Proposal for an Energy Security Initiative

The Energy Security Initiative (ESI) is a proposal to increase the benefits offered to countries in good standing with their NPT Obligations, to compensate for all the new supply restrictions and intrusive safeguards requirements imposed on them. The NPT Balance between benefits to signatories and impositions made on them has eroded through more restrictive interpretations of the NPT. The recently implemented Additional Protocol, the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the proposals to deny nuclear fuel cycle facilities to countries not yet operating them on the one hand, and the limited supply of low cost nuclear energy available to developing countries on the other hand, demonstrate the need to re-constitute the balance implied in the NPT. It is, in fact, in the self interest of the developed countries, to be able to offer an expanded menu of additional energy benefits to countries whose current scope of available benefits has shrank, while the costs of complying with all new restrictions imposed and proposed has increased. This is the purpose of the ESI, which represents a reinterpretation and expansion of a part of Article IV of the NPT.

This presentation includes a detailed description of what ESI could offer under a new reading of article IV; which countries could qualify as beneficiaries of such program, how much might the total program cost, and how to fund it. A special case dealing with small national enrichment plants in countries such as Iran or Brazil is also considered.

Chaim Braun is a vice president of Altos Management Partners, Inc., and a CISAC science fellow and affiliate. He is a member of the Near-Term Deployment and the Economic Cross-Cut Working Groups of the Department of Energy (DOE) Generation IV Roadmap study. He conducted several nuclear economics-related studies for the DOE Nuclear Energy Office, the Energy Information Administration, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Non-Proliferation Trust International, and others. Braun has worked as a member of Bechtel Power Corporation's Nuclear Management Group, and led studies on power plant performance and economics used to support maintenance services. Braun has worked on a study of safeguarding the Agreed Framework in North Korea, he was the co-leader of a NATO Study of Terrorist Threats to Nuclear Power Plants, led CISAC's Summer Study on Terrorist Threats to Research Reactors, and most recently co-authored an article with CISAC Co-Director Chris Chyba on nuclear proliferation rings. His research project this year is entitled "The Energy Security Initiative and a Nuclear Fuel Cycle Center: Two Enhancement Options for the Current Non-Proliferation Regime."