[cdn-nucl-l] Megatons to Megawatts: Good Prediction, Bad News

["Adam McLean" <adam.mclean@utoronto.ca>]

Posted in Science Magazine, Volume 295, Number 5556, February 1, 2002,
p. 765.
An interesting view on the privatization and future of swords to
plowshears...

Adam

---------------

Good Prediction, Bad News

Donald Kennedy
Economists, like lawyers, are frequent victims of the unkind use of
humor. What easy targets they are! It is the economist's lot to predict
the future, in a world in which circumstances and human motives refuse
to stand still. So when an economist, especially one who stands naked on
the public policy stage, gets a call right, he deserves applause.
Therefore let's hear it for Joseph Stiglitz who, as chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton administration, argued in
the mid-1990s that the privatization of the United States Enrichment
Corporation (USEC)--then a government entity--would be a bad idea.
Current events validate his prediction with a vengeance and should be of
deep concern to scientists and policy-makers.

Here is the condensed history of a strange, tortuous episode. USEC was
established in 1992, just as the Soviet Union was falling apart. It was
a government-controlled corporation, devised by Congress to take over
the Department of Energy's task of producing enriched uranium. From the
beginning, it was an experiment in the evolution of privatization, in
accordance with the prevailing market mantra that private entities
working for their shareholders do things more efficiently than
governments can. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, USEC undertook
a new mission. It resulted from a suggestion by MIT physicist Thomas
Neff, who later received the American Physical Society's Szilard Award
for Physics in the Public Interest. Under a U.S.-Russian agreement that
came to be called "Megatons for Megawatts," USEC would purchase
lower-grade fissionable material for nuclear reactors, obtained by
down-blending bomb-grade uranium from Russian warheads. It looked like
an attractive deal all around: Russia got significant income and kept a
stable of scientists busy, and USEC got material to sell to utilities.
The arrangement called for USEC to accept, over a 20-year period, about
500 metric tons of the weapons-grade uranium; it would then be able to
supply about half of the uranium used by U.S. nuclear power plants,
thereby accounting for 10% of U.S. electric power needs.

But that's not the best part of the deal. The best part, in the view of
the security community and the scientists who have advised it, was that
the agreement would help keep the stuff out of the wrong hands.
Terrorists and rogue states would like to have weapons-grade uranium;
Russia's sites were notoriously lax, and money would surely be offered
for diversion. Transferring the material to peaceful uses through this
mechanism provided the strongest protection against that security risk.

The agreement followed a bumpy early course, with disagreements over
price and other issues. Meanwhile, privatization was moving toward
approval by a combination of congressional pressure, misleading
accounting that made the proceeds of the sale look like a revenue gain,
and simple inertia. Within the Clinton administration, privatization
faced only token opposition, save for Stiglitz, who told the Washington
Monthly well before the sale to investors was closed: "You don't have to
use a lot of imagination to see that the economic incentives are not
there for USEC to import the Russian uranium. So you're putting
something that's in our national security interests in direct conflict
with USEC's private property interests."

As this issue of Science went to press, the parties were locked in yet
another stalemate over the price for delivery of down-blended Russian
uranium to USEC. This time USEC has said that it won't take the material
unless the Russians accept its lower price terms. Why should it? Its
other work has better profit margins, and its managers (including
several former government employees who were rewarded with good jobs for
urging privatization) have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. But as
the profits rise, the proliferation risks grow, and national security
will suffer--just as Stiglitz had predicted.

It is worth noting that since September 11, some of our national
enthusiasm for turning everything over to the private sector has faded;
see, for example, the spasm of second thoughts about the airline
security mess, another instance in which national security interests and
the profit motive collide. This loss of innocence about markets is a
good thing: They are fine in their place, but when market incentives
conflict with national security, security should come first. The
government probably can't repossess USEC, but it must make it behave.