The Department of Energy's long-term plan for dealing with material contaminated with plutonium and heavier elements from the U.S. weapons program is to bury it underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico.

The Energy Department's plan aims to safeguard nuclear material for the next 10,000 years. But three Stanford nuclear scientists point out in a new commentary article in the journal Nature that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was not designed to hold as much plutonium as is now being considered for disposal there. And, in fact, the site has seen two accidents in recent years.

"These accidents during the first 15 years of operation really illustrate the challenge of predicting the behavior of the repository over 10,000 years," said Rod Ewing, the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

What's more, there's more plutonium proposed for disposal at WIPP in the future, a result of treaties with the former Soviet Union and now Russia to decrease the number of nuclear weapons by dismantling them.

A recent assessment of what to do with the plutonium from dismantled weapons has proposed that the material be diluted and disposed of at WIPP. But this analysis does not include a revision of the safety analysis for the site, wrote Ewing and his two Stanford co-authors in the Department of Geological Sciences, postdoctoral scholar Cameron Tracy and graduate student Megan Dustin.

They call on the U.S. Department of Energy, which operates WIPP, to take another look at the safety assessment of the site. Particular emphasis should be on the estimates of drilling activity in the oil-rich Permian Basin, where WIPP is located, and on the effects of such a huge increase in the plutonium inventory for the pilot plant.

"The current regulatory period of 10,000 years is short relative to the 24,100-year half-life of plutonium-239, let alone that of its decay product, uranium-235, which has a half-life of 700 million years," the researchers wrote.

"We cannot be certain that future inhabitants of the area will even know WIPP is there," they added. As a result, it is important to understand the impact of future drilling in the area.

The waste is stored 2,150 feet below the surface in hundreds of thousands of plastic-lined steel drums in rooms carved out of a 250-million-year-old salt bed. The repository is at about half of its planned capacity and slated to be sealed in 2033.

The researchers question some of the assumptions used in the safety studies. For example, to determine the odds of oil drilling in the future, the study uses a 100-year historical average drill rate, even though drilling has intensified in recent decades, throwing this assumption into question.

The Stanford experts also suggest more attention to how the buried materials may interact with each other, particularly with salty brine, over centuries. A single storage drum may contain a variety of materials, such as lab coats, gloves and laboratory instruments; thus, the chemistry is complex.

Ewing said that the complacency that led to the accidents at WIPP can also occur in the safety analysis. Therefore, he advises, it is important to carefully review the safety analysis as new strategies for more plutonium disposal are considered.

Rodney Ewing, senior CISAC fellow and Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security, has been honored with three prestigious awards in the geological and mineralogical sciences.

Ewing will receive two medals at the Geological Society of America’s next annual meeting in Baltimore at the end of this month: the Ian Campbell Medal for Superlative Service to the Geosciences from the American Institute of Geosciences, and the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for scientific eminence.

He is being recognized for his groundbreaking research on nuclear materials and his contributions to nuclear waste management.

“Rod Ewing is a modern mineral scientist at the top of his field who has excelled in both science and service,” according to the citation for the Campbell Medal.

“Dr. Ewing has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of radiation damage in minerals and the design of waste forms for high-level nuclear waste. And he continues to have a major impact on the policies underlying nuclear waste management in the United States.”

The international impact of professor Ewing’s research into nuclear waste storage is also being recognized with the IMA Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association, which will be awarded at a meeting in Rimini, Italy next September.

CISAC senior fellow Siegfried Hecker has been awarded an honorary membership by ASM International – one of the most prestigious awards from the world’s largest association of materials scientists and engineers who study and work with metals.

The ASM International board of trustees cited professor Hecker “for scientific enlightenment of Plutonium technology; for leadership of Los Alamos National Laboratory and for leadership in international control of nuclear arms.”

Hecker said he was proud to join a list of honorees that included many of his “old metallurgical heroes,” including Arden Bemet (former director of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and Thomas Edison (inventor of the phonograph, movie camera and light bulb) who was awarded an honorary membership in 1929.

ASM International established its honorary membership award in 1919 to recognize “truly outstanding individuals who have significantly furthered the purposes of the Society through an evidenced appreciation of the importance of the science of materials and through distinguished service to the materials science and engineering profession and the progress of mankind.”

Hecker was also invited this week to deliver the Alpha Sigma Mu International Professional Honor Society for Materials Science and Engineering distinguished lecture in Columbus, Ohio, where he recounted highlights from his storied career, from his time as a student at Ohio’s Case Institute of Technology, rising up the ranks to become director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, leading cleanup efforts at Russia’s former nuclear test site Semipalatinsk, and his current track-two diplomacy and nuclear non-proliferation initiatives with scientists from Russia, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

He concluded his lecture expressing the hope that scientists would use nuclear power to contribute to global peace and prosperity, rather than create war and disaster.

Today’s landmark deal between six world powers and Iran, which would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions, was an important step toward stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb.

However, the key challenge for the international community will be making sure Iran keeps its part of the bargain, according to Stanford experts.

“Both sides have made a series of compromises that will help Iran’s economy in exchange for constraining its nuclear capabilities – and that’s a deal worth making, in my view,” said Scott Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“Iran will still have a technical capability to develop nuclear weapons, given the technology and materials that they have, but under this deal it will both take them a much longer period of time and would require them to take actions that would be easily discerned by the International Atomic Energy Agency, so it constrains their break-out capabilities in important ways.”

[[{"fid":"219719","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"title":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","width":"870","style":"width: 400px; height: 266px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]The U.S.-led negotiations also included fellow United Nations Security Council members Britain, China, France, and Russia, as well as Germany – a group known collectively as as the "P5+1."

Sig Hecker, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the nuclear deal was “hard-won and is better than any other reasonably achievable alternative.”

“Iran agreed to considerably greater restrictions on its program than what I thought was possible before the Joint Plan of Action was signed in November 2013,” said Hecker.

Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law, called it the “least bad deal” for both Iran and the international community.

“Nobody gets everything they want,” Milani said. “Every side gets some of what they want.”

Under the deal, Iran would be allowed to continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes in its energy and health industries.

But it would have to reduce the number of its centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, and cut its stockpile of low enriched uranium down from more than 20 thousand pounds to about 660 pounds.

“Reducing that stockpile actually lengthens the breakout time more than any other measure,” said Hecker.

These limits were designed to increase the “breakout time” it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon from the current two to three months, to one year over a period of the next 10 years.

The agreement still faces a series of political hurdles before it gets implemented, and will face tough scrutiny from a Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, as well as the parliaments of European countries that were parties to the talks.

“I think it’s going to be hard for the U.S. Congress and [European] parliaments to kill the deal and be perceived as the ones who would rather have a war than give diplomacy a chance,” said Thomas Fingar, distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

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“The key is going to be the effectiveness of the verification procedures and IAEA access,” Fingar said.

“There’s an element of trust, but a far more important part is the rigorous verification protocols.”

As soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran is abiding by the terms of the agreement, economic sanctions can be lifted.

Sagan warned that the international community should not be surprised if Iran pushed the limits of the agreement, and should be ready to reimpose economic sanctions if Iran violated the deal.

“We should anticipate that Iranian opponents to the agreement will try to stretch it and do things that are potential violations and that we have to call them on that, and not treat every problem that we see as unexpected,” said Sagan.

“We should anticipate such problems and be ready, if necessary, to reimpose sanctions. Having the ability to reimpose sanctions is the best way to deter the Iranians from engaging in such violations.”

But Hecker said the international community should focus on incentivizing Iran.

“The best hope is to make the civilian nuclear path so appealing – and then successful – that Tehran will not want to risk the political and economic consequences of that success by pursuing the bomb option,” he said.

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Iran faced the threat of military action if it continued to press forward with its nuclear program.

While Russia and China had both signaled that they were likely to abandon the sanctions regime if talks fell apart.

One of the key challenges to reaching an agreement was “finding a language that would allow both parties to declare victory”, according to Milani.

“Iran has clearly made some very substantive concessions, but Iran has also been allowed to keep enough of its infrastructure so that it can declare at least partial victory for the domestic political audience."

Now the scramble is on in Tehran to claim credit for the deal.

Reformists, led by current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, hope it will strengthen their hand as they head into the next election.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives believe it could give them the edge in the battle to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader.

“They understand that whoever gets the credit for this will be in a much better position to determine the future leadership and future direction of Iran’s foreign policy,” said Milani.

It’s too early to tell what impact the agreement might have on Iran’s foreign policy, which is often at odds with U.S. interests in hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. But Sagan said today’s deal was an important step in making sure that future conflicts with Iran don’t go nuclear.

“Hopefully those disagreements will be played out without the shadow of nuclear weapons hanging over the future, and that’s a good thing.”

It’s been 29 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but two nuclear security experts affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) say there are still lessons to be learned from the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century.

In a new book by Sonja Schmid, the former CISAC science fellow argues that the consensus in the West about the cause of the disaster – that it was an inevitable result of a deeply flawed, backward Soviet system –  has precluded Western nuclear industries and policymakers from meaningfully incorporating the Soviet experience into their own practices.

The book, “Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry”, is being praised by leading experts in the nuclear security field, including Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI) Senior Fellow David Holloway who wrote: "[Schmid's] argument that the Soviet experience has to be incorporated into our broader understanding of the nuclear industry is both convincing and important."

Schmid was a social science research associate at Stanford University, a science fellow at CISAC, and a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Stanford from 2005-2007. She is now an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s STS Department.

Schmid credits CISAC with providing resources crucial to the conception, research, and completion of “Producing Power,” including multiple travel grants to conduct research for the book, help with editing preliminary drafts, and a final book edit.

Schmid also tapped CISAC’s stable of nuclear experts. Along with Holloway, CISAC Associate Director for Research Lynn Eden mentored and supported her project. Siegfried Hecker, an FSI senior fellow, connected her with multiple Russian interviewees.

“Mentoring Sonja was a great pleasure. She came to CISAC with deep insight about the close connection between Soviet state bureaucracies and the reactor design choices that those bureaucrats made. It was an amazingly interesting and ambitious project,” Eden said.

“CISAC is a scholarly community that encourages and supports outstanding research and writing that is in some way policy-relevant,” she said. “For our pre- and post-doctoral fellows especially, we want to encourage them and help them to think deeply and/or broadly about a question that affects people’s lives, and to write clearly about it.”

Edward Geist, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, said Schmid’s book is the first to grapple with the institutional history of Soviet nuclear power.

“The traditional accounts have tended to organize events around a ‘what went wrong’ narrative,” said Geist, whose article “Political Fallout: The Failure of the Emergency Management at Chernobyl”, appeared in the spring issue of Slavic Review. ”There’s a school of thought that emerged in the Soviet Union and was readily picked up abroad that says the Chernobyl disaster was the ultimate example of everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union,” Geist said.

This worries Geist, who specializes in nuclear power, Soviet history, and emergency management.

“As a result of having lived through the worst, Russian and Ukrainian nuclear energy industry leaders, to my mind, actually have a more realistic mindset regarding the hazards of nuclear energy than their Western counterparts,” Geist said.  “While a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States is really unlikely, the nuclear industry claims to have made nuclear power safe through superior methods and procedures–and that attitude can forestall effective emergency planning.”

The Chernobyl disaster hurt popular trust in nuclear energy, including in the United States. The still-popular narrative that Chernobyl was a problem purely of Soviet making was spun by representatives of nuclear industries in other countries to protect their interests from popular backlash.

By detailing the decision processes and procedures behind the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactor choice, design and commercialization, Schmid aims to show that the Soviet process was rational and the product of expert input rather than an irrational byproduct of the Communist regime. Chernobyl, in short, was an accident of history rather than a byproduct of an illegitimate system and should therefore be studied by members of the Western nuclear industry and policymakers.

“The Western nuclear field has more to learn from the Soviet experience than they care to admit. The bureaucratic practices of the Soviets are not really that unique to them and can be repeated by our bureaucracies,” said Geist.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan was a case in point. Fukushima’s reactors were designed and built by Americans.

It’s Schmid’s hope that by putting Chernobyl in the context of what was a sophisticated nuclear energy bureaucracy that had many more successes than failures, much like its American counterpart, that lessons of caution can be drawn by the latter.

“What Chernobyl has demonstrated (and Fukushima has only confirmed),” writes Schmid, “is that organizing a civilian nuclear industry remains at best a high-stakes process of trial and error.”

Geist, with an eye on his field of emergency management, agrees.

“The lesson from Chernobyl and Fukushima is accidents happen no matter what procedures or levels of sophistication, but accidents need not be catastrophes if you’re willing to learn from others’ errors and incorporate them into planning.”