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Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards
capacity. The same assumption cannot be made worldwide, since
individual countries may wish to construct reprocessing and/or
fabrication plants regardless of the size of their nuclear
industries.
The reactor
mix presented in Table B–4 is derived from a graph presented
in the U.S. AEC forecast. From the reactor mix, the total amount of
plutonium output, the uranium–235 input requirements, and the
uranium–233 output for foreign reactors (excluding the
Communist countries) can be derived for each year. A projection was
also made for plutonium input into foreign reactors based on an
assumption that plutonium recycle only occurs in the LWR, and that
10 percent of the uranium–235 in the LWR fuel is replaced by
plutonium. The results of these projections from 1980 to 2000 are
presented in Table B–5.
WORLDWIDE ESTIMATE OF PLUTONIUM OUTPUT
AND URANIUM–235 INPUT
Worldwide,
there are three blocks of forecasts: The U.S.; foreign, excluding
communist countries; and the communist countries. The AEC forecasts
provide an estimate for the communist nations, excluding China.
That forecast is 19.5 gigawatts at the end of 1980, 146 gigawatts
at the end of 1990, and 600 gigawatts by the end of 2000. In order
to get a very rough estimate of the worldwide material flow, it is
assumed that the reactor mix in the communist nations will be
similar to that in other foreign countries. It is also assumed that
China's installed capacity will be five gigawatts (corresponding to
five 1,000 megawatt power reactors) in 1980, fifty gigawatts in
1990, and 300 gigawatts in 2000. (Mason Willrich disagrees with
this sentence.) The worldwide plutonium production and
uranium–235 input for 1980, 1990, and 2000 are presented in
Table B–6.