Year
2011
Abstract
A major outcome of the April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC, was the commitment by 47 nations to collaborate in developing new technologies that require neither highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuels for reactor operation nor HEU targets for producing medical or other isotopes. At the summit, South Africa announced that it, quite ambitiously, had not only adopted a national policy of HEU-free production of medical isotopes -- that is, using only low-enriched uranium (LEU) for both fuel and targets -- but it also had developed the technology to carry it out. Regrettably, this significant advance could be undermined by economic disincentives. Molybdenum 99 produced from LEU targets is estimated to be about 10 percent more expensive than that produced from HEU, according to NTP Radioisotopes, a subsidiary of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation. NTP officials maintain that there is also a smaller additional economic penalty that South Africa pays by also using LEU fuel since this both produces more uranium waste and produces a somewhat smaller yield of Mo-99 (about 5 percent less) because of a smaller neutron flux. At the same time as South Africa is forced to incur higher costs, it is competing against lower-cost HEU producers, and in a market that is anything but free. As a recent OECD report makes clear, the Mo-99 market has long been distorted by government subsidies. The most important of these is that the capital costs of HEU-based Mo-99 production are not often factored into the cost that commercial processors have to pay. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration is employing several strategies to level the playing field for LEU-based producers including supporting congressional legislation that would phase out exports of US HEU used by foreign producers; supporting domestic LEU production; and seeking to cajole foreign producers to abandon subsidies and renounce new HEU-based production. This paper will evaluate these efforts and assess their progress.