Negotiating Nuclear Cooperation Agreements- Mark Hibbs

The United States is currently negotiating bilateral agreements for peaceful nuclear cooperation under Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act—so-called 123 agreements—with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Vietnam. At some point—thus far no decision has been taken when—the United States will begin a fifth such negotiation, with Taiwan.

The negotiations with South Korea and Taiwan are to renew agreements set to expire in 2014, while the others are new. All five states want to deploy nuclear power reactors for electricity generation in the coming years and they seek benefits that would accrue from a formal legal framework for conducting its nuclear trade and diplomacy with the United States.

Although the Atomic Energy Act establishes criteria that 123 agreements must meet in order to conform to U.S. law without special Congressional consideration, for all of these negotiations to succeed the language and terms written into the five agreements will have to differ quite significantly. Why? Because the interest calculus and leverage balance of the two parties in each case won’t be the same.

Progress in negotiating these agreements has been held up because of a contentious two-year interagency debate in the United States over how to proceed in trying to limit the spread of uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing (so-called ENR) capabilities worldwide. In 2009, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) concluded a 123 agreement that said it would not “engage in activities within its territory” for ENR. The UAE agreement also indicated that the no-ENR provision was to be included in future 123 agreements for countries in the Middle East.

Some administration officials, supported by lawmakers, sought to universalize the UAE no-ENR provision as a “gold standard” for all future agreements, but others preferred instead to apply it on a limited case-by-case basis. More

 

Keep focus on nuclear security

More than 53 heads of state and representatives from four international organizations will attend the second Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul on Monday and Tuesday. They will take stock of the progress they have made in implementing the communiqu and work plan agreed at the first summit in Washington D.C. in April 2010 and endeavor to agree on substantial new measures that will be reflected in the communiqu released at the end of this summit.

But the original aim of these summits, strengthening global nuclear material security through national and cooperative measures, seems to have taken a back seat to a new focus on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear safety.

While the mandate of the first summit was to evolve national mechanisms to secure or dispose of nuclear and radioactive materials and prevent their trafficking, the attention of participants at the second summit has already shifted to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Iran, thanks to its staging in Seoul,

Although neither the DPRK nor Iran has been invited to attend, various comments in the lead-up to the summit have been frontloading the challenge of the DPRK and Iran's nuclear issues, and some of the leaders will be tempted to raise these issues, even if only on the sidelines of the summit. Particularly the United States, as President Barack Obama will no doubt want to play to the media with the presidential election on the horizon.

In addition, given the backdrop of the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the tsunami in Japan last March, the focus of the summit has shifted from the security of nuclear materials to the safety of nuclear installations. The Republic of Korea is an emerging exporter of nuclear technologies and this is likely to see the summit deliberating on the need to ensure the safety of nuclear power facilities. Several other influential leaders will also be carrying this message from their powerful domestic lobbies. The US has recently revived - after a freeze of three decades - its nuclear reactor manufacturing with a new project now sanctioned for Georgia. More

 

What Seoul can and can’t achieve

‘Beyond Security, Towards Peace’: the official slogan of next week’s Nuclear Security Summit is plastered around Seoul. And as South Korea prepares to host the largest gathering of world leaders on its soil, hopes are high for significant agreements aimed at protecting nuclear materials, including preventing them from falling into the hands of terrorists.

However, the summit is already being overshadowed by North Korea’s planned satellite launch next month. Furthermore, while the agenda will include measures to better protect nuclear weapons-grade materials and nuclear facilities – as well as to prevent the illicit trafficking of nuclear materials – a weak international governance framework makes it virtually impossible for summits like these to effectively eliminate the nuclear-security threat.

When not trying to galvanise action against his northern neighbour’s proposed satellite launch, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has pledged that the summit will produce ‘more advanced and concrete’ results than the 2010 summit in Washington (pictured). These are likely to include a consensus pledge to minimise the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in civilian research reactors (although the time frame might not be finalised), and a promise on the part of more than ten countries to remove or eliminate their own weapons-grade materials. However, it could be six to ten yearsbefore these commitments are fulfilled.

The threat of radiological terrorism will be addressed for the first time at this political level. This discussion is much-needed given the abundance of radioactive sources and the disruption that can be caused by their dispersal. The importance of protecting sensitive nuclear-security information (such as the know-how for building bombs) will be also examined.

Though the chances are remote, in a worst-case scenario, a well-equipped terrorist group armed with about 60kg of HEU could produce a nuclear weapon of similar design and effect as the Hiroshima bomb. The global stockpile of HEU is estimated at about 1,440 tonnes, while that of weapons-grade plutonium is thought to be about 241 tonnes (although a plutonium weapon is harder to make). Not all material is secured to the highest standards. HEU is used in about 120 civil nuclear research reactors worldwide and these are less secure than military sites. More