Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
2/5/2016
With less than a year until the next president takes office, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Tuesday highlighted the Obama administration’s key international nuclear security and nonproliferation achievements, as well as the political challenges that remain in the U.S. nuclear modernization program.
During a Wilson Center address on nuclear nonproliferation, Moniz said the Department of Energy is continuing its nuclear weapons life-extension programs as part of the modernization program meant to sustain U.S. deterrent capabilities. The challenge, however, is the lack of “political consensus in terms of making the investments that need to be made to modernize the [aging] infrastructure,” he said. Moniz pointed to the National Security Campus near Kansas City, Mo., as an infrastructure success story, noting that operations were moved to a smaller facility within the last few years, which was built with “half the physical footprint” of its predecessor and cost $687 million. He added, “That’s one plant that now is prepared for, I would say, the modern era with a reduced stockpile. But we have a long way to go with our other facilities.” The plant in Kansas City manufactures non-nuclear components used in nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, is often cited by members of Congress as a cautionary example of the consequences of deferring infrastructure maintenance. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, previously highlighted “the deplorable state” of the plant’s facilities, including aging buildings and leaking roofs.
Moniz also noted completion of the U.S.-Russian Megatons to Megawatts Program as a major accomplishment in recent years, calling the deal “one of the absolutely great nonproliferation programs.” Under the program, initiated in 1993 and completed in 2013, the U.S. and Russia converted 500 tons of surplus highly enriched uranium from Russian nuclear warheads into low-enriched uranium fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants. By the time of completion, 500 metric tons of HEU from about 20,000 dismantled Russian warheads were converted into enough fuel to provide roughly 10 percent of all U.S. electricity over the last 15 years of the deal, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Moniz also acknowledged ongoing efforts to promote nuclear security cooperation worldwide, noting that as a lead-up to the upcoming Nuclear Security Summit in March, DOE last week conducted a scenario-based exercise on nuclear security crisis response at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Moniz said “37 countries, many at the ministerial level, and key international organizations . . . [went] through a scenario of HEU falling into terrorist hands.” Senior delegates from 37 nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, European Union, and United Nations practiced effective responses to emerging nuclear security threats at the Apex Gold exercise, “the first ever minister-level gathering to identify national and international actions to address a nuclear crisis,” according to the NNSA. The agency said the intent of the event, organized by the DOE and the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry, was to prepare participants to advise their heads of government in the event of a nuclear security crisis.
Moniz added that participating delegations toured the lab to understand technologies for nuclear material detection, including nuclear forensics. International capabilities for these technologies are “highly variable,” he said, but exercises like last week’s Apex Gold encourage cooperation to develop global capabilities.
