Nuclear Materials Remain At Risk
Putin, Bush Urged To Boost Security At Research Reactors

May 20, 2002
By Joby Warrick, THE WASHINGTON POST

Two years after the Soviet Union dissolved, nuclear scientists in newly independent Georgia faced a daunting threat: the loss of nuclear fuel at a research reactor to separatist rebels. With no other help available, the scientists in the town of Mtskheta later recalled they guarded the reactor with sticks and garden rakes.

 SCIENTISTS AT a sister research reactor in Sukhumi were not as lucky. Abkhaz separatists overran the reactor and then apparently took two kilograms of highly enriched uranium. To this day, officials don’t know what happened to it.
 These incidents and dozens of similar ones point to what two new reports describe as a serious gap in efforts to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. While the United States and Russia are moving to tighten the security of their nuclear arsenals, few safeguards exist for bomb-grade uranium and plutonium stored at the sites of hundreds of nuclear research reactors, not only in Russia but in 57 other countries around the globe, the studies conclude.
 As preparations continue for this week’s Moscow summit, the reports, scheduled for release today, identify civilian-controlled research reactors — typically smaller reactors run by universities which often use a highly enriched form of uranium that can be used in bombs — as one of the world’s gravest unaddressed proliferation risks.
 
CRUDE ATOMIC WEAPONS
 Noting that only a few kilograms of highly enriched uranium stand between terrorists and crude atomic weapons, the studies urge Presidents Bush and Vladimir Putin to adopt measures at the summit that would dramatically increase efforts to keep nuclear fuels secured.
 “Insecure nuclear bomb material anywhere is a threat to everyone, everywhere,” said a report by the Project on Managing the Atom, part of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “Yet, there are no binding international standards for how well these stockpiles should be secured.”
 Both the Harvard study and a separate report by the Federation of American Scientists call for rapidly phasing out the use of bomb-grade nuclear material at most of the estimated 300 research reactors around the world, replacing the fuels with uranium that cannot be used in weapons. The action is one of several steps that could be taken immediately to reduce the risk of “catastrophic terrorism,” the reports say.
 They also urge a dramatic acceleration of efforts to destroy or store tens of thousands of pounds of plutonium and uranium, the military legacy of the Cold War arms race, still scattered across Russia and other former Soviet republics.
 There have been dozens of documented attempts to steal or smuggle nuclear material in the past decade, including at least one apparently unsuccessful effort by al Qaeda terrorists. With so much nuclear fuel available in so many places, the “forces of opportunity are only getting stronger,” said Matthew Bunn, who co-authored the Harvard report with a former White House science adviser, John P. Holdren, and Anthony Weir.
 
‘WORKING HARD’
 “Terrorists appear to be working as hard as they can to get these materials,” Bunn said. “We need to be working as hard as we can to keep them from getting it.”
 The Harvard study notes “substantial” progress under such non-proliferation initiatives as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, and others. The United States has poured billions of dollars into improving security at Russian facilities where 40 percent of Russia’s nuclear weapons and fuels are kept. The programs also have helped guarantee paychecks for thousands of former Soviet weapons scientists at risk of being lured away by such would-be nuclear powers as Iran and Iraq. At the previous Bush-Putin summit, in Crawford, Tex., the two leaders called efforts to block terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction “our highest priority.”
 Yet spending on nuclear security since Sept. 11 has remained essentially flat, Bunn said. He urged Bush and Putin to place an official in each government in charge of improving nuclear security, and he called on both presidents to lead a “global clean-out-and-secure” effort.
 Sam Nunn, the former U.S. senator who helped launch the program along with Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), said a strong signal from the two leaders at the Moscow summit was needed to remove bureaucratic obstacles that are slowing current non-proliferation efforts.
 “I continue to measure the threat against the size of the response, and there is a very big gap,” said Nunn, who now directs the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative. Nunn and Lugar are leading a congressional delegation to Moscow this week to explore ways to enhance cooperation on nonproliferation.
 Both governments could rapidly eliminate much of the highly enriched uranium in research reactors simply by paying universities to switch to new “high-density” forms of low-enriched uranium that cannot be used in bombs, according to a draft of the study by the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Project. The author of the study, Michael A. Levi, also proposed accelerating current U.S. efforts to buy Russia’s surplus highly enriched uranium and dilute it with low-enriched fuels used in Western commercial reactors.
 
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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