‘Farewell to (Nuclear) Arms’: D.O.E. Announcement Fulfills Bush Unilateral Disarmament Game Plan

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, the Department of Energy formally closed the Office of New Production Reactors — the organization charged with assuring the nation’s long-term need for tritium. Tritium is a radioactive gas critical to the proper operation of every modern nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal. Without this gas, such weapons will not perform reliably and as specified.

Importantly, tritium decays very rapidly; in approximately twelve years’ time, it loses 50% of its radioactive charge. This short "half-life" means that the tritium in American nuclear weapons must be periodically replaced in order to ensure that established military requirements (e.g., damage expectancy) are met.

It follows from this unalterable reality that a reliable source of tritium must be maintained if the United States is to be able to field an effective nuclear arsenal for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, the U.S. today has no operating capability to produce this "special nuclear material."⁽¹⁾ Worse yet, as a result of the latest Energy Department directive — which itself was merely the final act in a play scripted and performed during the previous Secretary of Energy James Watkin’s term of office — the nation will almost certainly be denied such a capability for at least a decade or more.

Consequently, it seems likely — all other things being equal — that at some point in the early twenty-first century, a future President of the United States will have to be given some grim news: His nuclear arsenal is no longer functional. While the process of mining large numbers of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons now being retired in response to presidential directive, alliance agreement and/or arms control treaties, may postpone somewhat this day of reckoning, it will not prevent its ultimate arrival.

The Center for Security Policy believes that such a prospect is almost certainly incompatible with U.S. security interests — probably seriously so. Particularly at a moment when more and more nations appear to be pursuing their own nuclear weapons programs, it is the height of irresponsibility to condemn the United States to a state of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

There is a double tragedy to the Watkins decision to terminate work on a new reactor intended to produce tritium. As has been repeatedly emphasized by the Center in recent years⁽²⁾, had the Department of Energy made the right choice between two competing NPR designs, the nation might simultaneously have achieved not only a reliable, indigenous source of tritium. By opting for the High Temperature, Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR) over an updated version of a heavy water design (which could only be used for producing tritium), the United States would also have obtained a working prototype of a new, far safer reactor capable of generating substantial quantities of electrical power which could then be sold on the commercial power-grid. Insofar as the United States faces without replacement the imminent block obsolescence of the entire generation of existing light-water civilian reactors, this opportunity lost may prove to be far more costly than the price of proceeding with the NPR program.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that both powerful national security considerations and environmentally sound energy-production issues argue for a prompt reversal of the decision to disestablish DoE’s New Production Reactor effort. A concerted effort to resuscitate and select the HTGR design could ensure that the fullest possible return is made on the nearly $2 billion invested to date on research, development and testing of this impressive dual-use technology. By so doing, the option could also be protected of safely producing additional tritium if, as seems predictable, it is needed to meet future nuclear weapons requirements.

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1. In theory, the Department of Energy is spending roughly $350 million per year to preserve the "K" reactor at Savannah River, South Carolina as a source for tritium. In practice, however, this reactor — which was built in 1953 without a containment vessel and was expected to run for only 5 years at 250 megawatts thermal but operated until April 1990 at 2500 megawatts thermal — is not functioning. It is not clear that it can ever be safely run again, despite over $1 billion spent since 1990 to effect modernization and other improvements to this facility.

2. See, for example, the following Center for Security Policy papers: "Should the U.S. Proceed with a New Tritium Production Reactor? Absolutely, But Make it the Right One!" No. 91-D 103, 6 October 1991; "Quadruple Whammy for National Defense: Congress, NATO and Bush Deal Setbacks to U.S. Security," No. 91-D 111, 4 November 1991; "Strategic Meltdown at Savannah River: Time to Revisit Watkins’ Tritium Decisions," No. 92-D 02, 6 January 1992.