Brazil & Southern Cone - 26 October 2004

International pressure on Brazil's nuclear plans appears to have eased from one quarter, with the news that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has accepted Brazil's restrictions on inspection of its new uranium enrichment plant. But it is increasing elsewhere, as non-proliferation activists in the US pick up some of the arguments of those who had been painting Brazil as the new nuclear menace, and Greenpeace launches an attack on Brazil's plans to expand its use of nuclear energy.

The pressure from the IAEA had been accompanied by much media spin generated in the US by two sets of critics: those on the political right who found a new weapon against Lula in the argument that he was turning Brazil into the world's most recent nuclear menace, and those concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weaponry, within and without the government, who feared that 'letting Brazil get away with it' would provide a precedent that might be used by other countries - particularly Iran.

Much of the international media took this spin at face value, and Brazil ended up being portrayed as refusing IAEA inspection of its new installations, when it was actually refusing visual inspection of its centrifuges whose proprietary design it wished to protect. All the rest of the enrichment plant at Resende was from the outset open to inspection, including the conduits in and out of the centrifuges - which, the Brazilians, argued, would suffice for the IAEA to perform its core task of verifying that no enriched uranium was being siphoned off.

Where it all started
Brazil has the world's sixth-largest uranium deposits, with proven reserves of 310,000 tonnes (and two-thirds of its territory still unsurveyed). It currently spends US$20m-30m a year sending its uranium to Canada for gasification, then on to Britain for enrichment, then back to fuel the power plants at home. A project carried out by the navy's research centre at Aramar, the Centro Tecnológico da Marinha (CTM), resulted in the development of a centrifuge which, the Brazilians say, can enrich uranium at a fraction of the price they are paying for the imported fuel.

The CTM says it is nonsensical to imagine that this could be the first step towards a nuclear weapons programme, and not only because Brazil is barred from doing so by its constitution and several international treaties. There is a practical reason as well: its system is designed to enrich uranium up to 20%, while weapons-grade uranium would require a level of 93%. And, the CTM adds, it has been enriching uranium for the past 19 years. The IAEA inspects the CTM (without seeing the centrifuge).

This year a full-scale enrichment plant was installed at Resende which is almost ready to go onstream. The plan is to build up domestic enrichment until Brazil becomes self-sufficient in nuclear fuel sometime between 2008 and 2010 and enjoys an exportable surplus thereafter. The equation is an attractive one: the mined uranium currently fetches about US$15 a kilo while the enriched fuel costs ten times more. It was as the Resende plant's completion became imminent that the question of verification became an international political issue, in an atmosphere charged by US preoccupation with real or imagined 'weapons of mass destruction' in North Korea, Iraq and Iran.

This semi-public tiff with the IAEA has been going on for more than a year. Several times the Brazilians felt they had come close to an agreement, but on each occasion the IAEA ended up saying that it was not fully satisfied with the inspection facilities on offer. It was only in early October that a strong signal came from the US that the matter was close to resolution.

Visiting Brazil, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the US fully accepted that Brazil has no desire, plans or interest in developing a nuclear weapon but rather aims to develop a nuclear-power programme for peaceful purposes, and that when inspectors from the IAEA returned to Brazil (to review inspection proposals for Resende on the ground) 'they'll find a way to resolve their outstanding issues'. Powell said that he did not believe 'the IAEA or the US or anyone else' wants to see Brazil give away any of its 'proprietary knowledge' on nuclear matters 'that [Brazil] believes it should hold close'.

On 18 October the IAEA team turned up, and two days later, according to Brazilian officials, agreed to a solution which would be announced later in the month. The formula: the screens around the centrifuges would have their top ends lowered and the bottom ones raised, so as to give a better view of the piping and connections going in and out.

This, however, was not the beginning of the end: within that same week two new critical broadsides had been fired at the Brazilian government, one still aimed at IAEA verification of the nuclear enrichment process, the other at the plans to build up the nuclear contribution to the country's electricity generation.

Insisting on fuller inspection
The first attack came in the magazine Science in an article authored by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, an NGO. Its main message was that Brazil should submit to full, unrestricted IAEA inspection, among other things because it will establish a precedent for Iran and any other country wishing to build a uranium enrichment plant while remaining a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The article challenges Brazilian claims that its level of enrichment would not suffice to sustain a nuclear weapons programme. It says that at the declared level of enrichment, Resende would give Brazil the capacity to produce five to six implosion devices a year. By 2010, with the planned increases in capacity, it says, the capacity would rise to 26-31 bombs a year, and by 2014 to 53-63 bombs.

It also sounds a sceptical note regarding the Brazilian government's assurances that its nuclear programme has exclusively peaceful aims: these statements, it says, should be seen in the light of Brazil's nuclear history. Of this history, the article mentions that in the 1980s Brazil had a secret plan to develop a nuclear bomb, administered by the military and hidden from the IAEA. It mentions that in 1990 President Fernando Collor de Melo repudiated that programme, before leaping to the present and the refusal to allow access to the centrifuges.

The article, written and published before the end of the IAEA visit, concludes that the US has decided not to confront Brazil over this matter, choosing instead to try to persuade it to 'cooperate with the IAEA'. Hence, it ends urging 'the rest of the world' to help the US in its bid to make Brazil 'behave like a good nuclear citizen'.

Opposing anything nuclear
On 21 October the environmentalist organisation Greenpeace issued a communiqué condemning 'the relaunch of the Brazilian nuclear adventure'. It was not prompted by the latest developments in the IAEA verification saga but by a series of public statements made by Science and Technology Minister Eduardo Campos about plans for investment in a number of nuclear projects, and by an extensive report on plans in this area published by the newspaper Jornal do Globo.

The minister said, not for the first time, that the government intended to complete Angra III, the planned third nuclear generating plant at Angra dos Reis. He added that it also intended to build four additional ones. Completing the construction of the 1,300MW Angra III is expected to cost about R$7.5bn (US$2.6bn). The four additional ones, of 300MW apiece, would cost an extra US$2.8bn. The target is to raise the share of nuclear plants in Brazil's total electricity generation from the current 4.5% to about 5.7% by 2010 - by when, as noted, Brazil should be able to cover its own nuclear fuel needs.

Greenpeace is campaigning against this on two tracks. The first is to suggest that Campos has gone off on his own, against the opinion of other members of Lula's cabinet, 'again seeking to create a fait accompli, as last May, when he announced the export of enriched uranium and was disavowed'. The organisation maintains that the ministers of energy and the environment oppose Campos's plans.

The reference to May alludes to an incident during Lula's visit to China, when the president was reported to have reacted angrily to public statements made by Planning Minister Guido Mantega regarding plans to export uranium to China - not because of their content but because he had breached an instruction from Lula that ministers should confine their utterances to their own jurisdictions. Lula had actually already mentioned, at Beijing University, the possibility of a partnership with China in prospecting for uranium. 

What Campos said at the time was, 'Brazil is not in the uranium market because it imports enriched uranium.' He did note, though, that since 1982 Brazil has an agreement with China to cooperate in various fields of science and technology, including the nuclear sector. In November 2003, he said, China had expressed an interest in enlarging the scope of this cooperation in the nuclear field, but Brazil replied that that would have to wait until after the review of its nuclear development plan.

Greenpeace's second track is the argument that the Brazilian people don't want nuclear power. It refers to a survey it commissioned recently from the Instituto de Estudos da Religião (ISER), which showed 82.3% of respondents against the nuclear power plants. Indeed, notes Greenpeace, 85.4% said they would not vote for candidates supporting the construction of nuclear generating plants. Campos, says Greenpeace, 'ignores the fact that almost all developed countries are getting rid of the nuclear plants, deactivating those in use and desisting from building any new ones'.

Two-track response
Actually, Campos does more than that. He recently said, 'The nuclear programme is a strategic issue for Brazil. We now command the uranium enrichment cycle. We know that over the coming 20 years, 25% of all the electricity generated worldwide will come from a nuclear source, and Brazil could be one of the few countries supplying the fuel.' He notes that the US and France, which jointly cover about 55% of the world demand for enriched uranium, use the gaseous diffusion technology, which uses 25 times more energy than the centrifugation technique developed by Brazil. Russia, with another 30% of the market, uses centrifugation but, says Campos, uses machines that are smaller and less efficient than Brazil's.

But that is not his central argument. Even before Brazil can get round to enjoying earnings from exporting enriched uranium, it will need more nuclear-generated electricity. This is because the country's oil reserves will only last for another 17 years, and in the long run the scope for building more hydroelectric power plants will also run out. His ministry's stated target is to 'guarantee the supply of enriched uranium for the domestic and external markets'.