ST. PETERSBURG — Government plans to import and reprocess spent nuclear fuel have caused something of a stir in recent months. As the Nuclear Power Ministry claims potential revenues of billions of dollars, its critics have loudly voiced their concerns on safety issues, financial viability and nuclear accidents in the past.

Meanwhile, Russia and the United States are set to implement another billion-dollar agreement to develop special fuel using weapons-grade plutonium and burn it in existing nuclear reactors.

At first glance, the two projects seem to contradict one another. Reprocessing the imported spent nuclear fuel will give Russia uranium, liquid waste and plutonium. Yet the agreement with the United States appears predicated on nonproliferation — reducing the world's stocks of plutonium.

But interviews with experts and government officials here and in America show that Russia has a long-term vision: the acquisition — at Western expense — of an infrastructure that would allow Russia to abandon traditional uranium energy sources in favor of a more dangerous, but potentially inexhaustible, supply of plutonium fuel.

In other words, Russia is in pursuit of something that has always eluded the nuclear world: a closed-cycle, self-perpetuating nuclear energy system based on plutonium. All it needs is the cash. And both the above plans fit into that scheme.

Left Hand, Right Hand

With the plutonium disposition agreement signed last summer by President Vladimir Putin and then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, is seeking to reduce surplus weapons-grade plutonium in both countries by destroying 34 tons in the United States and 34 tons in Russia. (Former President Boris Yeltsin said in 1997 that Russia has about 50 tons of surplus weapons-grade plutonium stored in dismantled warheads, about half of the total surplus in the world.)

While this agreement was being thrashed out, Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov was campaigning vociferously for a pet project he has been discussing for several years — the paid import of nuclear waste from other countries for disposal and reprocessing in Russia. So confident was Adamov that the State Duma would support him, he struck a deal in December with a nuclear power plant in Bulgaria to import a shipment of nuclear waste from the plant, before the law allowing Russia to accept such imports had even cleared its first reading. It passed that first reading a few days later, and it is expected to fare just as well at its final reading this month.

In a country that cannot keep up with its own mounting nuclear waste, however, such a program sounded to many activists like madness. Environmentalists demanded the question be put to a nationwide referendum, and collected 2.5 million signatures — well above the required 2 million — on a petition to get the process going.

The Central Elections Commission, however, disqualified 800,000 of the signatures over what appeared to be minor technicalities. In several instances, signatures were disqualified because the signatories used "incorrect" abbreviations for their addresses, for example.

Adamov, meanwhile, has managed to shout down any critics in government by showing the bottom line: Russia's cash-strapped nuclear industry could make $21 billion over the next 10 to 15 years by charging other nations a fee for taking nuclear waste off their hands. The money would go on increasing the country's nuclear industry, upping its share of energy production from the current 14 percent to 30 percent in 2030, improving salaries and living conditions for nuclear workers, and providing for programs to clean up the various leaks and spills that have blighted Russia's reputation in this field.

In interviews, the DOE said it has no argument with Russia's import plans. According to officials there, the imports would have "no connection" with the DOE's project because, among other reasons, they would do little to enhance Russia's weapons-grade plutonium stocks once reprocessed.

Officials pointed out that the United States has dibs on 94 percent of spent nuclear fuel worldwide — it either possesses it outright, or has consent rights to it in other countries. Adamov can't get his hands on a significant amount of spent fuel without U.S. say-so. Nonetheless, the DOE's stance makes it clear that Washington will not stand in Adamov's way. The DOE's job, as it sees it, is to dispose of the agreed-upon 68 tons of weapons plutonium over the next 25 years. Whatever happens to the Russian imports is the business of Russia.

Connecting Trains and MOX

Whether or not the DOE acknowledges it, however, its own plutonium-disposition plan — when enacted in the context of the Nuclear Power Ministry's waste-import program — may set the stage for a situation in which Russia not only doesn't deplete its plutonium base, but is given the basic tools by Western countries to increase its plutonium stock infinitely, and virtually for free.

The centerpiece of the DOE's plutonium disposition plan, the department's web site says, is the production of a mixed-oxide nuclear fuel, or MOX, a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide. This fuel would then be burned, on the Russian side, in retrofitted VVER-1000 type reactors, a standard nuclear-power block known as a light-water reactor. Russia has seven of these reactors, which were designed to use uranium, not MOX fuel.

In early January, however, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research released a report that raised a number of technical and security problems with MOX. First, while MOX reactors exist in a number of European countries, they use commercial, reactor-grade plutonium, rather than weapons-grade. (Both categories can be used to make a nuclear bomb, although the yield with reactor-grade material is much less predictable.)

A test to see whether weapons-grade plutonium can be used in MOX fuel is about to start at the Chalk River laboratories in Canada. Initial results will be available in four years. If successful, plans to convert Russian light-water reactors to burn MOX will likely go ahead.

The IEER report was highly critical of the concept, saying MOX experiments in Japan and Europe during the 1980s found light-water reactors increase plutonium isotopes, effectively making the plutonium unfit for repeated use as fuel.

This method of destroying the plutonium was selected by the Nuclear Power Ministry and its DOE counterparts, said the DOE's Laura Holgate, who brokered the disposition accord, because the Russian side steadfastly refused to consider immobilization — that is, burial of fuel in special ceramic chambers.

"I've sat across the negotiating table from [the Nuclear Power Ministry], and they consider plutonium to be a viable resource," said Holgate in a telephone interview from Washington last week.

"The only way they will agree to get rid of it is by burning it in a reactor. If plutonium disposition is to be a reality with the Russians, immobilization is out of the question." To take the MOX route and burn the plutonium, Russia needs approximately $1.7 billion to convert its reactors and to build, or transport from elsewhere, a plant to fabricate MOX fuel. Though more costly than immobilization, it will at least meet the disposition goal.

Not-So-Hidden Agenda

The MOX agreement has been hailed as a route to a safer world, an aid to disarmament, a barrier to "loose nukes," as well as a way of generating more electricity in Russia and thus fulfilling Adamov's stated plans.

But experts say that these issues are a sideshow to the real plan. If Russia gets a MOX fuel production facility, it will have made serious inroads into securing a self-perpetuating, plutonium-based economy.

"The U.S. Department of Energy's MOX-producing plans would create a plutonium economy for Russia and stand the plutonium economy of the world on its head," said Edwin Lyman, scientific director of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington-based nuclear energy watchdog organization.

Lyman said further that Holgate's assertion that Russia won't capitulate to an immobilization plan is "a smoke screen."

"Western countries [participating in the plutonium disposition plan] see it as a business deal — with a veneer of social responsibility."

The MOX plan would give Russia a MOX production plant for free, probably by dismantling an unfinished one from Hanau in Germany and rebuilding it here. Regardless of whether or not Russia's light-water reactors are converted, the country could earn money by exporting MOX fuel. Importing spent fuel is a further source of money, at the same time, as its reprocessing would produce more plutonium. In short, Russia would get the cash, the technology and the fuel, without spending a ruble. All this leads in one direction, analysts say: the construction of a new generation of Russian breeder reactors. "This has been the philosophy [of Russian nuclear agencies] going back to the Soviet Union," said Adrian Collings, an industry expert with the London-based Uranium Institute, a nonprofit, nongovernmental nuclear forum.

Breeder Reactors

Breeder reactors were built to answer the problem of what to do when supplies of uranium ran out. In short, they are designed to create more fuel than they consume by converting a nonfissile isotope of uranium into fissile plutonium, which can then be used as fuel.

However, as the IEER report states, the idea never really worked because breeder reactors proved tricky and expensive to run. At the same time, the price of uranium steadily declined, making the reprocessing of spent fuel to extract plutonium uneconomical by comparison.

With a ready stock of military plutonium, however, the breeder reactor could run on MOX fuel — technically a far better means than converted light-water reactors. As MOX fuel passes through a light-water reactor, its energy supply is reduced.

This doesn't happen with the breeder. In fact, a breeder reactor can actually increase the purity of the plutonium during the reaction process.

Nothing about breeder reactors is written into the U.S.-Russia agreement on MOX fuel. But as stated above, in order to build a closed plutonium economy, Russia needs — aside from the Western-funded MOX-fabrication facility — breeders, and the cash with which to build them. The latter, recalling Adamov's spent-fuel import program, could already be taken care of. According to the IEER report, the cost of Russia's only existing breeder reactor, the BN-600 located at the Mayak reprocessing facility, in the Chelyabinsk region, would be $918 million if translated into today's terms. Should Adamov's plans reach fruition, Russia would feasibly have the money to build several breeders.

Nuclear Power Ministry spokesman Yury Bespalko said in a recent telephone interview from Moscow that Russia has had a so-called BREST breeder reactor on the drawing board for some years. This reactor is designed to create plutonium on a one-to-one ratio, which would make it, for lack of a better term, a perpetual-motion machine. Bespalko would provide no further details, and Lyman was skeptical that the Russians could get the reactor to work.

But Collings at the Uranium Institute said that the Russians were well versed in breeder technology, describing the BN-600 reactor as "highly successful." "Russia has enormous nuclear-research capabilities at the laboratory level," he said.

Few Obstacles

One voice of dissent, published on the Norwegian environmental group Bellona's web site, came from Alexei Yablokov, a former Yeltsin environmental adviser, who said the Russians would be unlikely to attempt a breeder economy, opting instead for cheaper fresh uranium and a host of new light-water reactors.

And a DOE official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the United States would refuse any technical cooperation on any breeder programs in Russia as long as Russia continued supporting the development of a nuclear energy program in Iran. Other alternatives available to the United States, said the official, were to pressure Russia's potential waste disposal client states — like Switzerland, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern European states such as Bulgaria — into not letting go of their spent fuel. But when the MOX plan is through, that still leaves Russia 16 tons of weapons-grade plutonium declared surplus, another 30 tons of separated commercial plutonium stored at Mayak, plus waste disposal contracts that may exist without U.S. knowledge, said NCI's executive director Richard Rosenthal.

Summing up their objections to the DOE's plutonium-disposition plan, Arjun Makhijani, the author of the critical IEER report, wrote: "The net result will be that the first military plutonium will be used in the MOX plant, decreasing the military plutonium stock, while commercial reprocessing increases the commercial plutonium stock.

"Then the military-origin MOX spent fuel can be reprocessed while already separated commercial plutonium is fabricated into MOX fuel. In the meantime, more breeder reactors would be built. All but the last element would be financed with Western money.

"This seems to be the plan that [the Nuclear Power Ministry] is banking on."