ORNL-5388 - the Molten Salt Energy Technologies Web Site

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1. INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND
In the mid-l940s, as the nuclear era was just beginning, a prestigious group includ-
ing Robert Oppenheimer and led by David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the U.S. Atomic
Energy Comnission, was comnissioned by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson to recommend
ways that the benefits of nuclear energy could be shared with the world without the dangers
of what we now refer to as "nuclear proliferation": that is, the creation of numerous
nuclear weapons states. The report' they submitted states that "the proposed solution is
an international institution and framework of treaties and agreements for cooperative
operation of sensitive nuclear technology." At the same time, the committee proposed
several possible technological developments to help implement an international system,
including the denaturing of reactor fuels. They also suggested the restriction of the
most sensitive activities within a nuclear cycle to nuclear energy arenas.
In the subsequent years several steps have been taken toward international coopera-
tion in the political control of the potential for making nuclear weapons.
Atoms for Peace Program was initiated by the U.S. and in 1957 the International Atomic
Energy Agency was formed, one of its chartered responsibilities being the safeguarding of
fissile material and the reduction of the potential for the production of nuclear weapons.
In 1970 these efforts resulted in a nonproliferation treaty that was drafted by the U.S.
and the U.S.S.R. and subscribed to by 116 nations. As the dialog has continued, inevit-
ably all serious studies of the problem, including the most recent studies, have arrived
at the same conclusion as the Acheson comnittee:
with technological supports are mandatory -- or to state it another way, no purely tech-
nological fix to prevent nuclear proliferation is possible.
In 1953 the
international cooperation and safeguards
It was against this background and largely through the initiatives of President
Carter that an International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation Program (INFCE) was established
in the Fall of 1977 to study how proliferation-resistant nuclear fuel cycles could be
developed for world-wide nuclear generation of electrical power. At the same time a U.S.
Nonproliferation A1 ternative Systems Assessment Program (NASAP) was formed to carry out
intensive studies that would both provide input to INFCE and recommend technical and
institutional approaches that could be implemented with various nuclear fuel cycles
proposed for the U.S.
The principal proliferation concern in civilian nuclear power fuel cycles is the pos-
sible diversion of fissile material to the fabrication of nuclear weapons. If obtained in
sufficient quantities, the fissile material employed in any nuclear fuel cycle can be pro-
cessed into weapons-usable material ,but fuel cycles that are considered to offer the least
resistance to diversion are those that include weapons usable material that can be chemi-
cally separated from all the other materials in the cycle. The 235U in the low-enriched
uranium (LEU) fuel used by currently operating Light-Water Reactors (LWRs) cannot be chemi-
cally separated because it is embedded in a matrix of 238U. To extract the 235U from the 23eU