America faces bigger risk than agency claims
Chicago Tribune by Sam Roe
January 29, 2007
(For personal use only)

The U.S. Energy Department is exaggerating its progress in securing tons of nuclear-weapons fuel spread across the globe, a Tribune investigation has found.

Among the ways the government overstates its success is through a numbers game that ignores the highly enriched uranium in many reactors around the world.

Officials also have allowed huge amounts of nuclear fuel to sit around for so long in other nations that material once posing little risk now represents an extremely dangerous one.

And, some experts say, America does not even know how many facilities worldwide use highly enriched uranium fuel, the easiest pathway to an atomic bomb for rogue nations and terrorists.

Republican and Democratic administrations alike have fallen short in the three-decade effort to retrieve bomb-grade fuel that the U.S. and Soviet Union supplied to civilian research facilities in dozens of countries during the Cold War.

Energy officials say they have made significant strides since 2004, when the agency restructured its program to retrieve bomb fuel and doubled the effort's budget. They point out that six research reactors, including two in Libya, have given up their bomb fuel in the last 12 months--a far faster rate than in previous years.

"Overall, I think we are doing very well," said Andrew Bieniawski, who oversees the program for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Energy Department.

But documents and interviews show that one of the first things energy officials did after the restructuring was to make their job easier: They quit trying to remove bomb fuel from eight reactors that proved to be difficult cases, including one in Russia using four nuclear bombs' worth of fuel a year.

Other potentially dangerous facilities never have been targeted. One in Obninsk, near Moscow, has nearly nine tons of highly enriched uranium fuel--enough for more than 300 atomic bombs. It alone represents one-fifth of all the bomb-grade uranium out of U.S. control.

And even with increased funding, energy officials still rely on private donations. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-profit foundation started by Ted Turner and former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, is raising money to address gaps in America's effort to secure bomb fuel in Russia.

The U.S., which has been slow to stop using bomb fuel in its own reactors, wants Russia to abandon use of the material. But Moscow has no such plans.

"Why? What for?" asked Boris Onykiy, head of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, where a research reactor using weapons-grade fuel is housed in an aging concrete building.

When a technician was asked why a laboratory adjacent to the reactor was so cold--about 45 degrees--he chuckled and waved his hand at 20 broken glass-block windows.

Onykiy called U.S. efforts to convince his institute to give up the bomb fuel a "useless task" because the material is critical for research. Besides, he insisted, there is no security risk.

"Even if somebody steals something, he won't be able to run away," Onykiy said. "We will punish him."

President Bush has been unwilling to push Russia on the issue. At a summit in Slovakia in 2005, Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to continue working together to remove bomb fuel from civilian reactors "in third countries"--but not necessarily in their own.

In all, the Bush administration is trying to remove weapons-grade fuel from 60 research reactors worldwide, often speaking of this list as if it were complete. But there are at least 41 more reactors using highly enriched uranium fuel that the U.S. is not addressing.

Many of these reactors are called "critical facilities," which often use large amounts of bomb fuel for dry runs of key experiments. "They represent an unnecessary hazard," said Frank von Hippel, an arms control expert at Princeton University who has visited such reactors in Russia.

If the Bush administration were to count all of the reactors that use highly enriched uranium, its progress would be much less than claimed.

The agency is considering targeting more reactors. "This program is evolving," Bieniawski said.

Energy officials said the main reason the agency removed eight reactors from its target list was because scientists have been unable to invent fuels to replace the weapons-grade material powering the facilities. In other words, these reactors were taken off the list because the government failed to find a solution, not because it retrieved the material.

The agency also added nine reactors to the list. Those facilities are small and use tiny amounts of weapons-grade fuel.

Laura Holgate, a former manager of non-proliferation programs for the Energy Department and the Pentagon, believes a more basic problem plagues the entire effort: The U.S. still does not know all the locations and quantities of the world's highly enriched uranium.

"You cannot accurately judge your progress if you don't have a clear sense of the totality" of the problem, said Holgate, who now works at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Bieniawski, the energy official, disputes that assessment. He said the agency recently helped compile a classified report that is "the most comprehensive, complete inventory done to date" on enriched uranium worldwide. He said there is likely only "very little" bomb-grade material that is unaccounted for.

But Armando Travelli, a former Argonne National Laboratory physicist who once led America's effort to retrieve bomb fuel, said his team occasionally would stumble upon previously unknown reactors using bomb-grade uranium. "I think there are several spots in the world where there is still highly enriched uranium that hasn't been discovered. Hopefully it's not much."

Likewise, experts say no one knows for sure how much used, or "spent," bomb-grade fuel remains at reactors worldwide. This spent fuel remains highly enriched and usable in nuclear weapons.

For years, U.S. officials didn't bother retrieving spent fuel because it was so radioactive from being burned in reactors that thieves could not touch it without causing themselves serious harm or death.

But the U.S. has ignored spent fuel for so long--in some cases allowing it to sit in storage at reactors for 30 years--that some material is no longer highly radioactive. This means terrorists could spirit it away without immediate physical risk.

Only 7 percent of the known quantities of U.S.-supplied spent fuel has been shipped back to America. Eighteen tons remain spread worldwide. Much of that fuel is in Europe and other parts of the developed world, but experts say the material is a potential threat no matter where it is.

Last week provided a fresh reminder. Georgian authorities disclosed they caught a man trying to sell highly enriched uranium he had hidden in plastic bags inside his pocket.

He came from the nation with the largest supply of vulnerable bomb fuel: Russia.

How we reported this series

To chronicle America's failed quest to retrieve uranium, Tribune staff reporter Sam Roe obtained exclusive access to the government archive of the effort.

This archive, provided by scientist Armando Travelli, contained thousands of records never before publicly reviewed, including scientific trip reports, internal memorandums and e-mails, and government correspondence.

Roe also reviewed congressional testimony, previously classified records, foreign and U.S. research papers, and reports by government agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He conducted extensive interviews with Travelli, who led the uranium retrieval effort for a quarter of a century. Roe also interviewed dozens of U.S. and foreign scientists, nuclear reactor operators, and top energy officials here and in Russia.