U.S., Russia to sign nuclear fuel agreement

By MARK MCDONALD, May. 25, 2004

MOSCOW - The United States and Russia will sign an agreement Thursday that should finally lock down some of the world's most dangerous and poorly guarded nuclear fuel.

Atomic scientists have long warned that supplies of highly enriched uranium at research and university reactors around the world are particularly vulnerable to theft by terrorists. The new U.S.-Russia program would retrieve the uranium from 20 reactors in 17 countries and bring it back to Russia for storage.

"This fuel is of great interest to terrorists, so the program is quite significant," said Daniil Kobyakov, a nonproliferation expert at the PIR Center, an independent policy research organization in Moscow.

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham is expected to sign the accord in Moscow on Thursday with Alexander Rumantsyev, the head of Russia's nuclear agency. It will be formally known as the Russian Research Reactor Fuel Return.

Research-reactor fuel is especially attractive to terrorists because it can be used to make simple nuclear weapons - about 50 pounds of enriched uranium for one device. Smaller amounts could be used in "dirty bombs" - conventional bombs containing nuclear material that would spread radiation when they explode.

The research-reactor fuel also is easily transported and often can be handled without elaborate shielding precautions.

But the biggest worry is that it's usually lightly guarded.

"Academic and research reactors at universities are simply not capable of providing a defense against a terrorist assault," said Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. "The great concern is a paramilitary-type assault on one of these facilities and the material is forcibly removed."

Lyman said a U.S. government study found that thieves could carry off the uranium in a storage pool in about an hour.

The fuel coming back to Russia is expected to be stored at Dmitrovgrad, where it will be cooled and eventually "downblended," in essence, diluted.

Russian officials say there's no storage room left at the country's only fuel-reprocessing plant, the trouble-plagued Mayak facility. Mayak is swamped with fuel taken from Russia's fleet of rusting nuclear submarines and icebreakers.

Scientists and antinuclear activists are optimistic about the new fuel-return program, but they're also concerned that Russia is taking on large new imports of highly dangerous uranium. They point to Russia's poor record in storing and safeguarding the atomic material it already has.

"Bringing all this back to Russia, yes, it's a little paradoxical, given all the warnings about proliferation in Russia," said Lyman.

There have been numerous security breaches at sensitive nuclear facilities, including one in which radioactive material disappeared.

Two years ago, for example, a Greenpeace activist, a Russian lawmaker and a camera crew made their way into a "high security" area where thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel were stored. They spent several hours in the facility, located in Krasnoyarsk. They walked past any number of guards and sentry posts, shot their film and left without incident.

"Our protection system against terrorist attacks must be modernized," said Nikolai Shingarev, chief spokesman for Minatom, the Russian nuclear agency. "We know this. We pay great attention to it."

Shingarev acknowledged "discrepancies" in inventory-taking at nuclear plants and "very small thefts" of radioactive material.

"There was one building operator who was caching away `extra' fuel in case there was a shortfall in his inventory at the end of the month," said a nuclear-security expert in Russia who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Until only recently, he said, most Russian nuclear facilities were keeping hand-written inventories in large account books. He called the system "old-fashioned" and "haphazard."

The official said, "There would be guys in smocks and caps opening up unmarked containers, saying, `What's in here?' Sometimes we'd find pretty dangerous stuff that was clearly not supposed to be where it was."

The U.S. Department of Energy is spending some $40 million to help the Russians improve security at nuclear installations.

Many of the so-called "rapid upgrades" are Home Depot-style measures: Replacing wooden doors with steel ones, putting iron bars on vulnerable windows and installing refrigerator-size concrete blocks to block access to nuclear storage casks.

Other measures are more Radio Shack style: closed-circuit TVs, electronic key-cards, motion sensors, walkie-talkies.

Russian officials also asked for field-sobriety kits to test their Atomic Guard troopers.

Nuclear experts believe successful implementation of the U.S.-Russia program will need some $80 million in funding by Congress over the next two years.

The program covers fuel that the Soviet and Russian governments originally supplied to foreign atomic facilities. In some cases, those fuel shipments began as early as the 1950s.

The United States also exported nuclear reactors and highly enriched uranium at the same time, starting with President Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program. More than a dozen plants using that uranium are still operating in the United States and elsewhere, but these fuel supplies aren't covered under the new program with Russia.

Reactors in Uzbekistan, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Poland are thought to be among the highest priority targets for the upcoming "clean-out."

Lyman said there are substantial quantities of highly enriched uranium in the former Soviet republic of Belarus.

"Many bombs worth," he said.

The other countries covered by the fuel-return program are Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, North Korea, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan Latvia, Libya, Vietnam and Yugoslavia.

Facilities returning their highly enriched fuel to Russia must agree to convert their reactors to operate on low enriched uranium, which is considered less of a proliferation threat.

The new U.S.-Russia program got something of a test run on Aug. 22, 2002, when military forces from both countries raided a research reactor outside Belgrade, the capital of then Yugoslavia.

The 17-hour operation, which cost an estimated $5 million, reportedly netted 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium, enough for two nuclear bombs.

Two other collections were made last year - 31 pounds of highly enriched uranium from Romania in September and another 37 pounds from Bulgaria in December. Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency also participated.

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