Welcome to CSIS. I am Sharon Squisoni. I direct the proliferation prevention program here. I can't tell you how happy we are, not only to release this report, which we've been working on for quite a while, but also that you could join us this morning. I have to apologize. Dr. Hamry was supposed to give welcoming remarks this morning, but he had to meet with the Secretary of Defense. And unfortunately, that takes a little higher priority. But he sends his regard. I'd like to make one administrative note before I introduce our first speaker. And that is, we are webcasting this. If you could please turn your cell phone ringer off. We're happy if you text or tweet or whatever else, but the noise can be sometimes disruptive. So it is my great pleasure to introduce Joan Rolffing, who is the President and Chief Operating Officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. To give welcoming remarks, I realized just how long I know you, Joan, this morning when I was thinking about it. And I'm not going to say that at all. But I feel really fortunate to have been able to collaborate with Joan and her staff on this project. Joan, before becoming President and Chief Operating Officer of NTI, was the Senior Vice President for many years. But before that, many of you may know her as a government official in the Department of Energy and the House Armed Services Committee and also in the Department of Defense. So Joan, thank you for agreeing to come this morning and open up our event. Thank you, Sharon. I'll add my word of welcome to all of you this morning. This is indeed a great day for us. This is a report that we have worked on for a period of years, I can safely say. And so to be able to launch this today gives us all great pleasure. We really appreciate your coming out this morning to help us launch and contribute to the discussion of this new report. A new approach to the fuel cycle tackles one of the toughest challenges our world faces, which is how to enable and ultimately sustain peaceful nuclear energy that can help the world cope with issues like economic development, as well as climate change, while at the same time protecting against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Since our founding, NTI has addressed the spread of nuclear materials, weapons, and know-how. And as this audience understands, the same facilities used to produce fuel for nuclear power plants can also be used to make materials needed to fuel nuclear weapons. Therein lies our challenge. Seeking creative solutions to managing the fuel cycle has thus been an important focus of our work through projects at NTI, like catalyzing the creation of the IAEA International Fuel Bank. Today's report is especially timely with the deadline for Iran, looming and the negotiations looming, as well as the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference on the horizon. The fact is, the world so far has been reluctant to confront the key question raised by security gaps in the treaty. Do we really believe that we can live securely in a system that poses so few constraints on any state's ability to produce weapons usable nuclear materials? We think the answer is no. The best practices approach that you'll learn about today is ambitious and comprehensive and also offers practical solutions. It introduces new ideas generated by tying together all elements of the nuclear fuel cycle from the front end through the back end. And it strives for equal obligations and benefits for both have states and have not states, that is, nuclear weapons states or nuclear materials producing states and those that do not have these facilities. So I want to express my great appreciation to our project leaders, Sharon Squassoni, senior fellow and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program here at CSIS, and Cori Hindersneen, NTI's vice president for international programs, who unfortunately cannot join us here today. We were hoping she might make a guest appearance, and she still may. But Cori is now on detail to the Department of Energy and obviously is doing important work, left just at the very end of this study. So she's with us here in spirit today. The report co-authors together with Cori and Sharon, are Andrew Newman, senior program officer at NTI, whom you will hear from today, and Kelsey Hartigan, who's a program officer at NTI. And I don't see Kelsey in the audience yet. Throughout the process of grappling with these challenging issues and finding new solutions, the team consulted with experts worldwide to develop and test the ideas in this report. We appreciate the input of all of those experts as well. Finally, I want to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for their financial support of this project. And now let's hear from the panelists. Their bios are included in your material, so I'm not going to go through bios in any great depth. I do want to say, however, with respect to the program this morning, co-authors Sharon and Andrew will begin by presenting the report. Sharon has extensive background on this intersection between nuclear energy and proliferation, having worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Congressional Research Service, and the US State Department. Andrew brings experience from Harvard's Managing the Atom Project and the Australian government, both here in Washington, DC, as well as in Australia. We're also fortunate to have Everett Redmond from the Nuclear Energy Institute to comment and moderate the Q&A as well. Thank you, Everett. As Senior Director of Fuel, Cycle, and Technology Policy, he is responsible for policy and programs relating to both front and back end of the fuel cycle. So we look forward to your insights as well, Everett. And with that, let me turn the mic over to our panelists. Thank you. Thank you, Joan. And Joan may not be able to stay for the entire time she's off to South Asia soon. Do I have a mouse for this, or am I using a keyboard? Here we go. Great.  I hope you grabbed a copy. It's also available online. There are a lot of details in there. And we don't want to overwhelm you this morning, but kind of give you a flavor where this started, where we're coming from, what the most important points are. We opted not to give any handouts in the interest of climate change and saving the environment. But so we may refer at times to certain pages in the report. So if you don't have a report, you can raise your hand and someone will provide you with one. I couldn't resist, as ever, Carl Stoiber, who's not here today with us, but who was part of this process. He's actually a very well-known cartoonist, but also an international nuclear law specialist, sent me at the last minute. He said, oh, you need a cartoon for this. So what are we talking about? Fuel cycle? Not a nuclear fuel cycle, but this nuclear fuel cycle, which is all of the capabilities and facilities that support peaceful nuclear energy. In our report, we call this a nuclear fuel cycle process, because obviously, different countries have opted to pursue different capabilities. So for example, this process right here doesn't include, it doesn't have the fast reactor fuel cycle. But so anyway, this is just for those of you who may not be so familiar with the technical aspects. This is a schema, and it's further back. Actually, it's in the appendix. But as we were thinking about how can we really design an approach that would capture more of the fuel cycle than previous proposals have, we decided to simplify this a little bit and talk about production, sensitive technologies like enrichment and reprocessing use, because we're also interested in what materials are out there, particularly if you follow nuclear security, highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and then storage and waste. So as we go through this report, we'll be talking about how we would apply our best practices to production, use, and disposal, storage and disposal.  All right, so we believe that there is a problem in the current system. And when you look at production, use, storage, and waste, this is what you have under the current system, the outcomes under the current system. So I would argue that you do have new national enrichment facilities that have some questionable economic justifications. Iran is clearly one of those. You might say that some facilities in the US fall into that category. You might say that when you look at Japan's nuclear fuel cycle, that the viability of their enrichment capability right now is in question. When you look at plutonium separation and material accumulation, you see India pursuing fast reactors. China is now going to start reprocessing. And the future of Japan's recycling is also a great big question. When you look at use, you see slow progress on programs to consume or dispose of separated material. Japan is a big one there, but also Russia. And then on storage and waste, 50 years after we've started peaceful nuclear energy, there are no repositories currently, repositories for commercial spent nuclear fuel operating. Although Finland and Sweden are probably closest. But the real question, and one of the things we really tried to get at in this report is, what do you do with the back end? Can you leverage the back end to provide some incentives for countries not to pursue some of these sensitive technologies? OK, so why do we think these are problems? Both the materials, if you're talking about highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium, but especially the technologies, uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing, they are inherently dual use. You cannot escape that technical fact. They can be used to make peaceful nuclear fuel or fissile material for nuclear weapons. And the treaty, the NPT, does nothing to limit those capabilities. And the debate on Iran that we're currently in the midst of illustrates that NPT dilemma. And so in the report, we can call them gaps. We can call them flaws. But the fact of the matter is, under the NPT, without violating a comprehensive safeguards agreement, countries could do any of those six things. They could produce highly enriched uranium. It would be under safeguards, but they could stockpile it. They could take that HEU out of safeguards by declaring its use for non-explosive military purposes. They could accumulate stocks of these materials. They could acquire sensitive technology under safeguards. And finally, they could develop the technical know-how for a nuclear weapons program and an indigenous manufacturing capability without violating their safeguards agreement. These are not new. These are not earth-shattering. These gaps have long been known. What have we done about it? Well, clearly, we've done things about it over time. So on the supplier side, for many decades, we have restricted technology transfer under the nuclear supplier group. But all of these controls are voluntary. They've mostly worked, mostly. But technology continues to evolve, and manufacturing capabilities continue to shift. On the demand side, we've largely relied on market disincentives. That is, there's interest in nuclear energy. It goes up, and then it goes down. And so then we don't worry so much about these capabilities. And fundamentally, it's cheaper to buy enrichment and reprocessing services than it is to develop it yourself. But that approach, I would say, we've been fairly lucky over many decades. But that approach ignores the fact that the nuclear market is not exactly free. In the United States, we certainly have, and I guess I would say the nuclear industry might argue, that we need more subsidies. We need more government support. In other countries, there's a lot of government support and subsidies, particularly for exports. So we know the market's not free. And we also know that countries pursue these capabilities, not just for out-of-economic reasons. And Iran is a perfect example of that. So if nuclear energy is not about to disappear, and I don't think it is, how do we make it sustainable for the future? How do we not confront another Iran in 10, 20, 30 years? So our initial approach, we said, OK, when we look at the system, what are the things we want it to do? So economically, we didn't want it to disrupt the market too much. Politically, it had to be widely acceptable, not just to existing supplier states. Technically, we wanted to leverage technology where possible, but we didn't solely want to rely on technical solutions. And by that is, we've heard talk about proliferation resistant technologies for a long time, but they never quite measure up to what we want them to do. And then finally, institutionally, we wanted to create higher barriers against proliferation. So you're asking, why do we need this new approach? For 70, 60 years, there have been a lot of proposals, some of them really good, some of them very far ranging. I mean, you can go all the way back to Baruch plan. There have been a lot of different ideas and concepts, but most of them, I would say, have been fairly piecemeal with few concrete results. Actually, NTI was able to push forward in a very concrete way its idea of an LEU, low enriched uranium fuel bank. That's been positive, but that's only looking at the front end of the fuel cycle. For the countries that we are trying to engage, their responses have been largely tepid. And even sometimes, they've been suspicious. And in part, that's because of this political problem they have with sovereignty and what they see as their inalienable right to peaceful nuclear energy. But I would say overall, the problem has been that none of these proposals haven't addressed some of the fundamental underlying issues, which are sovereignty and the uneven distribution of capabilities. And none really tried to create a consensus on current proliferation risks. So from a systemic perspective, that's why I would say we need a new approach. Within the US, I would say that when we look at our policy, we have different sort of streams for nuclear energy, for nuclear security, and non-proliferation. And they are fairly stove piped. I would say that our nuclear energy decisions are not part of a vision for a sustainable nuclear energy, but political economic footballs, non-proliferation, policy decisions can be sort of twisted by diplomatic imperatives. And then it's not often that fuel cycle decisions are really connected to nuclear security objectives. So from a strictly US approach that I would say we need to do something. All right, so our new approach, best practices, what's new about it? It's comprehensive. It addresses the front and the back end. It addresses both nuclear security and non-proliferation. It focuses on these best practices, which we're going to go into a little more detail about it. And then rather than applying a market solution to a political problem, it tries to leverage existing industry trends, which include the need for financial partnerships, especially in Richmond, and I would also argue in reprocessing, and then integrated supply. So when you see a Russia or a China offering a kind of build on operate package to new nuclear states, why did we focus on best practices? Because I would say, I think this has been an intractable issue for many years, for many reasons. But I think it's easier to agree on a guiding set of principles than anything else. So if you can agree on these principles, then you can get a little further, and they can help guide policy. And I think there's more sustainable in the long run than what I call our, well, not what I call, the US government calls it, an ad hoc approach on our bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements. We do try to steer countries in particular directions on their nuclear fuel cycle through those bilateral agreements. You can look at our agreement with South Korea, on the other side, India. We can get into the specifics in the Q&A session. So these are, sorry, what page? I don't have my notes. So this may be difficult for you to read, but we came up with three kind of, or sorry, six principles that would, what we call best practices, that will help guide policy decisions. So the first and the most important is equal access and shared benefits. The second is shared costs and burdens. And there we said, it's not just the new nuclear states that need to share the costs and the burdens. We have to level the playing field a little bit. We also think the system should provide for early detection. You don't want to wait until the last minute before you think a country is going down a clandestine nuclear weapons path. We'd like to minimize material. And that is the system in the end should yield the least amount of weapons useable material to reduce proliferation and security risks. We want to have expansion in the nuclear industry based on the market and unmet commercial need. And there should be incentives and consequences. So in other words, governments and industry should benefit more by adhering to this system than not adhering to it. So now I've forgotten, Andrew. Is this the part in which you take over? I think this is your last slide. This is my last slide. OK. So we're team tagging it. I mean, I have to say that this is the division of labor between NTI and CSIS has been kind of seamless. We've all worked on this together so many years. We're not sure who does what. But going back to that schema of production, use, and waste, we're going to take these best practices and apply them to each area. So what would that mean? So we're not just looking at production. We're also going to look at the use and disposal. So in production, we would have no net increase in nuclear weapons usable material, which means, practically, you're going to use up the existing material before you do new production. On use, you would eliminate nuclear weapons usable material wherever possible, eliminating justifications for facilities that perpetuate production and thereby reducing risks posed by the existing stockpiles. And finally, on the waste end, you're going to recognize the need for all countries to find spent fuel and high-level waste solutions. And there, we're going to have particularly focus on international, regional, and other kinds of partnerships. And so now, I'm going to pass the speaking baton, whatever, to Andrew, who's going to guide us through some of the more specific portions. Thanks, Sharon. So to go into a little bit more detail on what Sharon has just mentioned and thinking about what this new approach would look like and to reiterate what Sharon just said on the last slide, in terms of production, obviously, the overriding principle here is that you would want no net increase in highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And you would want to draw down stocks before producing new material. So some of the outcomes that you would be looking for under this new approach would be to eliminate HAU entirely from the civilian sector and to reprocess when the fuel can be consumed in a reactor. And there is a caveat to the last bit of this. And when the high-level waste from that reprocessing program can be sent to a disposal facility.  And it's important to stress here that a lot of these things take time. And as you've seen, we haven't had a whole lot of success on building repositories around the world here in the United States or anywhere around the world. We have some very, very important progress in places like Sweden and Finland and France as well. And to a lesser extent, Canada, we're seeing how that is playing out right now. But I should stress that this is a vision for how these things would work. And we know that it takes decades for repositories to get. Even if things go smoothly. And in almost all cases, they usually don't. They go in fits and starts. Things go bad. Things have to get changed. And so it takes a long time. And so that would be ideally you would want the high-level waste to be ready to go into an operating repository. But we understand that that's a long-term prospect for even the countries doing this on a national scale. So we fully appreciate that that may be some sort of phase in process. Now, in terms of use, the principle here is eliminating nuclear weapons usable material and reducing the risks that we face from existing stockpiles. And so some of the outcomes that we would want to see is the burning of plutonium. The blending down of HEU stockpiles. And, importantly, to minimizing the distances that these materials need to be transported to go through the processes that they need to go through. So one of the things here that would be particularly attractive would be strategies like co-location of fuel cycle facilities, fuel cycle parks, if you want to call it that. Nuclear islands is another concept that Tom Cochran and Chris Payne at the NIDC had mentioned about this in a very good paper that they wrote some years ago. And I'm not sure if either of those gentlemen are here this morning. But moving on to the third part of this, which is the waste disposal part. And I want to spend a little bit more time talking through some of the issues here, partly because it tends to get forgotten a little bit in conversations about the fuel cycle. And so I think it's important to delve into this in a little bit more detail. And before we say anything about that, I think the first thing to acknowledge is that the absence of viable spent fuel pathways for most countries, and that's the vast majority of countries, really, in terms of at least coming up with sites for interim storage or disposal. The fact that that doesn't exist in a particularly concrete form right now undermines acceptance of all nuclear facilities. And that's a problem for everyone. That's a problem for the industry. We completely understand that many countries face very substantial challenges and they can be economic, they can be political, and they can be geological when it comes to finding suitable sites to dispose or even store of their spent fuel. And so as a result of this reality, cooperative approaches to spent fuel management offer significant benefits in terms of things like economies of scale, security, and of course lowering environmental impacts as well, which I think is pretty important. But that being said, of course, there are these big benefits that go along with it. There's no question about that, but I think a couple of words of caution are well worth mentioning at this point. And that is the fact that calls for regional approaches to spent fuel management tend to generate pretty significant pushback from the countries who have advanced disposal programs right now, and you can pick those obviously Sweden, Finland, France, some of those countries that are well down the road to moving along and having found places where the spent fuel can go and just working through the technology processes here of making sure the repository will work and ensuring that you have continued public support from the host communities and more broadly. And there are two main reasons for this, I think. The first one is that there are concerns generated by any talk about regional storage or disposal. And the concerns on behalf of countries like Sweden and Finland and France that what this might actually do is undermine domestic support for what they're doing nationally in country and raising the spectre amongst various groups that what may actually happen is that the repository will end up taking waste from other countries. And obviously this is a thing that for us in the longer term is hugely important, but for right now this makes a lot of the managers in these countries very, very nervous if that rumor starts to float around then you get some real public issues about what exactly the plans are for this repository and that makes them very nervous. There are also concerns that other countries once, if you generate some really serious discussion about regional approaches to spend fuel management, other countries who don't have particularly advanced plans will simply halt any existing efforts that they have for national disposal or storage. In the expectation that a regional or an international solution will eventually bail them out. And so there are some clearly some pretty big sensitivities here. But they can be mitigated to an extent by ensuring that no country neglects its primary responsibility, which is to ensure a vibrant national program is in place to manage their spent fuel. And that vibrant doesn't mean that you have to have, you have to know where your final repository might be or where your storage site might be, but you need to be working towards that process. And so what you don't want to see is countries simply relying on the prospect that other countries, someone else is going to take their waste eventually. And frankly, that may never happen. So they need to have these plans in place to deal with themselves if they can't reach some sort of agreement on a regional approach. But in the broader context, as far as our new approach to the fuel cycle is concerned, whatever form it takes, if it happens, say it could be shared repositories, it could be take back from the fuel supplier or a third country even, it doesn't have to be the fuel supplier. There are some legal issues to work through there, but that you could foresee that happening as well. Cooperative spent fuel management definitely reduces the reasons for customer countries to develop their own reprocessing facilities. And I would say as a specific example, there are particularly small countries that are either about to embark on a nuclear program or have quite small programs where the cost of disposal constitutes a relatively large percentage of the nuclear enterprise for them. It will be a pretty significant cost, even if they can find somewhere to do this. Being able to send their spent fuel to a repository somewhere or at least a long-term interim storage site somewhere means that they will never have to worry about it again. Of course, unless they're getting some sort of way sent back. If the country that's willing to do this is willing to take everything and take title to it, that has got to be a pretty attractive option for a lot of these countries. And I'm willing to bet that they would pay a fair amount of money for that service. So as a result, to draw that bit to a conclusion, making progress on spent fuel management has the potential to be a real game changer in terms of safer and more secure international fuel cycle. But there are some issues that we have to deal with. Not one of those is the long lead times on all of this. And we're certainly not suggesting that these sorts of things can happen quickly because they won't. Also, I would just like to mention that we don't have time to dwell right now on all of the ways that some of these cooperative approaches may actually unfold. But I will say that the expansion of operations at a Brownfield site, and I suspect quite a few of you here in the audience have read a lot of what the International Atomic Energy Agency has said on this subject. They refer to this as the add-on scenario for how an existing site would then progressively take waste from potentially other countries is a particularly productive strategy, I think. And I'm happy to talk about this more in more detail in the Q&A section if anyone's interested in that. So going back to Sharon's slide of, I think it was slide number five. It doesn't matter, it was earlier on in the presentation. What would the major differences, what would we see, what would those major differences be between what we have now and the new approach? And right now, talking about production, you would have, I don't think... Technical blitz, you have to go back up. Okay, right, so as things stand now, when Sharon showed you that slide, we have potentially new national enrichment facilities with questionable economic justification. Under a new approach, then enrichment would be in balance with global demand. And to a pretty large extent, this is what we're seeing happening now, particularly with the enrichment market being so tough right now. We would have a lot of new facilities would actually come under diversified partnerships and we just wouldn't see HEU used in the civilian sector. As far, we also wouldn't have, also right now there is plutonium separation and material accumulation. It's okay, that's okay, that's fine. And under the new approach, separation would be linked to use. And so you would only see separation when it actually could be used in a reactor. We would have, right now we're seeing slow progress on programs to consume and dispose of separated material as we've discussed. And under a new approach, we would have new technologies and programs to consume. And then the timelines would be much, much tighter on this. And you would also be addressing the existing stockpiles before you did anything on new material. And as Sharon has also mentioned right now, we have no spent fuel repositories right now. Of course, until February, we did have the WIP facility but that was for transuranic waste from military programs. That has been closed for a period of time. We're not entirely sure when exactly that's gonna be open again. But as far as commercial spent fuel goes, we don't have any repositories now. And so obviously we don't have capacity for current spent fuel industries around the world. Under a new approach, we would have long-term storage and repository serving multiple clients and countries. And as I say, we have to understand that that is actually a, that's a longer term goal for us but something that we would... So looking forward, these progresses, these practices, excuse me, are not controversial. Well, maybe a little bit. But there are some consequences if they are to be applied to the fuel cycle system that we envision. And some of these applied directly to facilities and others are more systemic. So just quickly, the action, we have an action plan in the report that is on pages 40. And it's pretty much impossible to read from here, I'm sure.  Sharon gave a very good summary of what exactly that is but you can find that on pages 42 and 43 of the report. But I did wanna mention some of the consequences for adopting this plan. So in terms of facilities, what we would see is that safeguards would need to be applied to all enrichment and reprocessing facilities. Now obviously, now we're talking about non-nuclear weapon states and nuclear weapon states and that's a pretty significant step up in what safeguards would be required to do in terms of money and manpower. We would see more partnerships in running facilities. And they could take several forms. It wouldn't necessarily have to be just simply a financial interest in a facility. You could see, if you're talking about, say, an enrichment plant, the partnership could involve rights to output, the SWOO from that, or as far as disposal facility goes, then you could have guaranteed space in a disposal facility as the outcome of that. And that for some of you who have spent some time looking at low-level waste disposal in the United States, in particular, that's exactly how that works with the compacts here. And so we've seen that work on a slightly different type of waste, but those are some of the ways you could work with these partnerships. Also, we think that there would be a separation of operational control of, say, an enrichment facility, and we're talking about black boxing here, and so enrichment facilities would be the thing you're talking about here. There would be some operational control between the operator and the host country to hopefully raise the barriers against misuse of those materials. So that's on the facility side. On the systemic side, obviously, you would need independent national regulators. That's an absolute must. That's a must regardless of whether this project moves forward or not. That's something that's required at any time. You would also want to see the implementation of the IEA's most recent nuclear security guidelines. And interestingly, for us, we think, and this is probably no surprise for folks who have followed what the IEA does, and the budget they work with, that you would need some sort of consumption or sustainability tax that governments and facility operators probably would have to pay to fund all of this work that the IEA would now need to do. They have a pretty tight budget trying to do what they're doing right now, so if you're talking about a serious addition in the sorts of things they need to do, then that's what would need to happen. So what would happen if countries say they're going to comply with this, but they don't? Then clearly you would need some sort of enforcement mechanism, and we think that an IEA judgment of non-compliance would be the trigger for consequences. And there could be various consequences. One of the things that we really like that works through the market, and because we like the idea of leveraging what happens in the market rather than trying to make changes to a market that, quite frankly, on the front side works very, very well, that one of the things you could do is enforce a general ban on nuclear-related commerce. Now, it's tough in practice to do, but that's one of the things that could be used to enforce this new approach. I think it's worth stressing that these best practices constitute a vision for what we would like to see, and so the specifics of how to make it work would be very much open to negotiation once there was a general agreement on the underlying principles. So we're not trying to lay out a very specific roadmap here for, okay, once you get agreement, then this, this, this, this, and this must happen, but then that would be, I think you could work through some of those issues as time goes on. And finally, for me, at this point, it's, we came up with this figure, which is on page 45 of the report, that gives a rough idea of the extent to which a selection of countries here, and if you can't, I'm not sure how clear it is from down the back, so I'm going to be at the US, Japan, Jordan, Russia, Brazil, Korea, Canada, China, the UK, South Africa, the Dutch, the French, and the UAE. It gives you a sort of a general idea of what countries are already doing on some of the things that we're calling for in this action plan. Now, we fully concede that it loses a little bit of the nuance, given that we're limiting it to three colors here, essentially, which indicate whether the country is implemented, is committed to implementing, or is not implemented to each provision, and so there are, it's, you know, there's some gray in there, and obviously the one that stands out here is the all red sustainability tax, which is obviously all red, because it doesn't exist yet, but I think it's a nice and encouraging visualization of some of the progress that's being made on this, and so it's not as if we would have to absolutely start from scratch on this. I think we're seeing this, and this is just how the market has been working. So with that, I will hand it back to Sharon for the last couple of slides here. I wound up in your chair, but... That is okay. I put that question up there, are we there yet? You know, that's the question you always get from your kids in the back of the car. Are we there yet? The answer is partly, I mean, this was a group of countries that we sort of, we said, well, some are advanced nuclear states, some don't have much, some are aspiring. This chart would look different if you put a different group of countries up there, but I think it's, as Andrew said, fairly encouraging. Big question is, okay, so what about around? Under this approach, what would you have? So you would have no national enrichment, okay? And the key word there is national. You might have a consortium with multinational ownership operation, but it wouldn't be a national purely owned by the Iranians. The operation would be better tuned to needs. You might have already output strictly linked to contracts. And in fact, in the enrichment world, this is how it's done anyway, right? Normally you already have long-term contracts before you even build capacity. You would have no national reprocessing. Again, the key word there is national. And even if there were reprocessing, you would have to meet, for lack of a better phrase there, a needs test, right? You would have, it would be linked very strictly to consumption. And you know, Arriva now has, I forget what the policy is called, but they have, it's almost like a just in time, right? They don't separate. They try not to have a big inventory. As a matter of fact, their inventory has been static. So they don't separate until it's put into fuel. But here you're talking about actually using the fuel. And Iran would have to identify a path for a final waste disposal under the system. You would have stockpiles of HEU and plutonium would be limited. There would be no future breeder reactors. I recognize this is a big thing, okay? But you know, this is the question that nobody really wants to face. Are we gonna limit breeder reactors? Are we gonna, as we look forward, are we going to move into a plutonium-based nuclear energy economy? Iran would have to come up to compliance with all of the international standards. And finally, it would eliminate the rights argument that Iran has a right to enrichment or reprocessing. They have a right to peaceful nuclear energy, but not necessarily to a national capability. And frankly, if you are not producing fissile material for nuclear weapons, it's not clear to me that anybody needs a national capability. So this is our last slide, and then we're gonna look forward to turning the podium over to Everett who has been involved in many of these discussions over the years and brings a unique and very expert perspective. But if I had to sort of describe this approach in a nutshell, I would say this approach counters what we see as a current de facto monopoly of the fuel cycle owner states. You can call it monopoly, you can call it an oligopoly. The fact of the matter is there are very, 80 to 90% of fuel cycle capabilities are focused in about four or five. There are a few more on the enrichment side than the reprocessing, but you would increase access to the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy. It would apply, it would level the playing field a little bit. It would apply to the existing technology holders and not just focus on limiting options for potential new entrants. And finally, we think that these arrangements would help do all those good things, mitigate proliferation risks, strengthen certain areas of the market and help create a uniform standard among suppliers, key suppliers and vendors. So, I'm gonna leave that slide up there and turn the microphone over to Everett. Okay. Well thank you. Thank you very much. And I wanna thank both of you for your effort and both organizations for their effort in developing the report. I think it's very important to continue to have the conversation and contribute to the conversation. The principles that were outlined in this report, as I think was said, most of us can agree with, certainly at a high level, they make absolute sense. The challenge of course on anything is the implementation. I'm gonna open it up to questions in a few minutes, but before I do so, I wanna pose one or two questions myself to kind of kick off the conversation a little bit. And I think the first one I'd like to touch on is in terms of say the front end and the supply enrichment. The conversation about no national enrichment, the idea to keep it to a market based system. How do we address the issues of national energy security and who would generate, put the limit if you will, on production and what is really market based versus national? So great question, that's why we invited you here. As we were sitting here before I was struggling with this because obviously if we were just going to follow the market in uranium and uranium enrichment, right, we would be in deep trouble. The price for uranium has dropped.  So when the price of uranium drops, there's very little exploration. It's a problem when the demand goes down. So I take your point. On the, there's gonna have to be a discussion a discussion about whether do you keep a stockpile? If you keep a stockpile, do you, is it uranium? Is it low enriched uranium? Is it in, it can't really be in fuel. But the market by and large on the front end, have there been cases where reactors have gone unfueled except for maybe India, right? No, the market on the front end for the most part works, which is one of the things I'm interested in. You've got, you mentioned discussion on high enriched uranium and usage, no more production of that and use it down in terms of low enriched uranium. What's the thinking in terms of low enriched uranium and national facilities in that regard? So I guess I would turn the question back and say, do you need a national, is there a national security reason for keeping low enriched uranium? I mean, So there's not, it's with the low enriched uranium, I think you can continue to produce it. I'm not sure I see necessarily the challenge in some countries that wanna do their own facilities for their own reasons. Certainly from a market-based perspective, it doesn't necessarily make the most sense, but if they're not selling into the market, if they're doing it for their own purposes, then I'm not sure there's necessarily a problem, but that's part of, I'm kinda curious in terms of the conversation here. I would say if it's, you know, when we have facilities, so there was an argument, I think it was made with respect to the old USEC about national security requirements that was, I think at the time, connected more to the potential future need to enrich uranium up to highly enriched levels for the Naval nuclear program. So you're saying would you ever need to have a capability not under safeguards for? No, I'm not even referring to the safeguards necessarily, just the expansion of the capability. We've got expansion in the enrichment side now, not necessarily market-driven, but driven by certain states that want to have the capability themselves. Right. Is that a practice that could continue or not? I would think we don't, Andrew, you can jump in any time, but no, we would not want to see that continue, but how you determine what that need is, I think that is the difficult part, and that's gonna be a very sticky conversation. That is, I think, the challenge, how do you determine the need, who determines the need? And who determines the need, exactly. And I don't think, I know we have a lot of fans of the International Atomic Energy Agency in the audience, I'm not sure I would give that to an international body like that, but that is, okay, something that would have to be determined. Andrew, do you have anything to add? I would just say that, yeah, I think it's tough when you're trying to impose decisions on companies that have had long experience in this, and understand the lead times. And L.E.U. would be less of a concern for me, I've got to say just in general. But I think these, particularly, companies like your rank, I'll understand, are still in the market, so clearly they understand very well how it works and understand the lead times involved for these sorts of things. And so, yeah, that's one of the details that I think would have to be finessed a little bit as this moves forward. Let me ask one last question before I open it up to the audience. Certainly, the industry is hopeful that we'll have a significant expansion in nuclear worldwide. We're doing a little bit in the United States. In terms of a broad expansion of nuclear, looking at the best practices and the challenges front end and back end, if there was one area you had to pick to focus the international effort on, where would it be? Well, for me, and this is partially because I spend most of my time working on this, is spent fuel management. I think that is clearly the thing that we have not made anywhere near like the progress. That we should have. And as I said, I think this is, it's gonna be really important, I think, that the SWIDGE program and the program in Finland and France too. And hopefully, Canada, when this moves forward, that they do work well and they work safely. I think that sends an enormously important message to the rest of the world that these things can be done. You can get community support for repositories. They can work safely, particularly when you're talking about some of the work that's been done in Sweden and Finland that's very technical on this. And I think that sends an enormously important message. And I think one of the problems now is that you just don't have any spent fuel repositories operating. And so the unknowns that go along with that make a lot of people nervous. But I think if there was one thing that you could pick that you would want to move forward and get some real traction on, for me, that is it. And then you can start to look at down the track whether these things can be expanded with, and you need obviously safe management of safe operation of the facility and also community support, whether these things could be management could be expanded to consider taking spent fuel from elsewhere. And I think you're seeing that, it's a microcosm of this, but you're seeing this in West Texas right now with what waste control specialists has been doing after disposing of low level waste first of all from Texas and Vermont and then expanding that more widely to the rest of the country. And now that they're taking some of the canisters from Los Alamos National Lab and storing them. And now they're talking about storing spent fuel. And I think that's the way this has to go too. It has to be a slow building process where trust is built along the way. But if it was up to me, that's the one area that I think breaks a whole lot of other things open if you can get some traction on that. I wouldn't disagree on that. I would say we have to also focus on dry cask storage. For states. And also getting their heads around, many of these countries, when you look at expansion of nuclear energy right now, it's gonna be happening in Asia more than anywhere else. And the lack of availability of, I mean, some of these countries don't have the geology for repository. And so they need some safe, secure storage. And when you referred to dry cask storage, I'm assuming referring to an expansion of that in some countries that don't currently do that. Yes, absolutely. Begin to utilize it, okay, great. We'll open it up, questions right here, thank you. Microphones are coming. Thanks so much, Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic Council. This seems very utopian when it comes to Iran. Iran has made it absolutely clear that it's not going to give up enrichment on its own soil, that it can't trust the international community to provide enrichment, EuroDeaf, et cetera. So is there any aspect of this that is applicable to the current negotiations that are going on? And also how does this apply to countries like Israel and India and Pakistan that are not members of the NPT? Thank you. So I would, well, yes, there is an element of this that is utopian, absolutely, or more of a vision. But we didn't say no enrichment in Iran. We said no national enrichment. So an enrichment capability could be retained. And I totally agree with you. Iran is not about to dismantle its enrichment facilities. This would, what you're looking for is kind of more early detection, right? And so what you get, I would be the last person to say that a multinational approach to sensitive fuel cycle facilities is 100% protection against proliferation. That's not the case, right? Yurenko gave us, well, I shouldn't say that. AQ Khan was able to spirit out sensitive technology from Yurenko, right? But what it does give you is more warning because it is not under an entirely, the national veil of secrecy. So what would that look like? We didn't dot all the T's and dot all the I's and cross all the T's here in this plan because when we looked at all of the, or some of the past proposals, what you get from the international community is, oh, we didn't invent it, not invented here, therefore we're gonna reject this plan. No, so that's why we specifically went with these best practices. Do we all believe that the playing field should be leveled? I would say Iran would say, yeah. Do we believe that there should be shared costs and burdens? Do we believe that fundamentally across the world we need to reduce those materials that pose security and proliferation risk? So I think even the irons of the world, if there's more than one country in that category, would say that, yeah, they could sign up to those best practices. When I look to the future in Iran, I don't know what this, I've seen in some of the previous descriptions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Iran said, yeah, we'll never do reprocessing. Never is a long time. It could be 10, 20 years. It could be at some point, much as some other countries have said, well, we need highly enriched uranium for our naval submarine program. Why not? It's not prohibited under the NPT. I have seen countries who have very, very limited nuclear programs get up at international meetings and say, well, yeah, we might consider reprocessing in the future, because it's not prohibited. So the point here is to start a discussion that says, all right, what do we want? If we want nuclear energy to help us with climate change, if we think that we want to pursue this energy source as the future, we don't wanna, how much money and time have we spent in the last 13 years on talking to Iran, inspecting Iran? You know, this doesn't solve the Iran problem today, but it looks ahead and says, okay, these are all the problems we have had with this particular instance, and how can we overcome that so that we can all feel a lot safer and secure about moving forward with nuclear energy? So I, it's real Pakistan and India. Sharon, let me, if I may for a second, just pose a slightly different question. Come back to it. It's related to the question. If, at some point in time, there'll be a demand for more enrichment as nuclear grows, right now we're a little oversupplied, but when that occurs, and there needs to be an expansion in the market for enrichment capability. If countries that currently don't supply enrichment capability wanted to do it and to sell into the market, thinking of Iran and some of the other countries, is that the sort of proposal that I think would be considered acceptable? Where they come in under safeguards and all of that, but that they are doing it to sell into the market and of course supply some of their own needs potentially. Would that be acceptable under this system? Right. Sure, with all of those parameters in place. So... It can't not be, I don't think. I mean, this is where the market works, right? So I think that's one way to begin to think about it is in terms of market-based, if the market needs the more supply and enrichment, if the market eventually needs more on reprocessing, countries can do it if they're selling into the market. That's my interpretation anyways of what. So the real question is for Israel, Pakistan and India, if they do not place their, we had the systemic requirements or the facility requirements, right? If they do not place enrichment reprocessing, if they still keep military facilities operating, they would, according to the system, be shut out of nuclear commerce. Right, so there's your utopian part of this. Now, Pakistan and Israel are treated in certain ways under the Nuclear Suppliers Group because they do not have comprehensive safeguards. India is treated in another way as the result of the exemption. So there would be an impact for those countries, obviously. And yeah, we're not saying there are no consequences to this, but if you are also looking ahead, let's be even more utopian nuclear weapons-free world or even a fissile material production cutoff treaty, countries will have to place facilities under either some kind of monitoring inspection or dismantle their disused facilities. Question in the back. Hi, I'm Matthew McKenzie from NRDC. Andrew, thank you for that shout out to my colleagues, Chris Payne and Tom Cochran on the Nuclear Islands Project. Congratulations on your report and thank you for sharing it with us at this event today. My question has to do with the need for geologic repositories for spent fuel. Very often and correctly, this issue is conceived of as an environmental issue. The need to isolate the radiologic and toxic hazards of spent nuclear fuel from people and from the environment over a very long timeframe. But in your report, I'm seeing a discussion of deep geologic repositories as a security issue and I just wanted to circle back on that and see how you would articulate the need for deep geologic repositories for spent fuel as a security issue. Thank you. Yeah, I guess I would think it becomes, it is a security issue when you have spent fuel sitting on sites, at reactor sites, either operating or decommission reactor sites around the country, wherever those countries may be. And it seems that the most obvious way to get around that is to choose to have one site. And I know there's been some talk about deep borehole discussion, but that's very early on. But deep geological repository would be, you could, you solve a lot of problems with security then because you're only dealing with one site. I mean, eventually once the spent fuel gets to that facility, then you're only dealing with one site. It's much more difficult to access than it would be under, whether it's sitting in dry cask storage or in spent fuel pools at reactors. I know there has been some discussion about the risks that are posed also by geological repositories as well. Because then you have a very large amount of spent fuel in the one place. And particularly if there were, there was a very significant change in the political system of the country you're dealing with. And also particularly when you have usually, or not usually, almost all the time best practice I think is that the repositories would be retrievable for a certain amount of time to ensure that the way it's doing, what you think it's doing. And if it's not, then you need to do something about it. But I, to some extent, I think the concerns about the security of geological repositories are a little bit overblown. I gotta say if it was a terrorist organization in particular, but even a country that had decided that it wanted to go down a nuclear weapons path, I think there are a lot easier ways to do that than diving back in to your repository to bring that fuel, to bring that spent fuel out and then do things with that. So I hear, I understand the argument and sure it exists, but I think it's not as much of a concern maybe as some people suggested it. So I think consolidation, I mean for economies of scale and security, I think is a good idea and provided the repository is operating safely and then after a while, then you would close it up. Then it becomes much more difficult to get into. Of course, I know Alan Hansen has mentioned this a number of times to me in meetings that we've all had with him that essentially in the end, it's only a matter of engineering, right? If you're willing to put in the time and the effort, of course you can get back into that repository. But that sends a massive warning sign to the rest of the world about what's going on. And I think then you can react more quickly to that. But does that answer your question? Is that? Yes, there's a really important integral component of how the best practices work together to improve the international system. Yeah, I guess then the other part of that too was that maybe I spent a little bit more time and I should have stressed a bit more and we're talking about regional repositories here. So if you can have a number of countries participating in this, that then the justification for a number of the customers for reprocessing really disappears. If you can get rid of the spent fuel so you never have to deal with it again, then reprocessing becomes a much less interesting prospect, I think. I would just add there's another reason why the back end is important to us and that is many countries have not found the front end assurances to be all that attractive or they're not that enthusiastic about it. But these nuclear newcomers when Russia for example says oh yeah we'll take back your waste. That seems to be, I think that would provide a bigger incentive. Now it's not entirely clear that Russia actually is going to take back that waste. No other countries are really prepared to do that. There's some talk of China doing the same but I think we're gonna need to wait and see. But when you look at the entire kind of standing back, for many countries if they have one reactor or two reactors to have that waste taken care of in some way, if it's in a regional repository or regional storage or that makes nuclear power a lot easier, I think for them. Yes, up front. Oh, that's fine, sorry. Come around. Yeah hi, Mark Goodman, State Department. I have a question for you Andrew. Your presentation talked about getting rid of HEU-fueled naval reactors. How important is that to this proposal? If you couldn't achieve that, what impact would it have on the integrity of this concept? And also even if you had LEU-fueled naval propulsion, wouldn't that provide a national security justification for national enrichment facilities? Yeah Mark, I appreciate that. And it's something of an outlier in this presentation particularly because we are talking to a large extent about the civilian fuel cycle here. And so then we're getting to talk about the military side of things. And we fully appreciate, we've been doing a little bit of work on this at NTI2 and Kelsey who I believe is here now has been doing a lot of work on this too about the naval side of things. And I think I would just say that in the overall picture I think it's a very important thing because you're talking about the largest stocks of HEU that you really would like to deal with, but to some extent it's a slightly separate discussion. It's linked, but it's a slightly separate discussion and with the significant challenges that you know very well about this with designing new submarines and the very, very long lead times on those. And some of the skepticism that the US Navy in particular has expressed towards doing this in short term when as far as it's risking operations, worried about or at least worried about the effect that it might have on the operations of the fleet, I think that's one of the things that we would be willing to push out a little bit further. But you're right, then LEU fuel, and we've seen as the French do this, there are a number of countries that do use LE fuel for their naval fleet, for their naval submarines that that may also promote, it may or may not promote more enrichment facilities to do this, but that wouldn't, that again, that wouldn't obviate the need for some sorts of groups of countries being involved in these sorts of facilities. So it's, yeah, as I said, a little bit of an outlier for this, but we think an important thing to keep in mind going forward and something that you have to be thinking about and trying to do something about it if you see that as important now, because very quickly you get into with the Navy's build cycle, then all of a sudden things start happening and it's too late for the current or the next generation, then you're talking 60, 70 years down the track and that's a long, long while to wait. So it's something that we think is important, but we understand the challenges, the very, very large challenges with that. Up front here if we can, we have a question here. Thank you, I'm Samira Daniels, I'm thrilled that this report has come out because I think that's, it's too bad it didn't happen like five, six years ago, so congrats to Samira. Yeah, I'm sure. So, but these issues, as you pointed out, Sharon, have been in circulation for many, many years and you rightfully point out that specifically with the spend fuel and you as well, management has been, should be a much greater priority, but the discussion in different fora always sort of veers back, it's almost like this poll to the more ideological and geopolitical dimensions of it. And so there's a kind of a conflation that sometimes I don't get, you know, I'm not really technically savvy as you, so maybe I focus on that a little bit more, but I wonder if there's any fora you think which can sort of accelerate these issues because it seems that different fora have different competencies to deal with this. And I'm wondering what, which fora you think could most deal with these issues that you've raised and sort of implementation issues, which fora you think could, you know, accelerate it. In my wildest dreams, IFNAC would take this up. I'm not sure that there is a fora out there. I mean, you know, what you need and we have, you'll see towards the back of the report highlighted some steps that we would advocate as follow on actions. You need to start whatever you wanna call it, conversation, discussion, workshops with government and industry, especially industry, maybe some track to talk this through. You're not gonna have to work on specific issues. INMM, I would love to see somebody give a paper at the next INMM gathering, but that's not really an action-oriented group. I wanted to make one comment back to Mark's question because I think it's a good one. I think what you were asking was, does this all fall apart if you can't get your H-E-U elimination? So under the Nuclear Security Summits, we've been working towards minimizing H-E-U where possible, and that hasn't really applied to naval reactors. But as Andrew mentioned, there are countries that do use L-E-U fueled subs. I don't think it, I think it, I'm not sure you would necessarily have to, well, let me put it this way. We have never confronted this because we've had enough H-E-U for our naval submarine program. The question, especially if you are gonna pursue a Fissile Material Production Cutoff Treaty is, can you safeguard the production and then somehow come up with some monitoring mechanism when it comes out, when it's withdrawn from safeguards for a military purpose? You could say it's a military non-explosive purpose, so would that allow an enrichment, an enricher like your Renko or somebody to say, oh, maybe it's not being used in nuclear weapons, it's just being used in a military program? I don't know, these are tough questions. I understand there have been some exceptions for L-E-U that was used to produce in a reactor to produce Tritium, if I have that correctly. It does complicate things, absolutely. And so really, you're not looking, when we look at this best practices approach, we're not looking as, yeah, everything magically happens in 2025 or whatever, but that you could start to implement parts of this and actually improve the system, even if you don't make it the whole way. Okay, we're gonna have, we have just a couple minutes left, and Andrew, did you wanna make a quick comment on the last question? And then I'll take, let's go around. Thanks, yeah, just quickly. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right that one of the problems we're seeing, particularly on spent fuel management globally, is that apart from in Europe, where we're seeing some pretty interesting cooperation right now, the rest of the parts of the world, it just doesn't exist. And so we, and obviously Asia, when you, obviously South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the two most important countries here because they're running into some pretty serious storage problems, and right now too, for a number of them, that, and they're not really talking to each other on this specific issue. And so we've been trying to do a little bit of work on putting some sort of regional grouping together to talk about these things. The thing we've had to be really careful about though, is that you don't wanna get immediately into a discussion about right, if we were gonna do this regionally, where would the repository go? Who was willing to put at the hand, host it? Because countries just not ready, and not even close to ready to do that. And so what we're hoping is that if you can build a discussion about some of the cooperation that can be done, some of it technical, some of it political, on very early in the stage about, you know, dry cask storage and experiences on that, and various things that would over time build trust, and then down the track you get to the point where maybe you start talking about, okay, if we were looking for someone to become a host, for a regional host, what would need to be in place? And then maybe then you get some countries saying, well that sounds like something that we could possibly be, but you don't wanna leap into that at the start because then things get shut down completely and then you really haven't achieved anything. Okay, let's do, I know we have multiple questions here and I'm unfortunately, we're just about out of time, so let's just take the one gentleman right there because I saw that hand earlier. Thanks very much, Stephen Dolly with Plats. In the previous life I did this non-proliferation stuff, so I really appreciate the effort that goes into developing a proposal like this and thank you for sharing your report. But I also developed an appreciation of just the vast scale particularly of the plutonium economy in the world and the stockpiles we already have of separate plutonium as you've been discussing. I'm trying to get a better sense from you of how you get started on this part of the proposal where there's no reprocess until you draw down the current stocks because these countries have, some countries, the numbers I'm sure in your report have vast stocks of separated plutonium already. It would take decades to develop a fleet of burners if that's the way you want, burner reactors if that's the way you want it to go. It seems like the only option to move forward in the short to medium term would be mox fuel in the current light up water reactor fleet and that sounds like a proposal for a global plutonium economy of LWRs around the world burning plutonium. I'm not sure that's what you're proposing. I don't think that's what you wanna propose necessarily from a non-proliferation perspective. How do you get started on a limitation of reprocessing until current stocks are drawn down in practice? Great question, very briefly. I'm getting a sign that we need to add. Quick response. I don't think you wanna wait for burner reactors to be deployed. This is the question that Japan is facing right now, which is plutonium stocks, what do you do? I think the near term is mox. We're not getting everything that, as non-proliferation experts, we're not getting everything that, we have to be realistic.  The plutonium buildup is really focused in Russia, there's some in the UK. Where are most of the stocks, Japan, what's that? Yes, yes, and so that's where we are, but you're gonna have to make some compromises, but I appreciate you're bringing up that point. Well, we've reached the end of the time. I appreciate everybody participating in the questions and the conversations and I very much wanna thank both of you for your efforts in putting the report together. And we wanna thank you. And please, let's thank them for their work. Thank you so much. Thank you.