Brazilian Navy Nuclear Program
The Brazilian Navy Nuclear Program is the Brazilian navy's initiative to master the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear propulsion to be used in a Brazilian nuclear-powered submarine. The PNM is distinct from, but directly necessary to, the Submarine Development Program, which will build the submarine itself. It is carried out by the Navy Technological Center in São Paulo, which operates a headquarters unit on the University of São Paulo campus and the Aramar Nuclear Industrial Center, in Iperó, São Paulo.
Founded in 1979 under the codename "Chalana Program", it was originally part of the "Parallel Nuclear Program" of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which was dissatisfied with the technology transfer it had been offered by developed countries. Civilian institutions and the country's three Armed Forces branches had their own projects, but only the navy succeeded in the long term. Under the initial leadership of naval engineer Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, ultracentrifuges were obtained to enrich the first milligrams of uranium in 1982. The project was subsidized through secret accounts and enveloped in both Brazilian and foreign espionage.
The program was made public after the return to democracy and maintained with varying degrees of support from the federal government. Politically, it is associated with agendas of technological autonomy, security, and international projection. In 1988, the PNM completed a research reactor and inaugurated the Aramar complex, despite an intense local anti-nuclear movement. The program was tarnished by association with the dictatorship and fears of a nuclear accident. In the 1990s, the government lost interest, the navy's budget took over all expenses, and the program dropped in priority and stagnated. A notable development in those years was a contract to supply ultracentrifuges to the Resende Nuclear Fuel Factory, meeting part of the fuel demand of the Angra Nuclear power plants. The dual use of the technology helps explain the survival of the PNM.
The creation of ProSub in 2008 brought a solid promise for the construction of the nuclear submarine, renewed federal support for the PNM, and the institutionalization of its goals in the National Defense Strategy and other official documents. The nuclear fuel cycle has already been mastered, and the land-based prototype of the submarine's nuclear plant, called the Nuclear Power Generation Laboratory, is under construction. The issue of international safeguards remains unresolved: Brazil has the technical capacity to enrich fissile material potentially usable in nuclear weapons, but ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1998. However, it has not signed the NPT Additional Protocol, which would grant more access to international inspections. The Brazilian government claims to be protecting sensitive information, and no agreement has yet been reached regarding the future fuel stockpiles of the nuclear submarine.
Background
Nuclear energy in Brazil
At the beginning of the atomic age in the 1940s, Brazil emerged as one of the main suppliers of nuclear ores to the United States. Even at that time, large unexplored uranium reserves were known to exist, which, by the early 21st century, were estimated to be the sixth largest in the world. From early on, the Brazilian government was not content with merely supplying raw materials and expressed interest in the nuclear technology held by the great powers. There were two diverging paths to acquire this technology: cooperating with the U.S., the dominant country in the field, or pursuing independent development. Initially, the prevailing stance was alignment with the U.S., to which Brazil was already aligned in the Cold War. The first nuclear research reactor in Brazil was built using American technology in 1957.The Brazilian military dictatorship refused to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, created by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union in 1968. Its representatives at the United Nations General Assembly accused superpowers of using international security as a pretext to deny advanced technology to developing countries. Even so, in 1970 the American company Westinghouse was contracted to build the country's first nuclear power plant, Angra I, which would begin commercial operation in 1984. The 1973 oil crisis increased interest in nuclear energy, and in 1975 the Geisel administration signed an agreement with West Germany to build two more plants in Angra dos Reis.
The agreement authorized Brazil to import a centrifuge plant to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, but Germany's participation in the Urenco group required the consent of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to transfer centrifuge technology. The Netherlands vetoed the transfer, and in Brazil, there were suspicions of American interference. Germany's alternative offer was to transfer jet nozzle enrichment technology, which had only been demonstrated on a laboratory scale. One of the nuclear plants, Angra II, would begin operation in 2001, but the jet nozzle method was a failure. Its contracts would be dissolved in 1988 and the equipment and machinery destroyed in 2001.
Brazil depended on enriched uranium from the U.S., a source threatened by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act passed by the United States Congress in 1978. Exports would only be allowed to countries that accepted full safeguards on their nuclear materials. Brazil was one of the targets of the legislation; international non-proliferation experts feared that the country—due to its great-power aspirations, authoritarian government, rivalry with Argentina, and insistence on its right to develop military explosives for peaceful purposes—might use its nuclear energy program to conceal a weapons program, as India had done.
Under pressure from the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Brazil signed a safeguards agreement with the latter covering the nuclear infrastructure it would receive from Germany. Facilities outside the program were exempt. Domestically, the Brazil–Germany nuclear agreement was criticized by liberal economists and hydroelectric energy lobbyists. A Parliamentary Inquiry Commission, created in 1978 to examine the agreement, served as a platform for the "autonomists" to question the jet nozzle method, past nuclear cooperation with the U.S., and the sidelining of national scientists in the program's direction. The CPI concluded, nonetheless, that the agreement was necessary for energy production. Dissatisfaction with its results would later motivate a separate uranium enrichment program, in which the navy would participate.
Nuclear science in the Navy
The Brazilian nuclear program has been linked to the military since its inception, as in other sectors of science and technology, such as aeronautics, engineering, and telecommunications. The common ideology across all these sectors was development through industrialization, and their method, a military-technocratic alliance. The Brazilian Navy in particular became one of the main actors in the Brazilian nuclear field, in a connection that begins with Vice Admiral and naval engineer Álvaro Alberto da Mota e Silva. His name was given to the power plant complex in Angra dos Reis—the Almirante Álvaro Alberto Nuclear Center—and to the future nuclear submarine Álvaro Alberto. Alberto presided over the first two meetings of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in the 1940s and, in the following decade, Brazil's National Research Council, then the leading agency in Brazil's nuclear sector. His vision for the country's nuclear future aligned with nationalist political sectors.Strategic orientation
The use of nuclear energy in naval propulsion was considered as early as 1954, when the professional journal Revista Marítima Brasileira published a translation of an article by American officer E. B. Roth on the United States Navy's nuclear submarine program. The first vessel of this kind in the world, the USS Nautilus, would enter service the following year. At the time, the Brazilian Submarine Flotilla used conventional propulsion, which offers inferior performance. Brazilian submarines were surplus American World War II boats. Their operational concept fit within the collective defense of the Western Hemisphere as an auxiliary to the U.S. Navy, favoring anti-submarine warfare at the expense of the classic submarine role of denying sea use to the enemy.Before concrete interest in nuclear propulsion emerged in the 1970s, the fleet commissioned new submarines of European origin and broadened its range of missions. Foreign policy took on a more "north-south" and less "east-west" orientation, while domestic policy turned its attention to resources in the territorial sea. A new generation of strategic thinkers, such as officers Mário César Flores and Armando Vidigal, proposed a greater focus on national over collective interests. Another concern was to escape external technological dependence.
In this context, nuclear submarines, with their stealth, autonomy, and speed, seemed attractive options for coastal defense. Navy Minister Adalberto de Barros Nunes brought up the topic in a lecture at the Naval War College on October 26, 1973. He proposed that his successors begin technical studies to build a nuclear submarine and build or acquire a helicopter carrier, both of which were to be budget priorities. A 1975 document from the War College mentions both "projects under study destined to have a major impact".
Precursor measures of the PNM
The Brazilian government requested the navy's opinion on nuclear propulsion for the first time in 1976, when it was offered by German negotiatiors. It would not necessarily be for a submarine; the proposal was for an oceanographic research vessel. According to Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., president of Nuclebrás, "the German interest is explained by the limitations in this field to which the FRG is subject in its own territory, as a result of the 1954 Paris Agreements". The talks, which had no outcome, went beyond what the agreement allowed, as any military use of the technological cooperation was forbidden. On 15 July 1976, Navy Minister Geraldo Henning informed president Ernesto Geisel that his service's participation in the nuclear program should, for the moment, be limited to acquiring knowledge, but that it was possible to consider nuclear propulsion in warships. Brazilian officers even inspected the German nuclear-powered cargo ship Otto Hahn, but concluded that it would be too expensive to operate and the submarine would take a long time to enter service.Technologies used in the British Churchill-class nuclear submarines were reportedly offered by the president of Vickers-Armstrongs to Admiral Eddy Sampaio Espellet, Director-General of Navy Materiel, in 1976. According to Espellet's account, upon returning to Brazil, he informed the Navy Minister of the matter and recommended sending a naval engineer to the nuclear engineering course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The suggestion was endorsed by the minister and by President Geisel himself, and the chosen officer was Commander Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva. In the decades that followed, Othon would come to be known as the "father" of the uranium enrichment and nuclear submarine programs, the most prominent figure in Brazil's nuclear program after Admiral Álvaro Alberto.