Nuclear Weapons 29 - Decommissioning
I have posted a number of blog entries about design of nuclear weapons and treaty negotiations to reduce their number. One question that I need to address is what you do with the old weapons when you want to get rid of them. This is referred to as decommissioning. Estimates of the number of nuclear warheads in the world vary but there are tens of thousands. The majority of the warheads are possessed by the United States and Russia with close to ten thousand each. In response to a number of treaty negotiations through the years, some U.S. and Russian warheads have already been dismantled and many more are slated for disposal.
In order to decommission a nuclear warhead, it has to be dismantled. This does require the proper facilities and trained technicians for handling radioactive materials but such facilities and technicians are available. The biggest problem in disposal involves the disposition of the plutonium core that is the heart of the warhead. If we dismantled all the warheads in the world, there would be tens of thousands of these highly radioactive plutonium cores to get rid of.
One possibility would be to send these plutonium cores to facilities such as Russia’s Mayak Chemical Combine, Frances La Hague or England’s Sellafield for reprocessing. The goal would be to convert the plutonium into a nuclear fuel call MOX or mixed oxide for nuclear reactors. There would, of course still be useless nuclear waste produced by the reprocessing. There have been problems in the past with leaks from these reprocessing facilities where waste has been dumped into public waterways. Sellafield is currently under attack for just such problems. The problem with MOX fuel is that plutonium is much more toxic and dangerous than the uranium used for fuel. If there is an accident that disperses plutonium into the environment, it poses a much greater health and environmental hazard than uranium fuel
. A recent U.S. Government report stated that it would take decades to set up a proper reprocessing facility to recycle warheads and spent fuel into new reactor fuel in the United States and there does not seem to be an interest in doing it. Having the reprocessing done abroad in other countries would require the transport of the cores exposing them to accidents and possible terrorist seizure. So it would appear that the U.S. will have to bury the dismantled warheads. We do not have a permanent storage facility yet and it will be decades at best before we have one. Therefore, plutonium from dismantled warheads will have to be stored in temporary facilities with all the attendant problems.
Part of the problem of disposal is the argument over the funding for the dismantling program in the United States. Given that an estimate for dismantling all our nuclear weapons runs around seven billion dollars a year for ten years, it seems rather silly to fight about it when that would amount to around 1 % of the annual Pentagon budget. In addition, the U.S. has been assisting the Russians in the dismantling of their nuclear warheads and there is a fight about the funding for that program. I would think that this expenditure is definitely relevant to national security.
The world will be a safer place when nuclear weapons have been eliminated but there are a variety of logistical, technical, safety, political, and economic problems that will impede the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide. Still, it is a very important goal for the safety and wellbeing of the human race.
Dismantling a U.S. W56 warhead:
