THE U.S. HIGHLY ENRICHED URANIUM DECLARATION: TRANSPARENCY DEFERRED BUT NOT DENIED

Abstract

In February 2006, the Department of Energy (DOE) released its historical account of U.S. production and disposition of highly enriched uranium (HEU) through 1996. The report was unclassified and had been completed in 2001, but it required five years of petitions and appeals under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) before the Bush administration was forced to release it. According to the report, in 1996 the United States had a stockpile of 741 metric tons (MT) of HEU with an average enrichment of 84 percent. Of that stockpile, 178 MT of HEU with an average enrichment of 62 percent had been declared excess for military purposes. In 2005 and 2006, an additional 70 MT was declared excess and 138 MT was put into a reserve for future use as naval reactor fuel. An estimated 5 MT of HEU was lost due to “normal operating losses,” and there was a residual discrepancy of about 3 MT between the number obtained by subtracting cumulative disposition from cumulative production and the actual 1996 stockpile. This article discusses the value of this information and provides insights about the feasibility of declaring additional U.S. weapons HEU excess and the ultimate limits of nuclear disarmament verification.

Keywords:

• Highly enriched uranium
• secrecy
• Department of Energy
• Freedom of Information Act

Notes

1. “Fundamental Review of Dept. of Energy Classification Policy,” Openness Press Conference Fact Sheets, June 27, 1994. This and other press releases cited below may be found through <www.osti.gov/opennet/index.jsp>.

2. Plutonium: The First 50 Years: United States Plutonium Production, Acquisition, and Utilization from 1944 through 1994, Dept. of Energy (DOE), DOE/DP-0127, 1996, <www.osti.gov/opennet/forms.jsp?formurl=document/pu50yrs/pu50y.html>.

3. “Declassification of the United States Plutonium Inventory and Release of the Report, ‘Plutonium: The First 50 Years,’” DOE Press Release, Feb. 6, 1996.

4. “Openness Fact Sheet Summary,” DOE Press Release, Feb. 6, 1996.

5. See, for example, Science at its Best, Security at its Worst, Report of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, June 1999, available at <www.fas.org/sgp/library/pfiab/index.html>.

6. Many of the withdrawn Los Alamos technical reports have since been made available through the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) online, <www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/index.html>.

7. “Openness: The Way to Do Business,” DOE Press Conference Fact Sheets, Jan. 15, 1997.

8. “Highly Enriched Uranium Report: The First 50 Years—a Commitment,” DOE Press Release, Jan. 24, 1997.

9. “Office of Nuclear and National Security Information Weekly Report,” DOE, Feb. 6, 2001, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2001/02/doe020601.html>.

10. Letter to Steven Aftergood from Abel Lopez, DirectorFOIA/Privacy Act Division, Office of the Executive Secretariat, DOE, April 10, 2002, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/202/04/doe041002.html>.

11. Secrecy News, April 17, 2002, FAS Project on Government Secrecy, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2002/04/041702.html>.

12. Letter to Sen. Gordon H. Smith from Joseph S. Mahaley, director, Office of Security, DOE, June 9, 2003, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2003/06/doe060903.html>.

13. Letter to Steven Aftergood from Marshall O. Combs, director, Office of Security, DOE, Jan. 24, 2005, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/01/doe012405.pdf>.

14. Decision and Order of the DOE, ruling of the DOE Office of Hearings and Appeals, Case No. TFA-0088, March 7, 2005, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/03/doe heu appeal.pdf>.

15. Highly Enriched Uranium: Striking A Balance—A Historical Report on the United States Highly Enriched Uranium Production, Acquisition, and Utilization Activities from 1945 Through September 30, 1996, DOE, Jan. 2001 (Revision 1, redacted for public release), <www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/heu/index.html> or <http://osti.gov/opennet/reports/RedactedHEUReportDraft.pdf>. (Note: OSTI version is a 58-megabyte file.).

16. The information released by DOE may be found on the U.S. government's Opennet Database, <https://www.osti.gov/opennet/press.jsp>. On June 27, 1994 the DOE released the total historical amounts of U.S. HEU production and current inventories at all DOE sites other than the Pantex Plant warhead assembly/disassembly facility at Amarillo, Texas, and on Feb. 6, 1996, the locations and amounts by facility of the 174.3 MT of HEU declared excess.

17. Assuming that the enrichment feed is natural uranium containing 0.711 percent U-235 and that the depleted uranium “tails” contain 0.3 percent U-235.

18. This is 4.3 MT in spent research reactor fuel containing HEU that was originally exported from the U.S. and 0.6 MT in former Soviet HEU imported from Kazakhstan in “Project Sapphire” in 1994.

19. The plutonium production reactors at the Hanford Reservation in Washington State were fueled with natural and 1-percent enriched uranium.

20. David Albright, William Walker, and Frans Berkhout, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities, and Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 252.

21. Historical Accounting for UK Defence Highly Enriched Uranium: A Report by the Ministry of Defence on the Role of Historical Accounting for Highly Enriched Uranium for the United Kingdom's Defence Nuclear Programmes, Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom), March 2006, p. 4, <www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/DDDBEE8B-F36D-457E-B472-C6C2877EE804/0/HistoricalAccountingForDefenceHighlyEnrichedUranium.pdf>.

22. Albright, Walker, and Berkhout, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996, p. 120.

23. “Remarks Prepared for Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, 2005 Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference,” Washington, DC, Nov. 7, 2005, <www.carnegieendowment.org/static/npp/2005conference/presentations/bodman_remarks.pdf>. On the 32 MT declared unsuitable by the Navy, see Dean Tousley, acting director, DOE Office of Disposition Projects, and Robert George, HEU disposition program manager, “U.S. Highly Enriched Uranium Disposition,” presentation at the Nuclear Energy Institute Nuclear Fuel Supply Forum, January 24, 2006, reproduced in the Project on Government Oversight report, U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Y-12 and Oak Ridge National Laboratory at Risk, October 16, 2006, Appendix F, <www.pogo.org/p/homeland/ho-061001-Y12.html>. On the Navy's reclaimed 10 MT, see Michael Knapik, ‘‘DOE Has Limits on HEU Sales This Decade,’’ Nuclear Fuels 30 (January 31, 2005), p. 1.

24. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62 (July/Aug. 2006), pp. 64–66, <http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/c4120650912x74k7/fulltext.pdf>.

25. The third U.S. gaseous diffusion plant, at Paducah, Kentucky, produced slightly enriched (0.9–1.1 percent) enriched uranium, which was fed into the other two (HEU Report, p. 27). Today, it is the only one of the three still in operation. It produces uranium enriched to up to 5 percent for light water power reactor fuel.

26. Albright, Walker, and Berkhout, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996, p. 87.

27. “Remarks Prepared for Energy Secretary Sam Bodman,” Nov. 7, 2005.

28. Estimate made in Chunyan Ma and Frank von Hippel, “Ending the Production of Highly Enriched Uranium for Naval Reactors,” Nonproliferation Review 8 (Spring 2001), p. 86, <http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol08/81/81mahip.pdf>.

29. HEU Report, p. 1.

30. Letter from Alan J. Kuperman and Paul L. Leventhal, Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), to Nils Diaz, then chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Feb. 13, 2006, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/nci021306.pdf>.

31. Letter to Alan J. Kuperman, NCI, from Dale E. Klein, chairman, NRC, Aug. 31, 2006, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/09/nrc083106.pdf.>

32. Letter to Alan J. Kuperman, NCI, from Dale E. Klein, chairman, NRC, Aug. 31, 2006, <www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/09/nrc083106.pdf.>

33. See, for example, “Reducing the Risks of Highly Enriched Uranium at the U.S. Department of Energy's Y-12 National Security Complex” by Robert Alvarez, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC, Sept. 20, 2006 (draft).

34. Thoughtful discussion of the feasibility, utility, and limits of nuclear transparency may be found in Monitoring Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear-Explosive Materials, Committee on International Security and Arms Control (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2005). More background on past U.S.-Russian exchanges on possible bilateral and trilateral (with the International Atomic Energy Agency) transparency arrangements may be found in Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, and John P. Holdren, Controlling Nuclear Warheads and Materials: A Report Card and Action Plan, Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Project on Managing the Atom, 2003, <www.nti.org/e_research/cnwm/monitoring/index.asp>.

35. In addition, the United States has declared 7.5 MT of government-owned plutonium in spent fuel excess for its defense needs, International Atomic Energy Agency Information Circular 549/Add.6/1, Oct. 11, 1999.

36. Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “U.S. Nuclear Reductions,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 60 (Sept./Oct. 2004), p. 70. It is quite possible, however, that, if warhead dismantlement is not given a higher priority in the interim, thousands of additional warheads will still be in the dismantlement queue in 2012.

37. These estimates are obtained by dividing the 66 MT of weapons-grade plutonium and the 650 MT of HEU in the U.S. weapon complex (nuclear weapons, the Y-12 HEU-component production facility, and the Pantex warhead assembly/disassembly facility) by the estimated 24,000 warheads in the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the mid-1980s, Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006.” During that period, the Reagan administration mounted a program to produce additional weapons-grade plutonium and expressed a concern about limitations on the availability of HEU for weapons, Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig, U.S. Nuclear Warhead Production (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1987), p. 92.

38. See for example the estimates in Albright, Walker, and Berkhout, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996, pp. 399, 400.

39. See the discussion in chapter 2 of Global Fissile Material Report 2006, International Panel on Fissile Materials, <www.fissilematerials.org>.

40. Chunyan Ma and Frank von Hippel, “Ending the Production.”

41. Albright, Walker, and Berkhout, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996, p. 378.

42. Steve Fetter, “Nuclear Archeology: Verifying Declarations of Fissile-Material Production,” Science & Global Security 3 (1993), p. 225.

43. HEU Report, p. 5.