Special nuclear materials cutoff exercise: Issues and lessons learned. Volume 1: Summary of exercise

摘要

In a September 1993 address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Clinton announced a new nonproliferation and export control policy that established a framework for US efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The new policy proposed that the US undertake a comprehensive approach to the growing accumulation of fissile material. One of the key elements was for the US to support a special nuclear materials (SNM) multilateral convention prohibiting the production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium for nuclear explosives purposes or outside of international safeguards. This policy is often referred to as the President's Cutoff Initiative or the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). Because both the US Department of Energy (DOE) and foreign reprocessing facilities similar to PUREX will likely to be inspected under a FMCT, the DOE Office of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, Negotiations and Analysis Division (DOE/NN-41) tasked Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) to perform an information gathering exercise, the PUREX Exercise, using the Plutonium-Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant located on the Hanford Site in Washington State. PUREX is a former production reactor fuel reprocessing plant currently undergoing a transition to a ''decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) ready'' mode. The PUREX Exercise was conducted March 29--30, 1994, to examine aspects of the imposition of several possible cutoff regimes and to study verification of non-production of SNM for nuclear weapons purposes or outside of safeguards. A follow-up activity to further examine various additional verification regimes was held at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) on May 10, 1994.