Six years ago, NPEC ran a mock execution of a law Congress passed in 1978 but that the Executive refused to implement —Title V of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978. Title V called on the State and Energy Departments to conduct country-specific analyses of how developing states might best meet their energy needs without nuclear power. It also called for the creation of an energy Peace Corps and an assessment of what our government was spending on energy development aid-related projects.
When NPEC started its efforts, the staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked to see what NPEC produced to use it to pressure the Executive finally to implement the law. NPEC commissioned a number of studies on how Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Taiwan might best meet their energy requirements without nuclear power. The center also contracted studies on the history and intent of Title V and on what government programs were already in play that aligned with Title V‘s stated objectives. As soon as NPEC’s project was completed, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff prepared a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking the Secretary finally to implement Title V and file the reports required by law.
Then, something unexpected occurred. The committee’s legal counsel discovered that the Secretary was under no obligation to comply: Congress had eliminated Title V’s reporting requirements along with several hundred other Congressionally mandated reports back in 1995. Flummoxed, I quietly set the book manuscript aside.
Why, then, release it today? Because it is again timely. In October, the Biden Administration announced it is still considering extending civilian nuclear cooperation with Riyadh that would allow the Kingdom to enrich uranium — a process that can bring states within weeks of acquiring the bomb. Administration officials no longer question if Saudi Arabia really needs nuclear energy to meet its energy requirements. Shouldn’t they?
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s presidential election this coming Saturday will, among other things, decide if Taiwan will build more nuclear reactors or not. Again, is new nuclear Taiwan’s best energy bet? As for China, the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned that the two “peaceful” fast breeder reactors and plutonium reprocessing plants Beijing is building will be used to make hundreds of bombs worth of weapons plutonium. One of the two fast breeder reactors is already operating. The question these dangerous nuclear activities raise is just how necessary they are to meet China’s energy requirements.
Then, there’s Iran, which is intent on building reactors of Iranian design. It plans on expanding its nuclear power program from roughly one gigawatt electrical capacity to 11. Given Iran’s renewables potential and oil and gas reserves, how much sense does this make? Finally, in its efforts to achieve net zero, the Biden Administration has joined 20 other nations in pledging to triple global nuclear generation by 2050. Again, how practical is this?
This volume’s aim is to help provide answers. Of course, in light of how long our government has ignored Title V, demanding it be implemented now would be odd. Creating a clean energy Peace Corps, comparing the costs of different types of energy, and trying to determine what investments would reduce emissions quickest and cheapest, however, all should be discussed. It’s my hope that the release of Net-Zero and Nonproliferation: Assessing Nuclear Power and Its Alternatives today might prompt such discussion.
Published January 2024
Published by: Nonproliferation Policy Education Center
Edited by: Henry Sokolski
For a physical Amazon copy of the book click here.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..3
Net-Zero and Nonproliferation: Assessing Nuclear Power and Its Alternatives
Henry Sokolski…………………………………………………………………4
A Brief History of Title V in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978
Leonard Weiss………………………………………………………………..11
U.S. International Energy Assistance and Cooperation: Has the Title V Objective Been Realized?
Robert Ichord…………………………………………………………………17
Motivations for Nuclear Power Programs
Stephen Thomas……………………………………………………………..63
Meeting China’s Future Energy Needs: Is Increasing Nuclear Power the Best Way To Go?
David von Hippel………………………………………………………….104
How Bright Is Taiwan’s Non-Nuclear Future?
Jessica Drun and Alexa Lee……………………………………………184
Economic Considerations of Nuclear Power Deployment in Saudi Arabia
Ali Ahmad……………………………………………………………………229
Saudi Arabia Energy Needs and Nuclear Power
Robin Mills………………………………………………………………….251
Meeting Iran’s Energy Requirements without Nuclear Power
Patrick Clawson……………………………………………………………300
The Enigma of Resource-Rich Iran’s Pursuit of Nuclear Energy
Geoffrey Styles…………………………………………………………….331
Appendix: Title V of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978
…………………………………………………………………………….364
About the Authors……………………………………………………….367
Net-Zero and Nonproliferation: Assessing Nuclear Power and Its Alternatives
Henry Sokolski
January 2024
Six years ago, NPEC ran a mock execution of a law Congress passed in 1978 but that the Executive refused to implement — Title V of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978. Title V called on the State and Energy Departments to conduct country-specific analyses of how developing states might best meet their energy needs without nuclear power. It also called for the creation of an energy Peace Corps and an assessment of what our government was spending on energy development aid-related projects.
The gist of this law was best captured by the language contained in Title V’s opening section:
The United States shall endeavor to cooperate with other nations, international institutions, and private organizations in establishing programs to assist in the development of non-nuclear energy resources, to cooperate with both developing and industrialized nations in protecting the international environment from contamination arising from both nuclear and non-nuclear energy activities, and shall seek to cooperate with and aid developing countries in meeting their energy needs through the development of such resources and the application of non-nuclear technologies consistent with the economic factors, the material resources of those countries, and environmental protection. The United States shall additionally seek to encourage other industrialized nations and groups of nations to make commitments for similar cooperation and aid to developing countries. The President shall report annually to Congress on the level of other nations’ and groups of nations’ commitments under such program and the relation of any such commitments to United States efforts under this Title. In cooperating with and providing such assistance to developing countries, the United States shall give priority to parties to the Treaty.[1]
Title V aimed to restrain and counterbalance the global promotion of nuclear power. It recognized the inherent nuclear weapons proliferation danger that any expansion of nuclear power posed. As Leonard Weiss, a key author of Title V noted, “a nonproliferation policy worthy of the name should begin with recognition of the inherent weapons proliferation potential in the technology and avoiding encouragement of its adoption whenever economically viable alternatives are available.”[2]
When NPEC started its efforts to write up this and the other required Title V reports, the staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked to see what NPEC produced to use it to pressure the Executive finally to implement the law. NPEC commissioned a number of studies on how Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Taiwan might best meet their energy requirements without nuclear power. The center also contracted studies on the history and intent of Title V and on what government programs were already in play that aligned with Title V‘s stated objectives. As soon as NPEC’s project was completed, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff prepared a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking the Secretary finally to implement Title V and file the reports required by law.
Then, something unexpected occurred. The committee’s legal counsel discovered that the Secretary was under no obligation to comply: Congress had eliminated Title V’s reporting requirements along with several hundred other Congressionally mandated reports back in 1995. This was embarrassing. Flummoxed, I quietly set the book manuscript aside.
Why, then, release it today? Despite the project having been completed nearly six years ago, its country-specific energy assessments — on Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran — are now more timely than when they were written. In October, the Biden Administration announced it is still considering extending civilian nuclear cooperation with Riyadh[3] that would allow the Kingdom to enrich uranium — a process that can bring states within weeks of acquiring the bomb. Administration officials no longer question if Saudi Arabia really needs nuclear energy to meet its energy requirements. Shouldn’t they?
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s presidential election this January will, among other things, decide if Taiwan will build more nuclear reactors or not. Again, how necessary building new plants is a central question. As for China, the Pentagon has become increasingly concerned that the two “peaceful” fast breeder reactors and plutonium reprocessing plants Beijing is building will be used to make hundreds of bombs worth of weapons plutonium. One of the two fast breeder reactors is already operating. The question these dangerous nuclear activities raise is just how necessary they are to meet China’s energy requirements.
Then, there’s Iran, which is intent[4] on building reactors of Iranian design. It plans on expanding its nuclear power program from roughly one gigawatt electrical capacity to 11. Given Iran’s renewables potential and oil and gas reserves, how much sense does such nuclear construction make?
The studies in this volume help answer these questions and more. In addition to country-specific energy studies for China, Taiwan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, it includes a brief legislative history of Title V along with a rough inventory of energy assistance programs the U.S. government conducts relevant to Title V’s objectives.
These objectives were timely 45 years ago. They were timely six years ago. They are still timely today. Just this last month, the United States pledged to achieve net-zero global carbon emissions by 2050.[5] To achieve that requires country-specific assessments of how best to meet this goal in a manner almost identical to that stipulated in Title V. The country-specific studies contained in this volume offer up worthy models.
Meanwhile, the Energy Department just created a Clean Energy Corps to accelerate efforts to clean up America’s energy sector.[6] This corps’ goals are similar to those of the energy Peace Corps that Title V proposed. The key difference is that the Clean Energy Corps is currently focused only on domestic American energy endeavors. Yet, the United States emits 14 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide.[7] If the Energy Department is serious about achieving net-zero emissions, expanding the Clean Energy Corps’ authority to cover U.S. energy assistance to friendly developing states would necessarily make sense as would a Title V-like report on the feasibility and advantages of creating a U.S. energy Peace Corps-like entity what would work both domestic and overseas clean energy development.
Finally, Washington officials also have committed to tripling global nuclear power and renewables[8] three-fold to help achieve net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century. This immediately raises a practical question: If the United States is serious about its net-zero pledge, what is the quickest, cheapest way to achieve it? Would it be quicker and cheaper to invest in natural gas conversions of coal plants as a bridge to moving entirely carbon-free forms of energy or to skip this gas transition and immediately invest all of our resources into renewables? What of nuclear power, which currently is quite capital intensive? Does it make more sense to build many of these plants now when the cost of borrowing is so high or should such investments be delayed until the overnight construction and borrowing costs decline?
To answer these issues, in turn, requires clarity on two fronts. First, what are the real overnight and levelized costs for renewables, nuclear, fossil-fueled energy systems, and their related energy storage and distribution systems? Unfortunately, solid information of this sort is all too scarce. Rarer still are sound, official government figures on these costs. The reason why is simple: government officials and industry have little incentive to clarify the ways different kinds of energy systems are subsidized and how large these subsidies are. Instead, they support an “all-of-the-above” approach to handing out government energy support.
This is unnecessarily wasteful. If Congress or the Executive wants to cut this waste, though, routine, up-to-date, official reports comparing the levelized and overnight construction costs of different energy systems and their related distribution and storage systems are essential. These costs, of course, must factor in government subsidies.
Second, one or more greenhouse gas cost abatement curve models need to be made available to help determine how much and when investments in different energy types and their related storage and distribution systems would make the most sense to get to net-zero quickest at the least cost. Currently, the best known model is the one the McKinsey Company has developed.[9] Both environmentalists and nuclear utilities have used this model. Other abatement curve models are available.[10] It would be useful for the U.S. government to endorse one or more of these, make them publicly available, and use them to devise investment strategies to achieve net-zero in the cheapest, quickest fashion.
Finally, just as Title V requires under Section 501, the Departments of Energy and State should catalogue what the U.S. government is doing with other nations, international institutions, and private organizations to meet their energy requirements in the cleanest fashion possible. This volume includes a rough catalogue of such programs. It, however, needs to be expanded and updated.
[1]. See Appendix of this volume, “Text of Title V of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978,” Section 501, p. 364.
[2]. See Leonard Weiss, “A Brief History of Title V in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978,” pp. 11.
[3]. See Brit Farmer, “Biden: Saudi-Israeli Normalization Not Dead” 60 Minutes, October 15, 2023, available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-saudi-arabia-israel-normalization-not-dead-60-minutes/.
[4]. “Iran begins procedures to build indigenous nuclear reactor,” Nuclear Energy International, 11 May 2022 available at https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsiran-begins-procedures-to-build-indigenous-nuclear-reactor-9687300.
[5]. See Dipanita Nath, ”Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Pledge at COP28: what is the tripling renewable energy target?” India Express, December 10, 2023, available at https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-climate/cop28-tripling-renewable-energy-target-9062282/.
[6]. See “Biden launches US ‘climate corps’ amid pressure from environmental advocates,” Al Jazeera, September 20, 2023 available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/20/biden-launches-us-climate-corps-amid-pressure-from-environment-advocates and US Department of Energy, “Clean Energy Corps,” available at https://www.energy.gov/CleanEnergyCorps.
[7]. Statista, “Emissions in the U.S.,” December 23, 2023, available at https://www.statista.com/topics/3185/us-greenhouse-gas-emissions/#topicOverview.
[8]. U.S. Department of Energy, “At COP28, Countries Launch Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy Capacity by 2050,” December 1, 2023, available at https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key.
[9]. See McKinsey & Company, “Pathways to a Low-carbon Economy: Version 2 of the Global Greenhouse Cost Abatement Curve, 2009, available at https://www.energy.gov/articles/cop28-countries-launch-declaration-triple-nuclear-energy-capacity-2050-recognizing-key.
[10]. For a brief overview and discussion of several cost abatement curve models see Wikipedia, “Marginal Abatement Cost,” available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_abatement_cost. Note well that many other models have been devised besides those listed in this article.
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