Center for a New American Security

Japanese officials shutdown the last of 50 nuclear reactors late Saturday evening, taking the country off of nuclear power for the first time in more than four decades. Most of Japan’s nuclear reactors will remain idle for the foreseeable future as they undergo stress tests to determine their ability to stand up against a major disaster, a measure introduced after the March 2011 triple disaster that crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant and left the country’s nuclear-power future in a tailspin.  

Japanese officials remain concerned that the country could experience electricity shortages during the peak summer months without nuclear power, which previously provided approximately 30 percent of Japan’s total electricity demand. A panel of experts reported to Japanese policymakers in April that nine utilities could see electricity shortfalls in August. As a result, Japanese officials may power up two reactors during the summer in order to meet electricity demand. The Japanese Times reports that “Last month, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and key members of his Cabinet decided that firing up the No. 3 and 4 reactors at the Oi power station is essential to ensure a stable supply of electricity in the Kansai region in summertime,” even as the country continues to reduce its reliance on nuclear power. It is not clear if those two reactors will be back online by the summer.

This is a new feature to highlight the top tweets of the week to hit my Twitter feed (@wmrogers).

From The Hill’s Energy and Environment Blog @E2Wire: “News bites: White House to promote ‘bioeconomy’ bit.ly/JXftuf.”

The Hill’s Energy and Environment Blog discusses the White House’s announced release of a new National Bioeconomy Blueprint on Thursday that is expected to make a broad push for investments in biotechnology, including renewable biofuels.

From Circle of Blue @circleofblue: “Soon, water may be more important that oil to #China @Forbessu.pr/1mAIOg #water

Circle of Blue links to a report in Forbes that discusses the growing strategic importance of water in China, driven in part by increasing demand as well as mismanagement of existing resources. According to the report, “The country’s water supply is smaller than that of the U.S., yet it must meet the needs of a population nearly five times as large. Industrialization has taken its toll on this already limited resource. Industrial and biological pollution has contaminated almost 90 percent of the underground water in Chinese cities.”

This is a new feature to highlight the top tweets of the week to hit my Twitter feed (@wmrogers). The list is completely subjective, of course, but I hope it is helpful to readers interested in following natural security news a little bit closer.

From Reuters’ @alertnetclimate: “Private funding for humanitarian response on the rise, as government budgets squeezed - report ow.ly/aeinB #aid#disasters.”

This is an interesting story to follow given the potential increase in demand for governments to support humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions due to climate-related and other natural disasters. Institutions like the U.S. military may be called on to support HA/DR missions in order to help dampen the impact of these natural disasters, which can have knock-on effects for security and stability.

From The Hill’s Energy and Environment Blog @E2Wire: “News bites: Study questions natural gas climate benefits, pump prices may have peaked, and morebit.ly/IrIEVM.”

The Hill’s Energy and Environment Blog links to a Wall Street Journal report on a new study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that challenges that assumption the natural gas reduces greenhouse gas emissions compared to other fossil fuels. The study notesthat methane (CH4) leakages throughout the lifecycle production process could offset the greenhouse gas benefits. The study is very important given the recent attention to natural gas production in the United States, largely from shale rock.

On March 25-26, 2012, the second Nuclear Security Summit (NSS), an international conference on global nuclear issues, will take place in Seoul, South Korea. The guest list has been finalized at 58, which includes representatives from 53 countries, and five representatives from four international organizations. In a post-Fukushima era and one in which the threat of terrorists obtaining and employing a nuclear device is viable, the 2012 summit will explore the issues of nuclear safety, security and terrorism. The summit is an avenue for the international community to collectively consider and learn from the mistakes of Fukushima in order to develop measures to prevent future nuclear disasters, the event of nuclear terrorism and restore public confidence in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.  

Enhancing Nuclear Security and Safety

There will be various meetings preceding the March 25-26 event. The two most significant are the 2012 Seoul Nuclear Industry Summit, on March 23-24, when roughly 150 nuclear industry CEOs will discuss the role of the nuclear industry in enhancing nuclear security and safety, and the Nuclear Security Experts Symposium, on March 23, when over 250 representatives from NGOs, nuclear research institutions and nuclear security experts will convene for discussions on innovating nuclear security governance.

U.S. President Barack Obama inaugurated the NSS in Washington on April 12-13, 2010. The first summit addressed preventing nuclear terrorism, or the event of terrorist organizations using a nuclear weapon or one comprised of radioactive materials – “a dirty bomb” – on civilian populations. In the summit communiqué, a document that participating nations signed at the summit’s conclusion, leaders succeeded in defining the current parameters of nuclear security and particular nations, for example Ukraine, agreed to relinquish their stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. However, while the first summit did bring high-level attention to the issue of nuclear terrorism, it neglected to produce collective agreements requiring nations to secure their own domestic nuclear weapons material and facilities. As nations were largely responsible for setting their own goals, naturally these states set the bar low as to ensure positive results. Accordingly, the second summit has the opportunity to set a more ambitious agenda and introduce higher standards for participants.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration has decided to withdraw its demand for countries pursuing nuclear energy development to relinquish their right to produce nuclear fuel domestically. This is a significant shift from a 2009 agreement between the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that prohibits the UAE from enriching uranium domestically or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.

According to The Wall Street Journal report, administration officials cited concerns that U.S. nuclear plant developers could lose a share of the market with a stringent requirement attached to nuclear-cooperation agreements that bound countries from developing domestic sources of nuclear fuel. “U.S. companies once controlled at least 50% of the world market for building nuclear reactors,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “This share has dwindled to around 20%, U.S. officials say, with Russian, French and South Korean companies gaining dominance,” and officials have cautioned that “Washington risked losing business for American companies seeking to build nuclear reactors overseas” if the United States continued to push the nuclear-cooperation agreement requirement.

Moreover, U.S. officials cited concerns that losing nuclear plant development to non-U.S. developers could weaken U.S. efforts to encourage countries to promote stronger nonproliferation safeguards and policies. “To the extent we lose market share, we lose nonproliferation controls and hurt national security,” a senior U.S. official told The Wall Street Journal.

CNAS is kicking off the 2012 event season with the launch of Philip Taubman’s The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. Join us today at 6 PM at the W Hotel’s Great Room for a discussion with Taubman and The New York Times’ Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger. Taubman will shed light on one of the most divisive security issues facing Washington today and tell the story of the unlikely efforts of five key Cold War players to eliminate the nuclear arsenal they helped create. The Partnership tells the little-known story of a campaign by five men – Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, William Perry, and the renowned Stanford physicist Sidney Drell – to reduce the threat of a nuclear attack and, ultimately, eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.

For anyone interested in nuclear proliferation (of energy or weapons), The Partnership is a must read.  As The New York Times’ Gary Bass wrote in his review of the book, “Taubman’s book provides an important public service by concentrating on nuclear perils that — despite previous powerful alarms from writers like Graham Allison and Richard Rhodes — continue to slip our day-to-day notice.”

For those of you traveling this holiday weekend and looking for a good book to pass your time with, I recommend Dr. Charles Ferguson’s Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know (available on Kindle). Ferguson is the President of the Federation of American Scientists and one of foremost experts on nuclear technology.

This has to be one of the best books available on nuclear energy, covering everything from the basic fundamentals of what nuclear energy is (including the types of reactors used and how fuel is reprocessed) to what the actual challenges are with nuclear reactor safety and the proliferation of fissile material. It is an easy read, but promises the reader a crash course in the technical fluency anyone working in or interested in this space needs to have to understand nuclear energy in the 21^st century.

I’ll be short on my description today and save a longer review of the book for another day. But one of the chapters worth reading if you’re short on time is the one on nuclear proliferation. Ferguson gives quite an even-handed assessment of some of the proliferation challenges the world faces with nuclear energy. He took on the question of nuclear proliferation in the last issue of Foreign Policy magazine, which is also worth a read if you missed it.

Despite some countries recently announcing a retreat from nuclear energy (especially in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster), Ferguson argues that the nuclear renaissance is far from over. In the closing pages of his book he writes that, “As renewable and nuclear technologies continue to develop, the world may be generating much of its electricity from these sources by the century’s end.” Thus, no matter how one feels toward nuclear energy, understanding nuclear technology is ever more important for those working on contemporary energy issues. This book is a great first step to furthering that understanding.

China is just one of the many East and Southeast Asian states that continues to pursue nuclear power in the wake of the March 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station. But China, like most other states with nuclear reactors or aspirations, has not been blithe about the Fukushima crisis. According to The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, “China was one of the world's fastest-growing nuclear markets before the March disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power facility.” That changed in March when “China's State Council, China's cabinet, ordered a suspension of approvals for new nuclear plants and began a nationwide nuclear-safety review as public fear over nuclear power widened after the Fukushima Daiichi incident.”

To help China improve its safety standards and develop other expertise, The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S.-based Exelon Corps – which provides support services to the nuclear industry – will partner with China’s state-owned China National Nuclear Corps (CNNC), a move, the Journal says, that suggests that “China's secretive state-owned nuclear companies are determined to learn Western safety practices and other expertise in the aftermath of Japan's nuclear incident in March.”

There are a lot of smart people in Washington and around the world evaluating the threat of nuclear proliferation against the backdrop of growing civilian nuclear energy use. In an October 18 post, I commented on a report by Dr. Charles Ferguson who addressed this challenge in the current issue of Foreign Policy. (Ferguson’s report is worth reading in full.)

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that some in Japan are advocating that the country maintain its civilian nuclear energy program, in part to keep its edge with the technology in case Japan ever needs to develop nuclear weapons.  “I don't think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it's important to maintain our commercial reactors because it would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time," said Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister. But, as The Wall Street Journal noted, this is a minority view in Japan. Most of the public remains skeptical about continuing nuclear energy generation, especially in the wake of the March Fukushima disaster: “Recent public-opinion polls show the Japanese public turning against nuclear energy after the March Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.”

Dr. Charles Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scientists, has a terrific piece in this current issue of Foreign Policy that explores the future of nuclear energy in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster.

According to Ferguson, the nuclear renaissance is very much still alive. Though several countries have announced their retreat from nuclear energy since the Fukushima meltdown, Ferguson explains that these states “were the exceptions rather than the rule.” As he notes:

The United States is reviewing its safety procedures for nuclear power, but not changing course on it; overall support for the energy source among Americans has hovered around 50 percent since the early 1990s. In France, which gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, President Nicolas Sarkozy said shutting down reactors was "out of the question." And as for China, India, and South Korea -- countries with a growing appetite for nuclear power that account for the bulk of active plant construction -- only the first has put any of its nuclear plans on pause, and that's just pending a safety review. India and South Korea have vowed to tighten safety standards, but have otherwise forged ahead with plans for nuclear expansion.

According to an August 2011 Congressional Research Service report, the list of states with planned nuclear developments is quite striking (see page 24). The number of planned nuclear facilities in the world – those with approval, funding and that should be operational within the decade – totaled 158. (Note that there are 440 in operation today.) Another 322 nuclear power plants have been proposed, and 61 others are already under construction. Indeed, when experts say that the nuclear renaissance is still alive, they mean it. But how will growth in nuclear energy make nonproliferation more difficult, if at all?

Ferguson takes on the challenge of evaluating the risk of proliferation quite diligently. It is not necessarily true that more nuclear energy production means more nuclear proliferation, he argues. “It's true that the nuclear enrichment and reprocessing facilities used to produce fuel for peaceful reactors can just as easily be used to make fissile material for bombs,” Ferguson acknowledges. “For now, however, this threat starts and ends with Iran. Most of the 30 countries that use nuclear power don't build their own enrichment or reprocessing facilities, instead buying fuel for their nuclear power plants from external suppliers.”