U.S.-Russia Team Seizes Uranium At Bulgaria Plant

["Gerry Blackwood" <gpblackwood@justice.com>]

washingtonpost.com 

U.S.-Russia Team Seizes Uranium At Bulgaria Plant 

Material Was Potent Enough for Bomb 



By Peter Baker

Washington Post Foreign Service

Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A10 





MOSCOW, Dec. 23 -- An international team of nuclear

specialists backed by armed security units swooped into

a shuttered Bulgarian reactor and recovered 37 pounds

of highly enriched uranium in a secretive operation

intended to forestall nuclear terrorism, U.S. officials

said Tuesday. 



The elaborately planned mission, which was organized

with the cooperation of Bulgarian authorities, removed

nearly enough uranium to make a small nuclear bomb, the

officials said. The material was sent by plane on

Tuesday to a Russian facility where it will be

converted into a form that cannot be used for weapons,

they said. 



It was the third time since last year that U.S. and

Russian authorities have teamed up to retrieve highly

enriched uranium from Soviet-era facilities in an

effort to keep such material from falling into the

hands of terrorists or rogue states. Experts worry that

such caches of uranium scattered in obscure corners of

the former Soviet Union and its satellite states

represent one of the most vulnerable sources of fissile

material for would-be bomb-makers.



"Proliferation of nuclear materials is a worldwide

problem and requires a worldwide solution," Energy

Secretary Spencer Abraham said in a statement. "We must

not allow terrorists and others with bad intentions to

acquire deadly material, and the Department of Energy

will continue doing its part."



U.S. authorities have begun stepping up such joint

operations with the Russians. In August 2002, a team

from the two countries retrieved 100 pounds of

weapons-grade uranium from an aging reactor in

Yugoslavia. The second seizure of uranium took place

three months ago, when 30 pounds was removed from a

facility in Romania.



"We hope that you'll be seeing this more frequently,"

Paul M. Longsworth, the Energy Department's deputy

administrator for nuclear nonproliferation, said

Tuesday. In conjunction with the Russians and the

International Atomic Energy Agency, U.S. officials have

developed a schedule to recover all Soviet-originated

highly enriched uranium and return it to Russia by the

end of 2005 for safekeeping and conversion, Longsworth

said.



After last year's mission in Yugoslavia, the State

Department compiled a list of 24 other foreign reactors

that use weapons-grade nuclear fuel, some in old and

poorly guarded facilities.



"We're certainly going in the right direction, although

one might prefer speedier development," said Alexander

Pikayev, a nuclear nonproliferation scholar at the

Carnegie Moscow Center, a research institute here. "But

it takes time. . . . Such problems cannot be solved

overnight."



The complexity of the Bulgarian operation demonstrated

the challenges involved. Officials focused on a

Soviet-designed, two-megawatt research reactor built in

1959 at the Institute of Nuclear Research and Nuclear

Energy in the capital, Sofia. The reactor was closed in

1989, and the nuclear fuel assemblies have been stored

ever since.



An IAEA team, accompanied by U.S. and Russian nuclear

engineers, removed seals from storage containers and

verified the contents before the material was loaded

into four special canisters provided by the Russian

government. The U. S. government paid the $400,000 bill

for the mission. The operation took 48 hours, and

special units of the Bulgarian domestic police took

responsibility for securing the facility and

transporting the uranium to the airport at Gorna

Oryahovitsa, about 100 miles northeast of Sofia.



The uranium taken from the Sofia facility was 36

percent enriched, which scientists consider usable in

nuclear weapons but not the most potent form called

weapons-grade, which refers to uranium enriched 90

percent or more. Still, because it has not been

irradiated, officials said, the Bulgarian material

would be particularly attractive to outlaw elements.



"It's quite useful to a terrorist," said Longsworth.

"You can handle it without protection."



The uranium was flown aboard a Russian AN-12 cargo

plane to Dimitrovgrad, in the Volga region of Ulyanovsk

about 520 miles southeast of Moscow. A facility there,

which is undergoing comprehensive upgrades due to be

finished in the next couple of months, will blend down

the uranium until it can no longer be used in a nuclear

weapon, officials said. At that point, it could be sold

for use in commercial nuclear power plants, officials

said.



The Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy was closed

Tuesday evening and no one answered telephone calls

seeking comment. A spokeswoman at the Bulgarian Embassy

in Washington said she was not able to discuss the

operation.







© 2003 The Washington Post Company 



http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25861-2003Dec23?language=printer



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