DOE increases request for GTRI; some say larger boost needed
Nuclear Fuels by Daniel Horner
February 12, 2007
(For personal use only)

DOE last week requested $119.6 million in fiscal 2008 funding for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a 10.7% increase from the $106.8 million the department requested a year ago.

Congress has not yet set FY-07 funding levels for most federal agencies, including DOE, but a joint funding resolution that was crafted by senior members of both chambers and approved by the House January 31 would give GTRI $115.5 million. The FY-08 DOE request represents a 3.6% increase from that level.

In a February 7 interview, Jack Edlow ? president of Edlow International, a nuclear transport and consulting company ? said the request represents "a good start" but "falls far short of where [the funding] needs to be." Edlow said he hoped to see Congress raise the funding level significantly above the DOE request.

At a February 6 briefing for reporters, William Tobey of DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration said, "Budgets are always a series of trade-offs." DOE will continue to implement the GTRI programs "enthusiastically," said Tobey, who is NNSA's deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.

In the FY-08 request, the major funding shift comes from an effort to provide long-term dry storage and physical protection for spent fuel from Kazakhstan's shutdown BN-350 breeder reactor. The spent fuel contains about 3 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium and 10 mt of high-enriched uranium, according to DOE budget documents.

Funding for that work would increase by $27.8 million from the FY-07 request, to $31.7 million. The money would be used for "serial production and delivery" of 27 100-mt casks, as part of the effort to move all the BN-350 spent fuel to Kazakhstan's Baikal waste storage site by 2010, DOE said.

Another significant funding shift was a reduction of $12.3 million, to $6 million for FY-08, for International Radiological Threat Reduction.

Funding for some of GTRI's core programs would change much less. Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors, or Rertr ? which aims to convert US-supplied nonpower reactors around the world from HEU to low-enriched uranium fuel and targets ? would drop by $0.9 million, to $31.2 million; US Foreign Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel Return would decrease by $2.1 million, to $4.2 million; and Russian Research Reactor Fuel Return, which works for the repatriation of spent and fresh HEU fuel from Soviet-supplied reactors, would rise by $1 million, to $31 million.

For FY 2009-2012, DOE projects annual funding needs rising from $151.9 million to $175.8 million. DOE says that by the end of that period, it plans to have converted 95 reactors from HEU, with another 34 following in FY 2013-2018.

But Edlow called that timetable "ridiculous." He acknowledged there is a limit on the number of conversions that can take place in the immediate future, because many reactors require a high-density LEU fuel that is still under development. But if development of such fuel is completed by 2010 ? the schedule that DOE gives in its budget documents, and that Edlow said was reasonable ? the main technical constraint would be lifted and conversion and the pace of conversion would be primarily "a question of money," he said.

In contrast to the conversion effort, there is no real technical constraint on the return of the US- and Russian-origin materials, particularly since the GTRI program now has the capacity to manage multiple shipments simultaneously, he said. With funding of $250 million a year for three years, the program should be able to take back all the US and Russian material in addition to completing development of the high-density LEU fuel, he said.

A country that can afford to spend $100 billion a year for the war in Iraq can afford to spend less than $1 billion over three years to secure materials that could be used in weapons of mass destruction, Edlow said.

He said he would urge Congress to double the administration's GTRI request. He noted that the FY-07 funding level approved by the House ? $147.6 million ? was substantially above the administration request. The $116.8 million approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee also was above the DOE request. The Senate committee's bill never came to a vote by the full Senate.

The budget request lays out with considerable specificity DOE's FY-08 plans for the GTRI "subprograms," as the budget document calls them. Under Rertr, the program would convert three facilities in Japan, two in the US ? at Oregon State University and Washington State University ? and one each in Bulgaria, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK and Vietnam.

Russian-origin fuel ? totaling more than 400 kilograms of "fresh fuel and/or spent fuel" ? would be returned from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Libya, Poland and Ukraine, the budget document said. The program dealing with US-origin spent fuel would bring back 675 spent fuel assemblies containing 70 kg of HEU from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, DOE said.

Under the Emerging Threats and Gap Materials subprogram, nearly 90 kg of "HEU and plutonium material" would be removed from Chile, Denmark, Greece, Italy and Switzerland in FY-08, DOE said. That effort, which "provides for material packaging, secure transport, storage and/or disposition of civilian HEU and plutonium not covered under other GTRI programs," would receive $1.7 million in FY-08, down from the $5.7 million request for FY-07.

Waiting for contract award

The budget request also gives a timeline for disbursement, from 2007 to 2012, of a $100 million contract. The request for proposals for that contract has been issued, and Andrew Bieniawski, NNSA's assistant deputy administrator for global threat reduction, said in an interview in late December that the contract would be awarded at the end of February or beginning of March. But he said it wasn't clear what the amount of the contract would be, because of the uncertainties surrounding the FY-07 DOE funding. NNSA spokeswoman Julianne Smith said last week that "the contract arrangement is ongoing, "and that it was "in the later stages."

The RFP is for an IDIQ (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) contract. The RFP includes two "sample task orders," one of which is for "recovery of three large beta- and gamma-emitting sources in self-shielded irradiators in the United States."

Under the other order, the contractor would assess a radioactive waste management facility for its vulnerability to unauthorized access and to theft of high-risk nuclear and radioactive materials. The contractor then would design and install security upgrades and would develop enhanced security procedures. The facility described in the RFP is located in "Belugistan," a fictional former Soviet Republic in Central Asia.