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Sharing the Atom, a special podcast from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and Argonne National Laboratory, takes you on a journey from the discovery of nuclear fission to the development of global commitments and systems to also use that discovery for good.
Sharing the Atom tells the story of how world leaders came together to develop a political and legal framework that enables the pursuit of nuclear technologies for peaceful use and how that framework is needed more than ever today.
At the center of this story is an international treaty: The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. Though seen by some as primarily a measure to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to hasten nuclear disarmament, the treaty also created the economic and security conditions for countries to access nuclear technologies for use in agriculture, energy, industry, and, of course, medicine. As demand for various peaceful uses of nuclear technology increases in response to numerous global challenges, the NPT is as relevant as ever in supporting a peaceful and prosperous world.
Voices included in the series: Ghanaian Ambassador Kwaku Aning, Canadian Ambassador John Barrett, Former Canadian official Jim Casterton, Dutch Ambassador Piet de Klerk, Brazilian Ambassador Sérgio Duarte, Doctor Guiseppe Esposito, NNSA Associate Deputy Administrator Rich Goorevich, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, Former U.S. official Lisa Hilliard, NNSA Assistant Deputy Administrator Corey Hinderstein, U.S. Ambassador Laura Holgate, Former President of Urenco USA, Inc.; current NNSA Assistant Associate Deputy Administrator Melissa Mann, ABACC Secretary General Marco Marzo, Former Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, Nigerian Ambassador Charles Oko, Former Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman, Author Richard Rhodes, NNSA Deputy Administrator Frank Rose, Former IAEA official Laura Rockwood, Economist Geoffrey Rothwell, Scholar Scott Sagan, U.S. Ambassador Adam Scheinman, Economist Tom Wood
Kwaku Aning: I used to say that [nuclear is] the biggest, the most profound technology that we have.
Kwaku Aning, Ghanaian diplomat and the former head of Technical Cooperation at the IAEA.
It is powerful in two totally separate ways. Its ability to destroy nuclear technology. The same technology can be used to determine whether a six months old baby is getting the right nutrient. So the use is broad, almost limitless. And its application is everywhere. Ubiquitous, it's everywhere.
Laura Rockwood: We don't educate people well enough on the Peaceful Uses of nuclear that don't involve energy. It's just, there's almost no aspect of science and technology that nuclear...
Laura Rockwood, former senior IAEA official.
Look at the zoonotic diseases because of some work that was done earlier by the IAEA, the IAEA was able to step in and help the labs in Africa develop a rapid approach for detecting COVID. Go figure who knew, right? So those are the wins that need to be better advertised, [00:48:30] better understood by everybody, starting with grade school kids.
Welcome to Sharing the Atom, a special podcast from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and Argonne National Laboratory, that takes you on a journey from the discovery of nuclear fission, to the development of global commitments to use that discovery for good.
Sharing the Atom tells the story of how world leaders came together to develop a political and legal framework that enables the pursuit of nuclear technologies for peaceful use and how that framework is needed more than ever today.
[Sound design interlude]
In the first two episodes, we explored the conditions that led to the negotiation of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and how the treaty provides the basis for enhancing peaceful nuclear cooperation.
In this third episode, we take a closer look at exactly what the NPT enabled: the exploration, development, and international sharing of technologies based on nuclear science that are used to improve the quality and well-being of people’s lives around the world. The closer we look, the more we realize the myriad of ways nuclear energy enables fundamental things we may take for granted: Cancer treatment, clean water, climate change mitigation and so much more. While the most significant and obvious peaceful use is for nuclear power, non-nuclear power uses of nuclear technology are critical to many other aspects of daily life.
The foundation for all of this work is the NPT, which is instrumental to ensuring that all peaceful [you say, “powerful”, restate peaceful] nuclear cooperation does not contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation. Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, is a diplomat and was President-Designate of the 2020 NPT Review Conference.
Nuclear technologies have something very, very important to offer ranging, of course, in the high end from those who are including nuclear energy in their integrated, intelligent energy mixes with a wise combination of renewable energies, and clean energies. And we see a lot of that. The IAEA is an enabler of that, and this is very clear. And then at the same time, we also look at the terminology that these days is applied in the climate negotiations. When you look also at the adaptation, mitigation being the nuclear energy part. When you look at the adaptation, then you see how through nuclear techniques we are helping countries to get food security, a better water management, reduce the risks of environmental damage. Like the wonderful things we are doing in ocean protection, against ocean acidification, or plastic pollution. All of these things, and of course, of course, in terms of human health. And here allowing to refer to Rays of Hope, which is this flagship initiative where We are trying to extend radiotherapy to countries that do not have a single small radiotherapy unit, unbelievable as this may sound. And none of this would be possible if we didn't have the NPT.
Laura Holgate, who serves as U.S. Ambassador to the Vienna Office of the United Nations and to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Holgate: The IAEA is in many ways the NPT embodied. On one hand, it provides the safeguards, infrastructure that verifies the peacefulness of use of nuclear technologies, and thereby contributes to that non-proliferation pillar. But it is also the delivery system for cooperation. It provides an infrastructure where the agency itself can do research to develop or refine ways that various nuclear technologies can contribute to the needs of member states across all 17 of the sustainable development goals, for example. But it also creates an opportunity in which experts can work with member states to identify what their needs are for certain types of nuclear assistance, peaceful nuclear assistance, and then to think about how to... Okay, well what's the best way to deliver that? So I thought it was a really insightful adjustment, and reflective of the agency's charter, when the former director general Yukiya Amano adjusted the agency's motto, which for decades was atoms for peace, pulling from President Eisenhower's famous concept. But to say atoms for peace and development, and to put right up front that development contribution.
Guiseppe Esposito, the chief of nuclear medicine and a Professor of Radiology at Georgetown University Hospital, explains.
Esposito: So we have the atom and the atom is for my nucleus and then there's a cloud of electrons around it. So that's what forms the atom. In some of the atoms live peacefully in a very stable state. They're there. They don't really change, but some of the atoms do not have an internal balance and because no one have an internal balance, they have to release usually that energy to reach a more quiet, balanced state and to do that, the way they reach that balanced state is by or the stable state by releasing energy.
And that energy most times often comes from the nucleus and it is in the form of radioactivity. And so, we called it nuclear medicine because the radiation comes from the nucleus. Sometimes also just outside the nucleus from the electrons, but in the end is radioactivity that is released by the atom. And that's what we can detect. There are different types of radiation, different ways, the nuclear, so the atom can reach its stable state, and we try to use these different types of radiation for our purposes.
Jim Casterton, a former Canadian government official who has worked on nonproliferation policy for more than 40 years.
Other areas where nuclear energy are used and for peaceful purposes are, for instance, human health. One only has to think of cancer therapy, the isotopes that are used in order to try to cure people of cancer, or at least to address some of the health issues associated with cancer.
When we’re talking about targeted treatment in nuclear medicine, I was telling you earlier that we attach reactivity to some molecules and this molecules go to those areas. So we can do two things. We can attach the type of reactivity that allows us to do the scans like a PET scan. And then we can switch around the activity, the radioactivity attach a different type of reactivity to do treatment. So deliver now a higher energy radioactivity with the purpose of killing the tumor cells. For example, it could be tumor cells could be a hyper function. Thyroid could be different things.
And so these new kind of paradigms where you have the imaging that tells you if there is a target to treat, and then once you see that there's a target to treat, you actually do treatment. That's a very powerful way of doing a kind of targeted individualized medicine kind of thing. So that's become popular because we've seen that there are benefits for the patients.
From the early days of nuclear technology development, small, versatile research reactors were among the most widely dispersed nuclear technologies. In addition to their scientific research applications, these reactors were used to manufacture nuclear isotopes for use in medicine, agriculture, industry, and more. Former Stanford Economics Professor Geoffrey Rothwell.
Profit maximizing companies can't produce radio medical isotopes for cancer treatment if nobody's going to pay for them, or they need idle capacity, or you have to produce an isotope that has a half life of six days. So you've got to use it or lose it. So I think in terms of the problems it's this mismatch between government and private.
In 2015, the United Nations developed 17 goals as a call to action towards sustainability, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDG. And several of these are made possible by nuclear energy. Again, Laura Holgate.
Whether it's contributions to climate change, managing the impacts of climate change or preventing climate change, which is SDG number 13…I was at Cop 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh earlier this year, and it was really gratifying to see how much attention was being to how nuclear technology whether the power, [00:26:00] nuclear energy, or what we call the non-power aspects of nuclear technology are contributing across the board to climate issues.
Clean energy is one aspect of that, that's SDG number seven.
Food security, SDG number two. Of increased access to clean water, SDG number six.
Sustainable agricultural practices is number 15.
Kwaku Aning.
In agriculture, in food security, food preservation industry, non-destructive testing, all these things are nuclear. But people don’t describe it as nuclear.
Global health and wellbeing is number three. Vital ocean ecosystems is number 14. Industrial innovations is number nine. We could count up to 17 if you want, but that would be boring. There's just so much that's happening here in terms of the research. But then how do you transform that research into an implementable technology for member states? And how do you make those member states aware of how these nuclear technologies can contribute to something?
One of the most commonly told stories relates to tsetse fly eradication in parts of Africa. There's countries or regions where for hundreds of years they could not support livestock because of the tsetse flies, which transmits sleeping sickness not only to animals but also to humans. And you just couldn't keep cattle, or goats or livestock animals as part of an agriculture environment. The IAEA developed a nuclear-based mechanism to sterilize male tsetse flies and then release them into the wild so that when they mate with the female tsetse flies, they don't reproduce. And so over time, the [00:28:00] populations of tsetse flies are decreased, and that allows for the introduction of livestock into those agriculture environments.
And as it turns out, a lot of what those livestock do in those environments is they replace labor otherwise done by women. And so you have cows that can plow the fields. You have beasts of burden, donkeys, or cows or whatever who can carry water. And this frees up women from doing manual labor in the fields to be otherwise engaged in their communities. Whether it's weaving or handicrafts, whether it's teaching their children, whether it's adding in some way to the family income, and it just significantly uplifts the whole community.
Another example of the peaceful uses of nuclear technology, shared by Charles Oko, former counselor in the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the IAEA.
Was funded under the Peaceful Uses Initiative by the US, several European countries and others, who were contributing to this project. And beneficiaries for this project included, it was the original project, it included Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Ghana, Mali, Mauretania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo.
So the regional project, which launched in 2012 until 2017 for the first phase, and I think the conference launched year after, it sought to help the participating countries better understand and manage the joint water resources, within their shared aquifers across five main cross aquifer zones. So the border aquifers were studied and mapped, and then training was provided in water sampling and analysis, focusing on isotopic techniques. And then the participants now learned how to use these skills, and they were able to develop national reports relevant for their countries, and interpret data with a goal of enabling better decision making in the water sector.
Some, like Guiseppe Esposito, see no shortage of need for nuclear applications in the parts of the developing world.
I participated in a conference on the nonproliferation treaty that was in Nigeria. That was a few years back. I think it was just before COVID. And really the aim was to, as a nuclear medicine physician and on behalf of the society of nuclear medicine, trying to underscore or promote the beneficial effects of radiation with using nuclear medicine. And so, while being at that conference, I was talking with different representatives from different African countries from the Sub-Saharan part of Africa. And some of the stories were horrible unfortunately. So, you were talking with oncologists, some other physicians about the disparity or lack of access to care, right in general or imaging.
Again, Kwaku Aning.
Ghana, we have a population of 30 million. We have two electron beam radiotherapy machines and two Cobalt-60 machines for 30 million people. But our neighbors, some of them, they fly for hours to come to be treated. So the need is profound and like everything else dealing with cancer and those things, they are expensive.
Corey Hinderstein is Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
COREY: I think nuclear technology will be a continuing presence and an increasingly important presence in the overall technology landscape going forward. And whether that's to produce carbon-free electricity or to be applied in the medical space, the use of radioisotopes for medical treatment, we know that nuclear technology can bring tremendous benefit to people around the world. And that access to that benefit has not been equitable in historically, and I think what we want is to be able to bring access to all of those peaceful benefits to countries who may not have had accessin the past.
Marco Marzo is the Secretary-General of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC).
You can imagine we have in Brazil more than 5,000 users of nuclear radioisotopes, more than 5,000 is a lot and all the medical applications. And we have a very important demand for nuclear radioisotopes. And I would say, we just apply one third of the needs. That means in terms of medical application, we have a lot of medical examination, medical diagnostic treatments. But we are treating only one third of our needs, which means we need much more. And then agriculture, Brazil is a very important agricultural country.
With the food radiation you can maintain the food health a long time. And this is very important view in Brazil, the food conservation. It's a many, many areas and I see the public opinion, although sometimes is not very favor of the nuclear power plants. But there is no discussion about the nuclear applications in Brazil. It's a very, very favor of a nuclear application.
Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz
We should remember that right from its beginning, the peaceful uses of nuclear energy was intended to be much broader. Today, it is much broader with especially the use of specialized isotopes in multiple situations in manufacturing, geological dating, the food industry, manufacturing, really across the board. It's a major enabling technology.
NNSA Deputy Administrator Corey Hinderstein
What the NPT does, however, is recognize that the benefits of technology should be shared, and that while we are trying to manage risk and threat, we do want to share the peaceful benefits of technology. And in the NPT that's of nuclear technology, I could see that model for others. There's the democratization of technology.
And then there’s one of the most well-known uses of nuclear science: nuclear power plants. Jim Casterton.
Jim Casterton: …the most obvious one and the one that is used globally, is for the generation of electricity. So there are quite a few nuclear power plants around the world that are generating electricity that we use every day in our homes, in our offices, wherever.
Frank Rose is the Principal Deputy Administrator of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration.
The peaceful uses and the NPT gives the United States confidence that we can provide capabilities in the nuclear area to states that don't have nuclear weapons with the confidence they will not produce nuclear weapons. So now it provides all sorts of other benefits that I've talked about to include energy, medical devices, but from a security perspective, the NPT and the safeguards that... The NPT and the safeguards give us the confidence that we can work together in a cooperative manner
Following the entry into force of the NPT in 1970, the number of nuclear power plants under construction grew substantially. Nuclear fuel cycle economist Tom Wood on the growth in nuclear power exports before and after the entry into force of the NPT in 1970.
If you just look at the numbers for the number of plants or the gigawatt electric capacity built from the dawn of the nuclear power era in say, 1954, I think was the first power plant connected to the grid. Between 1954 and 1960, there was just over a megawatt built. So, in the first 15 years, 16 years, we had the equivalent of one modern LWR in terms of capacity. So, it got off to a somewhat halting start, I guess you could say. But between '60 and '65, there were 4,500 megawatts built. Between '65 and '70, there were about 12.5 gigawatts built. And between '70 and '75, there were 62 gigawatts built. So it was incredibly rapid exponential growth, a lot of plants.
This enthusiasm was driven largely by the prospective profit in building large power reactors, and the widely accepted peaceful use commitments provided by the NPT. This led to competition among nuclear power vendors from different countries to sell their wares around the world. And this competition led to increased efficiency in reactor design and in market function.
[G]iven that amazingly rapid growth, I think it was pretty inevitable that there was going to be, number one, a sorting of the deck, if you will, in terms of the technologies, and that did happen. And the US designs, the PWR and BWR, light-water designs built by Westinghouse and GE were broadly successful in the world market. They set the standard for efficiency. They set the standard for fuel performance. And the fuel itself was radically improved over the '80s, '90s, and into 2000. So it was a remarkable era in terms of growing the industry, sorting out the technology, and making the technology safer.
Former Stanford Economics Professor Geoffrey Rothwell, adds.
Before the NPT, the British and French were selling their gas graphite reactors and it turns out that they were not a very good export because graphite is heavy and now they find out that it's almost [01:06:30] impossible to decontaminate.
So, what happened was that the US was able to export, and after 1970, there was this huge explosion of exports. Maybe it's coincidence, [01:07:00] but it goes from say seven gigawatts. The United States had exported seven gigawatts of capacity before 1970 and after 1970, they exported 26 gigawatts.
U.S. light water reactor technology was subsequently transferred to and adopted by several countries around the world. This subsequently increased competition to build nuclear power reactors abroad. The NPT’s legally binding commitments that these nuclear technologies would not be used to develop nuclear weapons enabled this competition.
I think it provided a structure that wasn't there beforehand. Inside that structure, you could develop a technology and sell it. Without structure, it's very difficult to sort of develop whatever technology and sell it. For some reason, the United States helped this technology, the pressurized water reactor technology, take off, and it dominates the industry. It's difficult to say [01:14:30] what the causation was because we don't have a lot of different universes in which we can say, well, if we didn't have the NPT, the pressurized water reactor wouldn't be as successful as it is today. But it provided a structure in which you could sell this technology and maintain control over the fuel cycle.
NNSA Deputy Administrator Corey Hinderstein.
So those who do support the spread of peaceful uses of nuclear technology should want a robust and credible [00:39:00] NPT and a robust incredible IAEA system behind it. Because that creates the groundwork for them to actually deliver on the promise of nuclear energy in a way that doesn't undermine national and international security. So having the industry at an NPT event doing aside events and interacting with the diplomatic community, I think can actually do good cross pollination. The diplomats and the states' [00:39:30] parties can engage on what they might be able to benefit from the peaceful nuclear community and the civil industry can demonstrate that they see, respect, and value the foundation that the nonproliferation regime actually creates and sometimes learn something on both sides.
Former international nuclear industry executive, Melissa Mann.
Is it still fit for purpose? Are there new problems that nobody anticipated back in the foundational days? Or did it do a pretty good job of guessing at what the possible band of usages of the atom might be.
Even reading some of the old Atoms for Peace documents, they did a good job of anticipating forward the types of things that might happen. I think the thing for me that needs to evolve is, there was the assumption that things\were black and white. You were a good guy or you were a bad guy. I don't know that any of that is true. I think that there's a lot more gray in there. It's those gray areas where you get the friction and where you get the hard-to-solve problems, where you get obviously uncertainty. But how do you try to chip away at that, so you've got enough of a comfort level that you've got the balance right between those good and bad uses? I mean, weapons versus commercial, medical, industrial use.
Former U.S. government official who worked for years at the U.S. mission in Vienna, Lisa Hilliard.
It's the balance of controlling and facilitating trade, and the important part is finding the appropriate balance and engagement with all of the players, so that everybody's playing by the same rules and able to trade, so that everyone who wants to can have access to peaceful nuclear applications for peace and development.
Scientists are continually discovering and implementing all the things nuclear energy can do. The relevance and importance of the NPT also continues, 50 years after it was written. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi on the IAEA’s technical cooperation program.
I always thought that the IAEA by virtue of the wide agenda that it has, held enormous promise. But my feeling was that it was a benign, underutilized tool in many respects. Specifically, when it comes to technical cooperation. I felt, my impression was that the efforts, the very good efforts, let me say because the IAEA did not start with me, won't certainly end with me. And there was a lot of tremendously good work done before.
But my concern was that I saw a technical cooperation program that was dispersed, that was so thinly spread across regions and countries, that you could even see the butter over the toast. No impact, no real impact. Good things here and there, good things, yes, but without the capacity to start moving the needle.
And I'm not saying a revolution or anything of the sort, but starting to provoke, facilitate change in countries. Here I apply this to cancer, I apply this to water management, I apply this to energy security, I apply this to food security, to insect pest control techniques. Everything in nuclear techniques.
I always believed that non-proliferation, nuclear safety, nuclear security, fundamental things as they are, are side-by-side with the technical cooperation. The promotional sides as bit as important.
But we were not having impact. This is why I started a very aggressive policy of opening up to the IAEA. I like to, for my NPT president-designate days, I have this concept of the bigger table. We need the bigger table. We need a bigger table that includes development banks. We need a bigger table that includes estate funds. We need a bigger table that includes the private sector. We need a bigger table that includes people who have money and want to benefit others. And of course, member states, our countries, donors.
As global climate change forces hard questions about energy and economic development and as global access to technology and health resources gains importance, the relevance of the NPT in enabling peaceful nuclear technology cooperation will only increase over time, facilitating progress on climate and sustainable development goals. In the remaining episode, we’ll explore how the NPT can help ensure the peaceful use of nuclear energy for decades to come.
Thank you for listening. Stay informed about the NPT and peaceful nuclear cooperation, visit sharingtheatom.com, where you can also listen to other episodes. Sharing the Atom is a production of the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and Argonne National Laboratory, in collaboration with SOUND MADE PUBLIC, with Tania Ketenjian, Philip Wood, Sarah Conlisk, and Alesandro Santoro. .