This question is mainly addressed to Dr. Bartis

What does the U.S. Government need to do to finalize a solution to the waste storage issue? Yucca Mountain fell apart even though it seemed as if that deal was totally implemented. If we are going to find a solution, what must happen?

James Bartis: Early on, Congress authorized the DoE to look at numerous sites for a waste facility, and then a few years later, Congress itself decided on a location. They picked Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Nevada has a small congressional delegation, and at that time none held positions of great power. Little did they know that a senator from Nevada that was deeply opposed to the selection of Yucca Mountain would become the Senate Majority Leader. The Yucca Mountain deal also failed because of the fairly rough-shod way that the DoE went forward with the project.

Yucca Mountain may or may not be reconsidered as a site—it’s certainly a viable one. Our research at RAND finds that there is no requirement to find a

geo-logical repository site within the next 25 years. So it may be appropriate for the United States to restart the search for an appropriate site, take its time, treat the public appropriately, evaluate multiple sites, and de-termine which site is most viable. There are communi-ties in the United States that may be very interested in the economic benefits of having a nuclear waste disposal site in their vicinity. That certainly was the case in New Mexico where there wasn’t unified oppo-sition to the geologic disposal site for defense-related nuclear waste materials.

Audience: Are you saying Yucca Mountain is not a good site for political reasons?

James Bartis: Absolutely. Certain claims were made on behalf of Yucca Mountain and those claims over time turned out to be incorrect. As a result, the DoE recommended what we call “engineering solu-tions” so that, in addition to the geology, there would be engineering barriers. A number of concerns were raised about some of these engineering barriers.

Basically, there was a breakdown of trust between the DoE/federal government and the State of Nevada, and it was a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. A lot of the blame here goes to the federal government for the way the DoE behaved. A solution to all the problems in Yucca Mountain was to simply keep the material above ground for at least 50 to 100 years. Af-ter 50 to 100 years, the radioactivity and the heat gen-erated by that radioactivity goes down significantly.

It’s the heat generation that poses the problem under-ground. If you keep it above ground and the waste has time to cool, there is much less risk associated with the integrity of geological disposal.

Audience: Do you think the same political prob-lem would exist if we moved all of the fuel to the front door of Yucca Mountain?

James Bartis: Even that is unlikely to work now because there has been a breakdown in trust. There needs to be a new procedure for site selection before you even start thinking about that option. I don’t know whether the DoE has formulated an acceptable strategy for dealing with the public.

Audience: The issue is not the site. The issue is the fact that you have to move 80,000 tons of waste on ei-ther beltways or highways, and you need equipment that’s going to be operated by human beings. All it takes is one derailment or one truck accident, and you could have a major problem. John McCain, for exam-ple, said that he supported putting the waste at Yucca Mountain. He was asked, “Would you agree to have it go through Phoenix?” “No, I would not.” That’s the problem.

Q: A comment. The United States is highly dis-turbed over the prospect of Iran developing what it calls a civilian nuclear program, and we know that’s not what they intend to use it for. Yet, we warmly em-brace the Sunni Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc., that want to go in the same direction. Thus when you think of civilian nuclear programs in the context of the Middle East, it’s probably an oxymoron.

Steven Miller: Two points. States have a right, and in the context of civil nuclear power, the right is en-shrined in Article 4 of the Nonproliferation Treaty, to make whatever choices they wish in the realm of nuclear technology. Everybody’s heard of the phrase

“the inalienable right to exploit nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.” If you actually read the sec-ond paragraph of Article 4, it has a phrase stating that you’re entitled to the fullest possible exchange of nu-clear technology. So the language is expansive rather

than limiting. Whether we like it or not, a lot of states are going to at least explore these possibilities.

In the case of Iran, we have lots of reasons for thinking that they have ulterior motives. But they’ve been struggling, almost completely unsuccessfully, to implement the program that was announced in April 1974 by the Shah and was worked out with the full connivance of the Nixon/Ford/Kissinger administra-tions. True, it produced a huge fight in the U.S. Gov-ernment because the nonproliferators were worried about what the Iranians were really up to. But the gross anatomy of the current program of the Iranian government is essentially identical to the Shah’s pro-gram: 20 large light water reactors, and the full fuel cycle, and so on. This is not an idea the mullahs came up with; this is an idea the Shah worked out with Henry Kissinger. So whatever else they might be up to, they do have an interest in civilian nuclear power.

The final point I would make is that Abu Dhabi is the spearhead of the nuclear newcomers. It’s they who will be the first to put a nuclear power plant in the grid and actually generate electricity among the newcomers. They negotiated a 1-2-3 agreement with the United States in which they agreed to everything that we wanted them to agree to. They had made a national decision that they wanted to move as quickly as possible toward nuclear power, and so they under-stood that they needed to dispose of this 1-2-3 ques-tion as quickly as possible. Therefore, they judged it to be in their own self-interest to acquiesce in all of our preferences. They agreed not to enrich. They agreed to forsake their right to reprocessing. No fuel cycle.

In Abu Dhabi (or the Emirates), they agreed to sign on and adhere to the additional protocol of all other safeguards arrangements that are currently the norm.

In the nonproliferation world this has been dubbed the Abu Dhabi model. If all the nuclear newcomers will do this, the proliferation implications of nuclear power are much more circumscribed.

It turns out that lots of other states are really angry at Abu Dhabi for its course and refuse to do it them-selves, including Vietnam which has been in similar discussions with the United States and has refused to forfeit its right to enrichment. The Egyptians are also in the same position. The Saudis have said they won’t sign up to such an agreement. I was at a meeting in the Gulf this summer at which one Arab and Gulf state after another expressed regret that Abu Dhabi’s lack of foresight in acquiescing to America’s full spectrum of preferences.

James Bartis: If I look at Iran, so long as Iran al-lows unimpeded inspections—and right now we have no evidence that they’re doing anything that’s against any letter of the law—they will be compliant. Is that correct?

Steven Miller: Iran committed, over a very pro-tracted period of time, a substantial number of safe-guard violations. These violations fell entirely in the domain of reportage. They were required to report ac-tivities, provide information, etc., which they system-atically failed to do over a 20-year period, resulting in a long list—bill of indictment against them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). What got them in trouble was not that they were pursuing enrichment, which is a permitted activity under the treaty, but, rather that they failed to report that they were pursuing enrichment.

The way we trapped them was by using the safe-guard violations to claim that they were delinquent in their NPT obligations. That gave us the right to refer

the matter to the UN Security Council. We then issued a series of the UN Security Council resolutions under Chapter 7 which are, in principle, binding which in-structed Iran to cease and desist its enrichment and plutonium-related activities immediately. Their fail-ure to do that then puts them in a position of noncom-pliance with international law under the UN charter.

So that was the legal mousetrap that we set for them.

But under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or its safeguards agreement, it has every right to both en-rich and reprocess so long as it permits the required safeguards under Article 3 of the treaty.

One last point: Iran is the most heavily inspected party in the history of the system now, and it has been subjected to more short-notice inspections than all other states in the system put together. There’s no evi-dence that the known and declared facilities are being misused for weapons purposes. So the fundamental issue is what covert actions or activities are underway.

That, of course, is what the IAEA is never given access to. Audience: What’s the case on North Korea? Simi-lar to Iran?

Steven Miller: North Korea belatedly signed a safeguard agreement when the inspectors came in.

In 1991 the inspectors detected discrepancies in the material accountancy which revealed quite unam-biguously that North Korea was diverting material. In 1992 the IAEA declared North Korea to be in a formal state of noncompliance with its obligations under the safeguard agreement and referred the case to the UN.

At no moment since then has North Korea ever been restored to compliance. The UN Security Council del-egated the issue to the United States which, in 1994, reached the agreed framework arrangement with the

North Koreans which froze their plutonium program for about a decade. But in late 2002 or early 2003, partly motivated by and partly under the cover of our run-up to war with Iraq, the North Koreans untagged and unsealed the tagged and sealed fuel rods that were under IAEA surveillance. They ripped out the close-circuit television cameras. They threw out the IAEA inspectors. They withdrew from the NPT. They restarted their reprocessing facility and in due course they detonated nuclear weapons.

The timing of North Korea’s joining NPT coincides with the completion of their reprocessing capability and with South Korea’s and North Korea’s joint dec-laration of denuclearization of the peninsula. Thus, basically, whenever North Korea takes some liberty, it feels comfortable in giving up something. But there is always covert development behind it.

Q: To bring the discussion back to environmental