Antinuclear

‘Game Changing’ Technique

In May 2006, G.E. bought the rights to Silex. Andrew C. White, the president of the company’s nuclear business, hailed the technology as “game-changing.”

Mr. Monetta of Global Laser Enrichment, the G.E.-Hitachi subsidiary, said the envisioned plant would enrich enough uranium annually to fuel up to 60 large reactors. In theory, that could power more than 42 million homes — about a third of all housing units in the United States.

The laser advance, he added, will promote energy security “since it is a domestic source.”

In late 2009, as G.E. experimented with its trial laser, supporters of arms control wrote Congress and the regulatory commission. The technology, they warned, posed a danger of quickening the spread of nuclear weapons because of the likely difficulty of detecting clandestine plants.

Experts called for a federal review of the risks. In early 2010, the commission resisted.

Late last year, the American Physical Society — the nation’s largest group of physicists, with headquarters in Washington — submitted a formal petition to the commission for a rule change that would compel such risk assessments as a condition of licensing.

“The issue is too big” to leave to the federal status quo, Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University and the society official who drafted the petition, said in an interview. He added that Mr. Obama or Congress might eventually have to get involved.

This year, thousands of citizens, supporters of arms control, nuclear experts and members of Congress wrote the commission to back the society’s effort. Many of them cited well-known failures in safeguarding secrets and detecting atomic plants.

But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington, objected. It said new precautions were unnecessary because of voluntary plans for “additional measures” to safeguard secrets…….

Global Laser Enrichment plans to build its complex on more than 100 acres at the Wilmington industrial park, with the main building covering nearly 14 acres. That, like Iran’s main enrichment plant, is roughly half the size of the Pentagon.

But critics say a clandestine bomb maker would need only a tiny fraction of that vast industrial ability — and thus could build a much smaller laser, perhaps like the modest apparatus in the old photograph. Each year, they note, the enrichment powers of the Wilmington plant would be great enough to produce fuel for more than 1,000 nuclear weapons.

Iran began its laser program in the 1970s during the global rush. But it kept the results secret. The silence violated Iran’s agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations that is based in Vienna and acts as the world’s nuclear police…….

When experts cite possible harm from the commercialization of laser enrichment, they often point to Iran. The danger, they say, lies not only in pilfered secrets, but also in the public revelation that a half-century of laser failure seems to be ending.

Their concern goes to the nature of invention. The demonstration of a new technology often begets a burst of emulation because the advance opens a new window on what is possible.

Arms controllers fear that laser enrichment is now poised for that kind of activity. News of its feasibility could spur wide reinvestigation.

Dr. Slakey of the American Physical Society noted that the State Department a dozen years ago warned that the success of Silex could “renew interest” in laser enrichment for good or ill — to light cities or destroy them.

That moment, he said, now seems close at hand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1