America: Powered by WMD?

Setting the stage for a global summit on nuclear security to be held next month, President Obama announced yesterday his intention to impose "dramatic reductions" on the United States' roster of nuclear weapons. In the statement, which followed last week's agreement with Russia to eliminate 34 tons of nuclear material, Obama said the action was necessary to move away from a Cold War mentality and become a world leader for "embracing the aims of non-proliferation."

But how will a reduction in nuclear warheads impact the surging nuclear power industry, for which Obama has promised a major increase in government backed loans? I wrote recently that the nuclear industry first embraced plutonium, instead of the cleaner and more sustainable thorium, as the central ingredient in nuclear power because of its wartime applications. The National Nuclear Security Administration announced yesterday that it could reverse the process and use the material from discarded weapons to fuel nuclear power plants.  The Energy Department has authorized the Tennessee Valley Authority (the group that brought you the massive coal ash spill) to consider using mixed-oxide fuel extracted from disposed nuclear weapons to operate two major nuclear plants in Tennessee and Alabama.

In a statement, Ken Baker of the NNSA said "the MOX program is an important example of this administration's commitment to irreversibly disposing of surplus nuclear weapons material in a way that realizes the energy value of the material and advances our nuclear nonproliferation agenda."

But critics worry about the expensive and potentially dangerous implications of using plutonium that once fueled WMD to increase the country's reliance on dirty and unpredictable nuclear plants. Last year, Duke Energy ran a failed MOX test run, and eventually spiked the program for technical reasons, according to a director for the utility.

"Duke's total abandonment of the plutonium fuel program should be a wake-up call to the Energy Department. Plans to force the use of this costly and dangerous fuel in U.S. reactors must be immediately halted," said Tom Clements of Friends of the Earth. "It's not too late to pull the plug on the entire misguided program, halt construction of an expensive MOX plant under construction at the Savannah River Site and pursue a cheaper, safer and faster alternative: management of plutonium as nuclear waste."

MOX is yet another scheme backed by the industry to make use of our existing nuclear capacity, which took decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to develop as the source of twenty percent of the country's energy. Since taking office, Obama has gone way out of his way to cater to nuclear interests by tripling the value of federal nuclear loan guarantees on the shoulders of taxpayers. But whether or not you think nuclear power should be a part of our energy future, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's best to not to mess with old nuclear warheads.

Photo credit: Gerald Simmons