Plutonium Management and Disposition in the United States: History and Analysis of the Program
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Signed in 2000, the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement between the U.S. and Russia required each nation to dispose of at least 34 metric tons of weapon plutonium. Nonetheless, the U.S. Plutonium Disposition Program still remains incomplete as of 2017. This thesis analyzes the failure of the Pu disposition program through the assessment of information from the scientific and technical literature, the U.S. government, and NGOs in order to answer the following question: Why has the United States been unable to implement its own policy as agreed to with Russia in the 2000 Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement? The analysis revealed that the failure of the U.S. policy is primarily a consequence of placing uncritical faith in the U.S. Government’s ability to implement the MOX fabrication technology. The program was unsuccessful because a multitude of problems compounded, including structural organization and communication issues, a waste standard that constrained disposition options, fundamental misunderstandings of the technology by those in policy-making positions, insufficient appreciation for the challenges of transferring a plant design from France to the U.S. with regard to regulatory and procurement issues, an underdeveloped contractor base, political complexity that affected the funding profile, and the attempt to implement a program that did not align with the U.S. National nuclear fuel strategy. This thesis proposes that a broad-based, reorganized U.S. nuclear waste and weapon material disposition program should combine the plutonium disposition program and other U.S. nuclear waste disposal projects into a unified national strategy. This plan should be implemented by a single-purpose organization focused on disposal of the entirety of the Nation’s nuclear waste, including excess weapons plutonium.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2017 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lubkin, Alexander |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Ewing, Rodney |
Subjects
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
|---|---|
| Subject | Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement |
| Subject | Spent Fuel Standard |
| Subject | plutonium |
| Subject | MOX |
| Subject | nuclear waste form |
| Subject | program management |
| Subject | nuclear security |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Lubkin, Alexander. (2017). Plutonium Management and Disposition in the United States: History and Analysis of the Program. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/cn721tt3529
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- alubkin@stanford.edu
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