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RE: Terrorists with Nukes [ANOTHER New Scientist article]
New Scientist
1900 GMT, 30 May 2001
Rob Edwards
New Scientist Online News
http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999811
WORST NIGHTMARE
Terrorists could easily make an atomic bomb from MOX fuel, says a
confidential report
Exclusive from New Scientist magazine
Terrorists could easily make a crude atomic bomb from MOX fuel produced at
British Nuclear
Fuels' new plant in north-west England, according to a confidential report
submitted
to the British government and seen by New Scientist.
The report comes as the state-owned company is trying to get the
government's go-ahead to make
MOX, a mixture of plutonium and uranium oxide, for reactor operators in
Europe and Japan.
Although the MOX plant, at Sellafield in Cumbria, was completed in 1996, the
government has postponed authorising its start-up because of doubts over its
economic viability. Last week, as a fourth
consultation exercise on the MOX plant ended, Friends of the Earth lodged
papers at the High Court
in London calling for a judicial review of the consultation, accusing the
British government of
skewing the process in favour of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL).
The environmental group alleges that the £462 million invested in the plant
so far has been
disregarded in calculating its financial prospects, and that the results of
an independent
audit have been withheld from the public.
"Terrifying possibility"
But now the confidential report submitted to the government highlights
another potential problem
for the plant. Written by Frank Barnaby, a physicist who worked at the
nuclear weapons
laboratory at Aldermaston, Berkshire, in the 1950s and later headed the
Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute, it spells out exactly how easy it is to make MOX
fuel into a bomb.
Barnaby says that terrorists intent on mass destruction would need no more
technical know-how
than that used to make the Lockerbie bomb. The expertise required is less
than the equivalent
skill used in 1995 by the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, to prepare sarin
nerve gas for
release into the Tokyo subway, he says.
It would be "sheer irresponsibility" for the government to allow the new
plant to open,
Barnaby warns, as the theft of MOX fuel pellets would then become a
"terrifying possibility".
His report, which was commissioned by the Oxford Research Group, an
independent body of scientists
studying nuclear issues, comes in the wake of mounting concern about the
poor security
arrangements for radioactive materials worldwide (New Scientist, 26 May, p
10).
Barnaby reveals three ways of chemically separating the plutonium dioxide
from the uranium dioxide in
MOX fuel. One, involving lanthanum nitrate as a carrier, was used in 1941 by
the atomic pioneer
Glenn Seaborg at the University of Chicago.
The other two methods - one of which is currently used at the University of
Kiev in Ukraine - depend
on reactions with resins. The chemistry is less sophisticated than that
required for the illegal
manufacture of designer drugs, he says. All the details terrorists need are
in the published
literature or on the Internet, says Barnaby.
A primitive bomb could be made with 35 kilograms of plutonium dioxide, or
terrorists could use
hydrofluoric acid to precipitate out the pure metal, Barnaby says. Only 13
kilograms of pure metal would
be needed to create an explosion with a yield of 100 tonnes of TNT - 50
times the size of the largest
terrorist bomb to date, in Oklahoma City six years ago.
Hard to steal
BNFL points out, however, that MOX fuel would be difficult to steal because
it travels under armed
guard. The security arrangements "are mature, comprehensive and robust",
says a company spokeswoman. "We are 100 per cent confident in the physical
protection measures we have."
The company points out that turning plutonium into MOX fuel and burning it
in reactors could reduce
the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation by cutting plutonium stockpiles.
Some plutonium also
has to be returned to foreign customers because they own it. The risk of MOX
fuel falling into the
hands of terrorists is "minimal", BNFL insists.
An atomic explosion in a city centre is "everyone's worst nightmare", says
Frans Berkhout, a nuclear
expert from SPRU (formerly the Science Policy Research Unit) at the
University of Sussex, Brighton.
But although turning fresh MOX fuel into a bomb is "theoretically possible",
he thinks that in practice
terrorists might find cheaper and easier ways of causing mass destruction.
Correspondence about this story should be directed to
letters@newscientist.com
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