Does Expanding Nuclear Energy Contribute to the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons?

“Since the invention and first use of nuclear weapons in 1945, predictions on the proliferation of these weapons have traditionally been overestimating. Despite all gloomy forecasts, only nine states nowadays are considered to possess nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Although more states have operated nuclear weapons programmes at some point in the past 65 years – some experts argue that in total 39 states once engaged in nuclear weapons activities – most of them sooner or later gave up their ambition to acquire these weapons. Especially since the second half of the 1980s the number of states with nuclear weapons-related activities has become relatively low. Taking into account the historical trends, it looks like political and academic forecasts even nowadays tend to be overemphasizing the risks of further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the near future.”

“The conventional wisdom suggests that states with nuclear energy programs are more likely to seek or acquire nuclear weapons. Yet there is a dearth of systematic empirical work that directly assesses this proposition. A systematic analysis of the historical evidence suggests that the link between nuclear energy programs and proliferation is overstated. Although such programs increase the technical capacity of a state to build nuclear weapons, they have important countervailing political effects that limit the odds of proliferation. Specifically, nuclear energy programs increase the likelihood that parallel nuclear weapons programs will be detected and face counterproliferation pressures; they also increase the costliness of nonproliferation sanctions. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, states with nuclear energy programs historically have not been significantly more likely to seek or acquire nuclear weapons.”

“Even among more open-minded observers, the tendency to conflate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons is hard to resist. Both technologies involve the release of energy from atomic reactions, and nuclear energy was originally developed by the U.S. Navy as a source of electricity to power submarines and aircraft carriers.

But it is also extremely misleading. Neither the physics nor the technologies are the same, nor are the institutions that manage the two technologies. Nuclear weapons today involve fusing two atoms together in an uncontrolled explosion. Nuclear energy involves harnessing the decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements in a slow and controlled reaction, creating heat that turns steam turbines.

Nuclear facilities such as Hanford are a legacy of the headlong rush to build enormous nuclear weapons arsenals at the height of the Cold War. Faced with an existential threat from an enemy who had promised to “bury” us, the developers of America’s nuclear arsenal didn’t worry too much about the toxic hangover in the rush to produce plutonium for new and ever more powerful weaponry. It wasn’t until the end of the Cold War that the nation began to come to terms with the enormous legacy costs of cleaning up the weapons laboratories.

Nuclear energy, by contrast, has been tightly regulated from the beginning, originally by the Atomic Energy Commission and then by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The operators of civilian nuclear energy plants have been required to set aside funds for the decommissioning of nuclear plants and the disposal of waste for many decades.”

“The United States should change it views on reprocessing [nuclear fuel] to be more in line with the rest of the world and resume leadership by acknowledging that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is no longer the shortest path to a nuclear weapon and, in fact, a valid resource utilization and waste-management strategy. The United States could then play a more active role in the expansion of nuclear power around the world and interacting with those countries that have or may plan to—for energy security reasons of their own—reprocess…

This expanding leadership and expanding capabilities are vital to enable a strong presence across the globe as the use of nuclear power continues to grow in countries that have nuclear power and those that are new to the use of nuclear power..

The United States can become the preeminent global nuclear leader. The United States may even, in time, be able to pursue a global expansion of nuclear power that improves energy security and access for presently impoverished populations, just as Eisenhower argued in 1953. It will simply take a commitment of the president and Congress to make it so. To not make the commitment now will see the global nuclear leadership of the United States continue to dim.”