Bergeron, Kenneth D. Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power.

• Author: Chang, Laura W.
• Position: Book Review

Bergeron, Kenneth D. Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 244 pp. Paper, $15.95.

A thought-provoking and well-written account, Tritium on Ice provides a concise yet comprehensive analysis of the issues and agendas surrounding the civilian and military uses of nuclear power. The author, a nuclear physicist who spent twenty-five years working for one of the U.S. government's nuclear-weapons laboratories, makes a well-researched argument against the Department of Energy's 1998 decision to begin producing tritium in commercial reactors (i.e., the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar and Sequoyah plants) in response to the Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum, on grounds of both national and international security. Tritium on Ice spans the relatively short history of nuclear energy, from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" initiative and the resulting International Atomic Energy Agency efforts to coordinate the program at an international level, to current issues of non-proliferation, national security, and public safety.

Tritium has been described as the "lifeblood of the nuclear arsenal." An isotope of hydrogen, it is required for the function of U.S. nuclear weapons as designed. Tritium is the "H" in the H-bomb; a mere few grams of this gas will "boost" nuclear weapons, or significantly increase their explosive yield, thereby changing an A-bomb into an H-bomb. Tritium decays at a rate of 5.5 percent and needs to be periodically replaced. Since it has commercial uses and is not inherently fissile, tritium is not classified as special nuclear material, nor was it addressed specifically in the 1982 Hart-Simpson Amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which prohibited the use of plutonium or enriched uranium derived from commercial reactors for nuclear arms. In 1974, for example, India circumvented international policy and exploded a bomb made with plutonium extracted from commercial spent fuel. Even though India had honored bilateral agreements with Canada, the production of the bomb revealed loopholes in the international system of non-proliferation.

Currently, the five nuclear-weapons states are the United States, Great Britain, China, Russia, and France. Other countries with nuclear-weapons capabilities fall into three different categories: those that have renounced their weapons; non-NPT-weapons states (possessing nuclear weapons but refusing to...