Nuclear Policy

A report by Alvarez advocates mixing the material with uranium isotopes unable to sustain a fission chain reaction. The Energy Department has said such an effort would result in an needless use of additional funds, but the Times said the potential step's expense was unclear.

Yet Mr. Alvarez maintains that the disposal plan is insufficient. Shallow land burial “sets a bad precedent in terms of international safeguards,” he said.

In a recent research paper, he also argued that the material should be made useless for making bombs by diluting it with a plentiful form of uranium that will not sustain a nuclear reaction.

“China represents, in my opinion … the last frontier of growth for nuclear power in the world, especially after the Fukushima disaster,” said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at Washington’s Institute for Policy Studies, who under the Clinton administration served as senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. “Because China is such a big, vast nation even a goal of a small portion of their energy demand could mean substantial growth for their nuclear power industry.”

The facility holds the largest inventories of nuclear material in the world, said Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy studies, who was a senior Energy Department official in the 1990s and is an expert on the U.S. nuclear weapons program.

"It should be one of the most well-protected facilities in the United States for that reason," said Alvarez, who said the breach in security was unprecedented.

"This is the kind of lapse that one would expect heads to roll," he said, noting that more rigorous government oversight of contractors is needed

Robert Alvarez, a former DOE security adviser in the Clinton administration, noted that former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks was forced to resign in 2007 after an incident in which a contract worker was found to have removed classified documents from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

“That site is storing one of the largest amounts of nuclear explosive material in the world,” Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser to the Energy Department, said in an interview. “It’s not rocket science to maintain and repair video cameras,” Mr. Alvarez noted.

“It’s supposed to be one of the world’s most secure facilities,” he said.

ROBERT ALVAREZ: The spent fuel pool in number four at Fukushima contains roughly ten times more caesium 137 than released by the Chernobyl accident.

"Once you get into Special Nuclear Material (plutonium, uranium-233, or uranium-235) everything becomes much more expensive in terms of cleanup and excavating," said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and former senior policy advisor to the Secretary of the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.

"The stuff is dangerous and you have to careful when digging it up," he said. "You also have to have all these additional expenses, safeguards, security, special reporting. The costs will go up astronomically."

The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements," Alvarez said in his response. "If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cesium-137 released by the Chernobyl accident."

Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser to the U.S. secretary of energy and now a scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, endorsed the U.N. petition.

"The U.S. should be doing more to provide technical and materiel assistance, especially helping to provide more dry casks," Alvarez wrote in an email interview. "The U.S. Energy department has a considerable amount of experience for the past 20+ years and has been spending $6 billion/yr to stabilize and remediate the huge mess left behind from the nuclear arms race at dozens of sites in the U.S."