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OCR for page 5
Charge to the Panel
At the request of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National
Academy of Sciences formed In fall 1998, under the auspices of its Com-
mittee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC), a Panel to
Review the Spent-Fuel Standard for Disposition of Excess Weapons Plu-
tonium. Under its charge, the Panel was to
(1) amplify and clarify the "spent-fuel standard" introduced in
CISAC's 1994 and 1995 reports on the disposition of excess weap-
ons plutonium2 as the criterion for judging the adequacy of resis-
tance to theft and proliferation conferred by the intrinsic charac-
teristics of the Anal plutonium form produced by a disposition
option; and
(2) use the results of (1) to determine whether the final plutonium
forms produced by the two primary-candidate disposition options
currently being pursued by DOE under the "dual-track" approach
"can-in-canister" immobilization of the plutonium together with
high level radioactive wastes and once-through irradiation of the
2These studies were: Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National
Academy of Sciences, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium, Washington,
DC: National Academy Press, 1994, 275 pp. (hereinafter CISAC, 1994~; and Panel on
Reactor-Related Options, Committee on International Security and Arms Control, National
Academy of Sciences, Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium: Reactor-
Related Options, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995, 408 pp. (hereinafter
CISAC, 1995).
5
OCR for page 6
6 SPENT-FUEL STANDARD FOR DISPOSITION OF EXCESS WEAPON PLUTONIUM
plutonium in mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel in commercial light-water
or Canadian deuterium-uranium (CANDU) reactors meet this
standard.
The Panel was not asked to address the proliferation and theft
resistance of the steps that lead, under these disposition options, to the
final plutonium forms, nor was it asked to address issues related to geo-
logic disposal or interim storage of these final forms except insofar as the
properties of the final forms under such disposal or storage relate to
assessing compliance with the spent-fuel standard. Neither was the Panel
asked to address compliance of final plutonium forms other than those of
the two primary-candidate disposition options currently being pursued
by DOE.3 The consequent omission from consideration of other final
forms, including some that have been proposed since the earlier CISAC
reports on plutonium disposition, does not reflect any judgment by the
Panel about whether these forms would meet the standard.
The Panel provided an Interim Report to DOE in July 1999, conveying
preliminary findings relating mainly to the "can-in-canister" approach to
plutonium immobilization and, more specifically, to the variant of this
approach described in the documents and briefings made available to the
Panel in the first part of 1999. The Final Report provided here updates and
expands those preliminary findings in a number of respects, including
consideration of the next iteration of DOE's can-in-canister design, fur-
ther attention to MOX options, and expanded argumentation in support
of the Panel's conclusions.
i:
3The complete charge to the Panel may be found in Appendix A.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
arms control
