Shaw further noted that much of the equipment for SILEX may be custom-made. Even if a potential proliferator successfully acquired the plans for such a facility, an order to a vendor for a piece of equipment only used in SILEX would be a red flag.

Safeguarding future laser facilities may not be as easy, though. In a report on safeguarding laser-based enrichment, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that the Agency’s own experience with the technology is “very limited since there is no declared LIS [laser isotope separation] facility under safeguards which is currently in operation.” The report warned of the “obsolescence” of the Agency’s own guidelines applying to laser isotope technology and lamented a general lack of personnel expertise with the technology.

The US’s most recent Eligible Facilities List, which states which nuclear facilities are open to IAEA safeguards, explicitly excludes the Global Laser Enrichment facility’s laser enrichment development, testing, and related areas.

Ultimately, for some observers, the real risk is not so much the SILEX technology itself but what its development has revealed about the U.S. nuclear regulatory process.

When the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was considering whether to grant GE-Hitachi a license for the proposed North Carolina plant, the American Physical Society submitted a petition requesting the NRC officially amend its licensing rules to include a nonproliferation assessment in all applications. The Federation of American Scientists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and members of the House of Representatives submitted letters supporting the proposed rules change.

The NRC rejected the request, saying that the proposed proliferation assessments would not meaningfully inform licensing decisions, that the considerations were not part of the agency’s statutory requirements, and that existing laws and regulations already provided appropriate consideration of proliferation risks.

“Nobody in the U.S. government is doing [a thorough nonproliferation] analysis and I think that analysis ought to be done. I’m not necessarily against the technology,” said James Acton, Senior Associate in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It does seem possible that if you do the analysis you come up with a conclusion that the benefits outweigh the risks and, if so, we ought to commercialize it. But I think it’s crazy to allow the technology to be commercialized before a holistic analysis is conducted.”

Global Laser Enrichment has said that it has conducted its own internal proliferation assessment of SILEX and, citing the sensitive nature of the information, has not released it publicly. A nonproliferation expert allowed to review the assessment wrote that, according to the assessment, “The single greatest barrier to the proliferation of this technology is the significantly greater technological difficulty it presents compared to centrifuge enrichment.”

That same report on the assessment, though, also noted that the report was seven pages in total, three of which were dedicated to biographies of the assessment’s authors. “If their assessment is really a four-page assessment, that is not a serious assessment,” Acton said. “If you want to look at a serious assessment, the DOE at the end of the Bush administration produced a nonproliferation assessment of the Bush administration’s nuclear energy plan. That was closer to two hundred pages long. I didn’t agree with it all, but it was a serious piece of analysis. A four-page piece of analysis is insulting, quite frankly.”

David Logan is a Princeton-in-Asia Fellow at Northeastern University.

Image: Flickr/Jeff Keyzer. CC BY-SA 2.0.