Small problem: Saudi Arabia has announced that it wants to go nuclear. That’s not the problem, because international law says every country has the right to nuclear power stations and all the supporting technology.
The Saudis have also said that they want to do their own uranium enrichment, and that is the problem. Or at least causes one, because the question becomes, “Should we be polite about this or call it what it is?” Sure, they have sovereign rights to do as they wish, but we should point out the truth: a country only does this if they want to go nuclear in the other sense — making nuclear bombs.
It’s worth explaining this technical background a little. To make a nuclear reactor, a country cannot just take the natural uranium they dig out of the ground and shovel it into a steel box. That natural uranium (to keep it simple and not confuse with details) is a mixture of two different types, and they come in a ratio of 0.7 percent to 99.3 percent (roughly, simple stuff again). To make fuel for a reactor we need to change that proportion, up to perhaps 20/80. To make a bomb we need to do it again, up to 80/20 or above. 20/80 is called low enriched uranium, 80/20 high enriched.
It’s true that there are some old reactor designs – mainly research ones or for producing medical isotopes – that use HEU. But we actually spend fortunes aiding people in closing those down these days in order to avoid having possible bomb material floating around. Other than that, HEU is for bombs, LEU for reactors.
Someone, somewhere, has to do that enrichment up to LEU for reactors, there’s no doubt about that. However, doing it is vastly, hugely, expensive. A good guess – no one really knows nuclear accounting numbers properly – is that it’s $10 billion to build a plant to do it. Someone also needs to deal with the used, or spent, fuel rods. Another very expensive process.
But this is where we get into problems. Those things have to be done. But if you own your own enrichment plant then altering it a bit to make bomb material isn’t that difficult. And if you run your own reprocessing plant then extracting the plutonium – another bomb making material created in the reactor itself – isn’t all that difficult either. Which is where our problem is.
It isn’t necessarily true but it is a useful enough starting point that anyone who wants nuclear power plants just wants nuclear power plants. Anyone who wants enrichment and or reprocessing plants wants not just nuclear power but also at least the capability to make bombs. That’s why one of the offers to Iran by the Russians was to let them have as many nuclear power plants as they wanted, the enrichment and reprocessing would all be done in Russia.
Our problem should be clear by now. Do we all just mutter that perhaps Saudi Arabia wanting to do its own enrichment isn’t a wise idea but what the heck, it’s their money? Or do we think about calling it out for what we think it is?
Absolutely everyone in the nuclear industry knows all of the above. There just is no economic point to handling one’s own enrichment or reprocessing these days — the plants just cost too much for any one country to make it viable. The basic supposition therefore is to think that someone wanting to build those plants – not the nuclear reactors themselves, they’re just fine – wants something more than just the nuclear power they’re entitled to.
Which is our problem. What do we say about the Saudis when they say they want those two plants as well as the reactors?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
