SHOULD THE U.S. PROCEED WITH A NEW TRITIUM PRODUCTION REACTOR? YES, BUT MAKE IT THE RIGHT ONE!

(Washington, D.C.): Within the next
few weeks, the United States government
will face a policy choice of potentially
enormous consequence. The outcome will
have significance for: the nation’s
future security interests; its prospects
for energy independence; and its
leadership in the field of safe nuclear
power generation for commercial purposes.

The New York Times reported
on 4 October 1991 that the Bush
Administration is reconsidering the need
for a new reactor to produce tritium — a
radioactive gas used in modern U.S.
nuclear weapons — in light of the
President’s 27 September decision to
eliminate thousands of these devices.
According to this article, officials in
the Office of Management and Budget are
wondering whether sufficient quantities
of this gas (which is used to boost the
explosive power of nuclear weapons) can
be mined from retired systems to meet
future tritium requirements, without
having to construct an expensive New
Production Reactor (NPR) for this
purpose.

Restructure the Near-Term
Tritium Production Plan

The fact of the matter is that Mr.
Bush’s decision has significantly
alleviated the problems the United States
otherwise would have experienced in
meeting near-to medium-term tritium
production requirements. As a
result, it is appropriate to reexamine
Department of Energy activities now
underway aimed at satisfying nuclear
weapons requirements during that
time-frame.

Specifically, the plan to spend
hundreds of millions of dollars over the
next two years to restart the nation’s
only existing production reactors — the
obsolescent “K” and
“L” reactors at Savannah River
— should be redirected along the
following lines:

• The “K” reactor should
  be brought to the point where the
  its viability can be
  reestablished. This could be
  accomplished by testing it at
  roughly a fifteen-percent power
  level to confirm the
  effectiveness of various
  improvements made prior to and
  during the period it has been
  shut down.
• Once this capability has been
  demonstrated, the “K”
  reactor should not continue to be
  operated. Instead, it should be
  placed in “warm
  stand-by” status (i.e., a
  condition from which it could be
  restarted within two-years time,
  if the need arises).
• In the meantime, the
  “L” reactor should be
  shut down permanently, much as
  the “P” reactor was
  before it.

The Case for A New
Production Reactor

While such an arrangement should prove
in the wake of President Bush’ decision
sufficient to meet projected near-to
medium-term tritium requirements and to
hedge against unexpected ones, it
certainly will not satisfy those the
United States will face over the
longer-term. Because of the speed with
which tritium decays (it loses half its
radioactive properties within just twelve
years), indefinite perpetuation of the
present hiatus in tritium production
would mean that by the early years of the
next century significant portions of the
U.S. nuclear deterrent will become
ineffective and insupportable.

In short, if the United States is
going to continue to field nuclear arms
much past the year 2000, it is going to
have to have a secure supply of new
tritium. As a result, this country will
require a New Production Reactor. For it
to be available to start producing
necessary quantities of tritium by that
time, however, construction of
the NPR will need to begin during this
fiscal year.

To ensure that such a schedule is met,
however, the Department of Energy will
have to allocate substantially greater
funds to the NPR than are currently
programmed. The most sensible way to
accomplish the needed reprogramming would
be to apply to the NPR funds saved from
restructuring the “K” and
“L” restart programs.

An Optimal Design for NPR
— and the Nation

The case for such a reordering of
DoE’s requirements in the present
strategic and fiscal environment would be
even stronger if the New Production
Reactor design affords the following
options:

• Latitude to modify the size of
  the NPR to meet reduced tritium
  output requirements: There is no
  compelling reason to pursue a
  design that has been sized to
  meet such requirements far in
  excess of those likely to
  eventuate. More to the point,
  there is no need to pay the
  substantial sums associated with
  such excess capacity.
• Productive use of the NPR
  even if, at some point in the
  distant future, a decision is
  made not to employ it to produce
  tritium.
• Utilization of the NPR as
  a test bed that serves the
  national interest above and
  beyond producing tritium for
  vital defense purposes.

Downselect the Winning NPR
Design Now!

Only one of the two designs now
competing for selection as the New
Production Reactor — the
High-Temperature, Gas-Cooled Reactor
(HTGR) — offers these benefits. Unlike
its rival, an updated version of the
existing heavy water reactors at Savannah
River, the HTGR has the following
attributes:

• The HTGR is scaleable. Because
  the HTGR utilizes a number of
  small reactors to produce a given
  level of tritium, should the need
  for tritium be greatly reduced,
  any excess capacity can be
  eliminated simply by cutting back
  on the number of reactors
  procured. The heavy water design
  cannot be similarly modified; it
  is basically the direct
  descendent of earlier, large core
  reactor designs. Any effort to
  reduce the size of the heavy
  water design would require going
  back to the drawing boards and
  spending substantial sums and
  time in qualifying a redesigned
  core.
• The HTGR can produce
  electricity as a
  by-product of the production of
  tritium. The sale of this
  electricity to civilian power
  grids can be used to offset to
  some degree the costs of
  construction and operation. The
  heavy water alternative has no
  such capability.
• The HTGR offers an
  “inherently safe”
  reactor design that can serve as
  a prototype for the next
  generation of commercial power
  reactors. Designed in
  such a way as to avoid the kinds
  of catastrophic failures possible
  with traditional reactor designs,
  the HTGR has the potential to
  allay understandable public
  misapprehensions about nuclear
  power plants. The same cannot be
  said of the heavy water design.

In other words, the HTGR offers an
attractive “two-fer”: On the
one hand, it appears to be the most
efficient and flexible approach to
producing whatever tritium will be
required over the long haul for U.S.
national security purposes. On the other,
it offers an attractive and publicly
acceptable means of addressing the block
obsolescence of the United States
existing commercial nuclear reactors.
Successful commercialization in sale of
civilian nuclear technology overseas.

Conclusion and
Recommendation

Neither President Bush’s initiative
nor Mikhail Gorbachev’s 5 October
response have altered the fundamental
requirement for a long-term U.S.
tritium-production capacity. Accordingly
the Administration and the Congress should
urgently implement: a restructuring of
the near-term production program for
tritium production along the lines
described above; a redirection of
resources thus freed up to the New
Production Reactor program; and an
immediate down-selection in the NPR
competition in favor of the HTGR, the
reactor design best suited to meeting
fluid long-term tritium production needs and
the larger national interest.