IAEA to consult on an international nuclear fuel assurance plan

London (Platts)--22Sep2006

The IAEA will begin consultations on an international nuclear fuel assurance
plan, following the recommendations of a brainstorming "special event" held
this week during the agency's general conference in Vienna. Charles Curtis,
chairman of the event and president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told a
press conference September 21 that the IAEA secretariat must now engage
countries with incipient fuel cycle capabilities, like Brazil, or those that
might be considering such capabilities. These countries should be included in
a "purposeful and structured consultation" on various proposals put forward at
the meeting, he said. Those proposals include an NTI pledge made on September
18 of $50 million in seed money for a virtual fuel bank administered by the
IAEA, as well as ideas from the nuclear industry, from a six-country group of
enrichment supplier countries, and this week from Japan, Germany and the UK.
Curtis and Tarif Rauf of the IAEA's External Relations and Policy office
stressed that participation by potential recipient countries in a future
nuclear fuel assurance regime would be based on voluntary renunciation of
sensitive fuel cycle technologies. However, Curtis said "renunciation" had
been banned from the vocabulary of the initiative because it is contrary to
states' ideas of their sovereignty. Promoters of the plan are "talking about
incentives" not to develop enrichment and reprocessing, he said. Curtis
acknowledged there is currently no consensus on the "need or the means" for
providing fuel assurances sufficient to obviate the consideration of domestic
sensitive technology development. He said it was hoped the IAEA could bring
consolidated proposals for a way forward to the agency's governing board in a
year's time.

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