The Nuclear Fuel Race

by CKR

Andreas Persbo, of Vertic, has a newish blog on verification of nuclear issues that we’ve included on the WhirledView blogroll. That may not sound very exciting, but Andreas keeps things moving. Verification may not be much discussed, but it is an essential part of arms control.

One of his posts this week provides some information that helps make sense of the Department of Energy’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP, pronounced by the cognoscenti gee-nep).

In January 2006, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an initiative to develop a Global Nuclear Power Infrastructure (GNPI) capable of providing secured and nondiscriminatory (equal) access to the benefits of nuclear energy to all interested countries in strict compliance with non-proliferation requirements.

So say S. V. Ruchkin and V. Y. Loginov in an article in the September 2006 IAEA Bulletin.

George Bush announced GNEP in what seemed to be a hurried manner in February 2006.

At a recent public meeting, the GNEP director, Peter Lisowski, assured me that talks are under way with other countries to develop participation in the program and that reactions are very favorable. But it appears that the Russians are ahead in gaining international participation in their GNPI.

Lisowski also allowed as how GNEP’s rollout could have been done better. “We’re still recovering from that.”

So it appears that the Bushies felt that they had to respond to the Russian GNPI initiative, which they did just in time to make it look to the Indians that President Bush’s March visit would be to limit India’s nuclear options. I’m speculating, but it looks like they had the Argonne National Laboratory’s UREX+ initiative in hand and decided to build around that, with words and not much else.

I guess it’s better to compete for the internationalization of the fuel cycle than in numbers of nuclear weapons, but it would be better still to develop a fully collaborative program. That would go a long way toward addressing the big issue that Persbo brings up: confidence for nations forgoing a nuclear fuel cycle that their nuclear fuel supply would be assured.