Cure for Russia's Nuclear "headache" Proves to Be Painful

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Interesting article in the washington Post today:

Cure for Russia's Nuclear "headache" Proves to Be Painful

Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, December 26, 1998; 
Page A01  

OBNINSK, Russia—Igor Matveyenko slaps a plastic identification 
card up against a gray metallic square imprinted with a red "K" for 
control. In front of him, a beep sounds and a glass door slides 
open. Just beyond lies an experimental nuclear reactor and what 
Matveyenko calls "our headache."  

The headache is not the reactor itself, but little round "tablets" or 
disks containing weapons-grade plutonium and uranium. They are 
used for tests carried out at the Institute of Physics and Power 
Engineering, a prominent and once secret nuclear research 
institute here, 60 miles southwest of Moscow.  

In the building known as Fast Critical Facilities, there are 100,000 
disks, or about 10 tons of bomb-grade fissile material, theoretically 
enough to make hundreds of nuclear bombs.   

The disks, a dozen of which could easily fit into a pocket, are kept 
underground. But the old Soviet accounting system for them is a 
nightmare. About 6,000 disks have duplicate numbers. The Soviet-
era records were kept in paper notebooks. The notebooks, some 
decades old, record the weight and the "price," an absurd 
measurement for bomb-grade material.  

In short, there is no full record of the current physical condition of 
the massive pile of uranium and plutonium disks. Stashed in other 
underground warehouses here are barrels and vaults containing still 
more fissile material.  

Today, an agonizingly difficult inventory of the disks is underway. In 
1 1/2 years, specialists have managed to put new bar codes on a 
third of them. But the work of imprinting the bar codes is slow and 
painstaking since the disks are radioactive, and it may take years 
to complete.  

The disks are at the heart of an enormously complex, costly and 
troubled drive to protect Russia's weapons-grade uranium and 
plutonium from theft and diversion. In this city, which has long been 
identified with nuclear energy and which boasts the world's first 
commercial nuclear reactor, the effort to control nuclear materials 
has already begun with help from the United States. But even so, 
the obstacles are large. And the difficulties have been aggravated 
by the Russian economic crisis.  

"The problems of the entire industry are all here," said the 
institute's director Anatoly Zrodnikov. "Just as all the problems of 
water can be seen in a single drop, so all the problems of the 
nuclear industry are here, too."  

The Soviet Union is believed to have produced more than 1,200 
tons of highly enriched uranium and 150 tons of plutonium. More 
than half is in weapons, but an estimated 650 tons remain 
scattered across Russia and the former Soviet republics in 50 
civilian scientific centers and military research facilities.  

Experts have long believed that getting fissile material is the final 
barrier to building a bomb. The assumption was that it would take a 
would-be nuclear state a decade or more to create fissile material, 
and that factories to make enriched uranium or plutonium would be 
difficult to hide. But this barrier could be breached by purchasing or 
diverting existing material from Russia's warehouses. After the 
Soviet collapse, the United States began helping Russia secure its 
fissile materials through a $137-million-a-year program, undertaken 
along with Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, known as 
"materials protection, control and accounting." The effort has made 
some headway, but there have also been alarming reports in recent 
months that it is faltering.  

The progress is symbolized here by a simple piece of white tape 
over an emergency exit used to detect possible intruders -- and by 
the new radio in the hands of Vasily Drakin, chief of security. In the 
Soviet days, officers at closed cities were prohibited from using 
radio communications because it was feared that spies could 
detect the radio waves.  

Another sign of progress is a host of laptop computers and 
measuring devices in a thick concrete-walled room here that once 
held a reactor but is now a training center set up with aid from the 
United States and the European Union. Andrei Mozhayev, in a 
white lab coat, demonstrated a garbage can-size device that can 
quickly measure how much bomb-grade plutonium or uranium is in 
a canister without opening it.  

And at the entrance to the experimental reactor, every person goes 
through a complex security gateway that, among other things, 
examines their handprints, and takes their weight and compares it 
with a computer record. There are also plans, so far unrealized, to 
consolidate all the fissile material here into one well-guarded 
"security island," a building with extra fences and protection.  

In the reactor hall, Matveyenko pointed out a television security 
system and a special piece of equipment used to scan a whole rod 
of disks to see what kind of fissile materials are inside. These were 
also the result of Western aid, he said, but the money ran out -- 
and neither is working.  

Western experts say Russia's economic crisis has also dealt a 
heavy blow to the "human factor," the guards and other mid-level 
workers who oversee tons of fissile material across the country. 
Moreover, the economic crisis has raised questions about the 
ability of Russia and the West to finish the job and protect fissile 
material stockpiles that remain vulnerable.  

According to U.S. officials with direct involvement, the devaluation 
of the ruble on Aug. 17 plunged many of Russia's nuclear institutes 
into a state of financial emergency. There were reports of shortages 
of food, clothing and housing for guards, widespread delays in 
paying workers who were operating safeguard equipment, and 
cases in which electric power to monitors was cut off.  

A larger question is how Russia's far-flung nuclear facilities will 
survive, given the shrinking resources available from Moscow. Many 
institutes have been under pressure to seek contracts outside 
Russia in order to stay alive, including from countries with 
developing nuclear power and weapons programs such as India, 
China and Iran.  

The Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy is also going through a 
tense debate about survival. The minister, Yevgeny Adamov, 
recently suggested splitting off some of the ministry's lucrative 
commercial activities, which generate cash, into a new state-
owned company. Critics say it could starve the weapons and 
research complex, for which government subsidies have dwindled. 
Some also fear that the plan will only throw open the doors to even 
more aggressive global commerce by individual Russian nuclear 
institutes.  

In the past, nations seeking know-how and fissile material for a 
weapons program have obtained it under the cover of civilian 
nuclear plants. A senior U.S. official said the greatest proliferation 
threat from Russia is not the possibility of leakage from military 
facilities, which tend to be guarded, but rather from the hundreds of 
civilian nuclear research facilities.  

In the Soviet police state, it was practically unimaginable that 
someone would try to steal bomb-grade plutonium or uranium. But 
today, with the authoritarian state having vanished and Russia 
mired in desperate economic conditions, the threats -- and 
vulnerabilities -- have changed.  

When police arrested three men in August 1994 at the Munich 
airport and accused them of trying to smuggle 13 ounces of 
weapons-grade plutonium into Germany, some experts contended 
that the material originally came from Obninsk. The source has 
never been identified, and the case has been described as an 
intelligence sting operation. Zrodnikov denied that the plutonium 
came from here. But he acknowledged that the new Russian 
market economy had brought temptations.  

"Earlier the system of physical protection was based mainly on the 
person with the gun, the guards," he said. "The possibility of an 
insider was not taken into account. It could not even occur to 
anybody to take the material out. There was no one to discuss it 
with. Who would possibly purchase it?"  

Now, he added, the prospect of insider diversion is real. "There is a 
very strong decline in the control over personnel," he said. "This 
selection used to be so strict, that this factor was a reliable 
element of protection. Now the reliability has declined 
considerably."  

At the entrance to this town, a sign welcomes visitors to the home 
of the "peaceful atom." Spread across two campuses over nearly 
300 acres, the institute, established after World War II, held a 
central place in Soviet nuclear power research. At its peak in 1988 
the institute had 10,000 workers, but now there are only 5,580. The 
first commercial reactor in the world was started here in 1954, and 
engineers designed many civilian reactors, as well as liquid-metal 
reactors for Alpha-class submarines and the Topaz nuclear power 
plant for spacecraft.  

For experiments, the institute received tons of bomb-grade 
plutonium and uranium. In the Soviet days, each shipment was 
accompanied by a paper "passport," listing the weight, year of 
manufacture, composition and price -- one of the more bizarre 
accounting practices of Soviet central planning.  

"It was an artificial price," said Gennady Pshakin, director of the 
international department. "No one knows the price of plutonium."  

Over time, it was not clear how much nuclear material had 
accumulated, nor what condition it was in. The Soviet numbers 
written on some of the disks were for use by the manufacturer, not 
the institute, and contained duplicates; sometimes up to five disks 
had the same number. Moreover, many of the disks needed to be 
re-covered with metal cladding, which is also painstakingly slow. 
The current pace is about a half-ton a year -- or 20 years to repair it 
all.  

Now, Matveyenko said, the engineers have put most of the old 
notebook data into a computer system. They have special scales 
and devices to measure more precisely the composition of each 
disk.  

But the institute is at the front lines of what looks to be a long 
battle across Russia to secure mountains of nuclear materials.  

Zrodnikov said the institute was like a bank, but without the 
equivalent means to guard the weapons-grade plutonium and 
uranium in its stores. "This property has to be accounted for, 
controlled, and protected with far higher security than, say, what 
they keep in the banks," he said. "It is obvious what problems we 
are facing. If we take any bank of Russia, they made very serious 
investments into their system of security. They have the most 
modern equipment. But all this was at the expense of their 
business.Our situation is utterly different."

------------------------
Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

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