[ RadSafe ] Russian nuclear hunt shifts into gear

[Gerry Blackwood]

{It still does not answer the HEU problem.......and its a huge problem..... and we will wait until the second shoe drops before we doing anything about it.]
 
Russian nuclear hunt shifts into gear
By C.J. Chivers The New York Times 
TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2005

MOSCOW The man carrying the hidden radioactive material passed among airline passengers at Sheremetyevo Airport on an afternoon this year. His briefcase holding the contraband was indistinguishable from anyone else's carry-on.  
Then, as he approached the check-in counter, lights flashed and an alarm sounded. A mounted video camera captured the man's image. Guards seized the briefcase and took it to a lead-lined booth for inspection.  
So passed a drill for a quietly expanding nuclear security initiative in the former Soviet Union. The man, a Russian customs employee, had tripped a silent sentinel - an electronic radiation detector that had been installed by the government, underwritten in part by the United States.  
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States and Russia have accelerated the installation of automated radiation detectors at Russian shipping ports, border crossings and airports, hoping to deter or detect the movement of radioactive material through Russia, a land where law and order is deeply inconsistent.  
Officials in the two countries hope the program, called Second Line of Defense, will complement security measures at former Soviet nuclear storage sites by providing a means to detect material that is already loose or that in the future makes it to the wrong side of the fences.  
Its principal tools are banks of sensors now visible at airports and borders in Russia near luggage inspection points. The program augments efforts to establish cooperative detection programs by the United States and former Soviet states. The United States has spent about $35 million on the program in Russia since 1998.  
Some details are not publicly known, including the locations of all the sensors and the schedule for installing more, because program managers do not want to give smugglers a map. (Russian and U.S. officials agreed to discuss the Sheremetyevo sensors because their existence was thought to be widely known.)  
But information already made public provides insight into the ambitions and limits of efforts to safeguard the public from nuclear and radioactive stockpiles left over from the cold war.  
Nonproliferation specialists in and out of government say that although much of the former Soviet Union's nuclear and radioactive material has been consolidated at improved storage sites since the union dissolved in 1991, security gaps remain  
Specialists also say that no matter the level of security and cooperation at storage sites now, uncertainty remains about the historical accuracy of Soviet nuclear inventories. That means that it is anyone's guess how much material disappeared before security was improved.  
The dangers have been clear since at least 1994, when a smuggler with plutonium for sale passed through this airport and flew on a passenger jet with the nuclear material to Munich, where he was arrested.  
Paul Longsworth, deputy director of the National Nuclear Safety Administration, a semiautonomous agency in the U.S. Department of Energy, said in Washington that the sensors were part of a strategy of trying to create layers of security between nuclear material on foreign territory and the United States.  
"It's better to have your defense somewhere other than on the one-yard line," Longsworth said in a telephone interview from Washington.  
The United States has helped underwrite the installation of the sensors at about 60 Russian ports, airports or border crossings; 15 more sites are planned by Sept. 30. Sensors also were installed in Greece before the Olympics last year, and a project has begun in Lithuania.  
Negotiations have begun for sensors in Kazakhstan, said Tracy Mustin, the program's director in Washington. Ukraine recently agreed to participate.  
Nikolai Kravchenko, chief of Russia's Service for Customs Control of Nuclear Materials and Radioactive Sources, said the sensors recorded 14,000 "hits" last year. Of those, about 200 involved cases of possible smuggling, including people who apparently had material but did not realize it. In some cases people carried money that had become irradiated, military collectors carried aviation dials and other lightly radioactive souvenirs and women wore radioactive jewelry.  
 
Since 1995, no weapons-grade material has been discovered, Kravchenko said. He said, however, that nuclear fuel pellets and raw uranium had been intercepted. Vladislav Bozhko, who supervises the program at Sheremetyevo, said that in 2002 all the sensors at one terminal were set off in sequence, as if someone had made a dry run. "We think they were just testing how well it worked, looking for a gap in the defensive line," he said. No one was caught.  
Still, nonproliferation specialists warn that for all of their abilities, the sensors and the Second Line of Defense program have limits.  
"A layered defense is really smart and important," said Laura Holgate, a regional vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization that works on nonproliferation. "But the best and most efficient use of resources is to make sure the material stays put, and that it is ultimately destroyed."  



"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality."