The Need for a Comprehensive Fissile Material Treaty

Greenpeace welcomes IAEA Director General Dr ElBaradei's initiative for an Expert Group to consider ways to tighten international controls on the nuclear fuel cycle. In particular, strengthening international controls applied to sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment, plutonium separation and spent fuel management, is a necessary, but not sufficient goal in the context of nonproliferation. A legal regime establishing comprehensive controls over all fissile material is long overdue. While initiatives such as Security Council Resolution 1540 (see Appendix 8), the Proliferation Security Initiative (see Appendices 5 and 6) and the G8's Global Partnership (Appendix 7) have been formulated to deal with nuclear proliferation, none of these address the root cause: halting the production, storage and use of weapons-usable fissile materials and specifically plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU). Instead, the nuclear industry, with the open support of governments that profess commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, is actively promoting reprocessing and MOX fuel in the civil nuclear industry, with MOX being advocated as the way to ‘dispose´ of surplus military plutonium. This will result in both increased amounts of plutonium in commercial circulation around the world and an increase in shipments of nuclear waste and MOX fuel - both of which increase proliferation and security risks. In contrast to treating plutonium as a waste and immobilizing it, the MOX route for dealing with plutonium is more expensive, will increase reactor safety hazards and will ultimately assist the Russian Federation to close the nuclear fuel cycle, with all the resulting hazards that this entails. The first physical manifestation of this new era will be witnessed within a matter of weeks with the trans-Atlantic shipment of weapons-grade plutonium from the United States to France. The vulnerabilities of the trade in plutonium will be highlighted by this transport which is scheduled to take place on lightly armed nuclear freighters with no dedicated armed escort. (For further details on this see, www.stop-plutonium.org).