuranic element that is the key component of a modern nuclear weapon, and remains radioactive essentially forever.

The DOE’s plan was for the facility to mix the plutonium with uranium to create a fuel for civil nuclear reactors to produce electricity. This recycling technology, developed in the United States originally, has been used in France since 1995.

The DOE has not yet taken a wrecking ball to the MFFF, but it is taking the first steps toward demolition. On June 25, the DOE issued a press release that the industry read as a precursor to a death warrant. The department announced that it was creating a “Red Team,” headed by Thom Mason, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to review “plutonium disposition options and make recommendations.”

The DOE statement said the team would “assess the MOX [mixed oxide] fuel approach, the downblending and disposal approach, and any other approaches the team deems feasible and cost effective.”

Industry sources say the choice is between the MOX approach and so-called downblending. In that application, the plutonium is not burned up but is spiked and mixed with a modifier that makes it unusable in weapons. Then it would be disposed either in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., or in a new repository, if one is commissioned.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been pushing the downblending option. But it is using numbers that many believe to be extremely speculative. They come from a private consulting firm hired by the DOE, Aerospace Corporation.

The first number is that the life-cycle cost of the MFFF would be $30 billion, while the life-cycle cost for downblending would be only $9 billion. These numbers are contested by the contractor building the facility, a joint venture between the construction firm Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and the French nuclear technology giant Areva. They point out that plutonium has never been downblended and that the WIPP in New Mexico has had its own problems. On Feb. 5, 2014, the plant closed after a salt truck caught fire; there was an unrelated radiological release nine days later. The plant is still closed.

It is believed that Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz favors the MFFF approach as a permanent and scientifically attractive solution, rather than burying the plutonium in New Mexico or elsewhere. However, he may be overruled by the White House and the military chiefs, who know that they are going to have to raise money on a huge scale for nuclear weapons modernization, in light of the deteriorated relationship with Russia and China’s continuing military buildup.

If the MFFF is canceled, it will join a long list of nuclear projects that the government has ordered up and canceled later, often with a huge waste of public money. Another negative is the wastage of engineering talent. Families move to sites, buy houses and send their children to local schools. Then come the pink slips and years of demanding engineering effort are nixed by policy, politics and general incoherence in Washington.

Nuclear Waste Disposal: The French Connection

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MARCOULE, France – In times to come, sociologists may well puzzle on America’s attitude to nuclear energy. We love our nuclear defense capacity:  its weapons, its submarines, and its aircraft carriers. But we have a kind of national anxiety about the use of the same science, under the most controlled conditions, to make scads of electricity.

Equally perplexing is our duality of opinion about nuclear waste. At every turn, those who dislike nuclear power — often with pathological disaffection — raise the issue of nuclear waste as a reason to give up on nuclear power. However, they do not have the temerity to suggest that we abandon nuclear aircraft carriers, subs, and even weapons.

The point is that whatever happens to the faltering nuclear power program in the United States, it will have nuclear waste aplenty — in addition to the waste which already exists – from the 100 civil reactors now in operation, and all of the military applications.
One step toward reducing nuclear waste is well underway here in France; in fact, it has been part of the country’s nuclear program for 40 years. The French recycle the waste from many of their reactors, along with the waste from six other nations.

Using technology developed decades ago in the United States, the French recycle nuclear fuel cores in a production chain that begins at the La Hague plant in Normandy – the northwestern region known for its orchards and Calvados, an apple brandy — and ends at the Marcoule nuclear site in the southeast, near Avignon, on the banks of the Rhone — famous for the vineyards that produce Cotes-du-Rhone and Chateauneuf-du-Pape wines.

When a nuclear power plant operates, it produces some plutonium, but only burns a small amount of valuable uranium 235, the fissile isotope at the heart of the nuclear power process. The French extract these fissile products at La Hague. Then they ship the plutonium to the Melox plant on the Marcoule site, where they are made into a new fuel for civil reactors. This fuel, which is made from plutonium oxide mixed with uranium oxide, is known as MOX.

The United States was set for world leadership in recycling when President Jimmy Carter pulled the plug; he believed it would lead to nuclear proliferation. France forged ahead, and now China is going to do likewise in a major way.

The United States may not be as enthusiastic about burning plutonium from civil nuclear reactors, but it is, or was, building a state-of-the-art facility near Aiken, S.C., to make MOX, in order to burn up plutonium from disassembled nuclear weapons. In 2000, as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russians, the United States committed to decommission many nuclear warheads, releasing 34 metric tons of plutonium and to making this into MOX to be used in civil reactors. The Russians pledged to burn up in their reactors an equivalent amount of plutonium from weapons once aimed at the United States.

Now the Department of Energy wants to put the 60- percent-complete Aiken facility into a kind of limbo that it describes as “cold standby.” Contractors fear this is the beginning of the end of the project, and that it will neither be revived nor will the supply chain be there to go on with it in the future. The department only requested enough money in the 2015 budget for the cold standby not for the completion of the facility. So far $3.9 billion has been spent, and the project is an important employer in South Carolina.

Congress, mindful that the Obama administration did considerable damage to the concept of safekeeping of used nuclear fuel when it abandoned the $18-billion Yucca Mountain, Nev., waste repository as it was about to open,  wants none of this. Used-fuel cores are piling up at civil reactors, their future uncertain. So Congress, on a bipartisan basis, is seeking to put the funds for the South Carolina facility back into the budget.

The House and Senate have voted to do this. The message is clear: Not again, Mr. President.

No word from the White House.

Here in France, they are hoping that the lessons learned from burning plutonium will evolve into even more elegant solutions to the nuclear waste problem. The one certain thing is that nuclear waste will keep coming, and the administration has so far frustrated efforts to deal with it. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate