BEIJING—China’s plans to process spent nuclear fuel into plutonium that could be used in weapons is drawing concern from the U.S. that Beijing is heightening the risk of nuclear proliferation.
U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, in Beijing for talks, said Thursday that China’s plans to build a nuclear-recycling facility present challenges to global efforts to control the spread of potentially dangerous materials.
“We don’t support large-scale reprocessing,” Mr. Moniz told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. He said China’s recent announcements that it would press ahead with building the country’s first such commercial-scale facility “certainly isn’t a positive in terms of nonproliferation.”
Mr. Moniz’s comments marked a rare public expression by the Obama administration of concern over China’s reprocessing plans. The differences, which the governments have discussed privately, are being aired ahead of a visit by President Xi Jinping to Washington this month for a summit with President Barack Obama and other world leaders on nuclear security.
The issue comes down to the different choices countries make over how to handle potentially dangerous waste created by commercial nuclear reactors. In the U.S., spent fuel is treated as sensitive material and is stored, and reprocessing is banned out of proliferation concerns.
Elsewhere, including in France and Japan, spent fuel is recycled to extract plutonium to be used in nuclear reactors. The U.S.’s concern is that the bigger the stockpiles of plutonium, the higher the risk that some of it could be refined for use in nuclear weapons or taken by terrorists.
China has said that the reprocessing is intended for commercial use. The Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on Mr. Moniz’s remarks. China’s National Nuclear Safety Administration referred comments to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which didn’t answer phone calls.
U.S. concerns about nuclear reprocessing and proliferation are particularly acute in the Asia-Pacific region, “where the perception is there is less international cooperation, less transparency,” said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
North Korea has ramped up its nuclear program and this month showed off what it said was a miniaturized nuclear warhead for missiles. Those capabilities have put South Korea and Japan on edge, raising fears of a renewed arms race.
At the same time, larger Chinese stockpiles of isolated plutonium could prompt Japan, especially, to build up its caches.
Civilian plutonium stockpiles reached 271 metric tons by the end of 2014, up from around 150 metric tons in the 1990s, the International Panel on Fissile Materials, an independent group looking at nonproliferation policy, said in its latest annual report.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported in September that construction of China’s reprocessing facility may start in 2020 and take a decade to complete. The project is expected to have a processing capacity of 800 metric tons of spent fuel a year.
Mr. Moniz declined to say whether he raised the reprocessing issue in meetings in Beijing this week. His discussions have focused on nuclear security and climate change.
Previously, the U.S. has questioned the economic viability of such projects, which are expensive to build and operate, as well as proliferation issues, he said.
“I don’t think in any way we’ve been coy about our arguments with all of our partners,” he said. “We just see so many problems. It’s just, on objective grounds, very difficult to understand.”
As China’s economy boomed, so did its electricity needs.
A desire to curb emissions and cut smog spurred a breakneck build-out of nuclear power capacity. China has 31 operational nuclear reactors and another 24 under construction.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says reactor construction in China accounts for one-third of all projects globally.
Mr. Hibbs from the Carnegie center said China’s decision to pursue reprocessing couldn’t be justified on economic or commercial grounds, given the billions of dollars needed to construct one large-scale facility. But China may be acting strategically, guaranteeing future fuel supply by recycling, he added.
Last June, state-owned China National Nuclear Corp. and France’s Areva SA agreed to speed up negotiations on building the facility. Areva didn’t respond to a request for comment on Mr. Moniz’s remarks and CNNC said its press officers weren’t available.http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-plans-to-recycle-nuclear-fuel-raise-concerns-1458228504
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