The US government program to prevent nuclear materials from vanishing from insecure facilities into the hands of terrorists has scored several striking successes but is still far from accomplishing its goals.  The Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) has securely repatriated 122kg of highly-enriched uranium to Russia in eight operations, including a recent dramatic midnight airlift from Prague.  The GTRI mission is of the highest importance, yet recent studies conclude that progress is dangerously slow. 

The Threat

Harvard’s Graham Allison believes, “The only thing keeping al-Qaida from building a nuclear weapon is the fissile material needed to produce a self-sustaining chain reaction for a nuclear explosion.”  The 2005 Carnegie report, Universal Compliance, concluded, “securing weapon-usable fissile materials is, therefore, the single greatest nonproliferation priority.”  As Allison puts it, “no fissile material, no nuclear explosion, no nuclear terrorism.”

Terrorists cannot manufacture the highly enriched uranium or plutonium needed for a bomb.  This requires large-scale industrial facilities that only states possess.  Allison calculates, “To make one bombs-worth of HEU would require five tons of uranium ore and 6,500 centrifuges working in a cascade for a year.”

However, large amounts of nuclear materials exist today in inadequately secured locations including civilian research and test reactor facilities and are susceptible to illegal sale or theft.  Approximately 50 tons of HEU reside in civil power and research programs around the world. This includes 128 civil research facilities that have 20 kg or more of HEU.  

The danger of theft or diversion is real.  According to the IAEA, the “number of illicit trafficking and other unauthorized activities involving nuclear and radioactive materials in 2004 increased significantly compared to prior years.”  Such activities include theft, illegal possession or attempted smuggling/sale of the materials. 

In 2004, 121 incidents were reported to the IAEA, compared to 77 in 2003 and 57 in 2002.  Though the rise could partly be explained by better reporting, “these cases are indicative of gaps in the control and security of nuclear material and nuclear facilities.” 

Most of the incidents only involved radiological materials such as cesium or americium-241.  Only one “reported incident involve[ed] trafficking of weapon-grade material since 2003 … An individual was caught attempting to smuggle 170 grams of highly enriched uranium across the border of the former Soviet republic Georgia.” 

The Plan

To address this threat, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) created the Global Threat Reduction Initiative in May 2004.  The mission of GTRI is “to identify, secure, recover and/or facilitate the disposition of high-risk, vulnerable nuclear and radiological materials around the world that pose a threat to the United States and the international community.” 

As part of the ‘global cleanout’ of civilian nuclear materials, six ongoing programs were consolidated into the Office of Global Threat Reduction. These programs include:

• Russian Research Reactor Fuel Return (RRRFR)
• Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR)
• Foreign Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel (FRR SNF)
• BN-350 Spent Fuel Disposition
• International Radiological Threat Reduction (IRTR)
• US Radiological Threat Reduction (USRTR)

The stated goals for these programs are to:

• Complete all Russian-origin fresh HEU repatriation by end of 2005
• Complete all Russian-origin spent HEU repatriation by end of 2010
• Accelerate conversion of additional 35 research reactors from HEU to LEU
• Accelerate repatriation of US-origin research reactor spent fuel
• Accelerate radiological threat reduction efforts

GTRI’s plans for 2005-2006 are to:

• Convert nine targeted research/test reactors around the world from HEU to LEU
• Repatriate to Russia 206 kg of fresh and/or spent fuel from Russian-supplied research reactors
• Secure 230 high-priority international sites with vulnerable radiological material

Achievements

On September 27, 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that, under the GTRI program, 14 kilograms of HEU were repatriated to a secure facility in Dimitrovgrad, Russia from the Czech Technical University in Prague.  In Russia, the HEU will be down-blended to LEU.  The operation was the eighth of its kind, with successes already achieved in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Libya, Uzbekistan, the Czech Republic, and Latvia.

Other key GTRI accomplishments include the completed shipments of 17 kg of HEU fuel from Bulgaria, roughly 17 kg of fresh HEU from Libya and 3 kg of fresh HEU from Uzbekistan to Russia.  The program has also completed security enhancements at 69 facilities, with security upgrades in progress at 149 facilities.

Faster Action Needed

Philipp Bleek of Georgetown University, in an analysis on current global cleanout efforts, concludes, “The bottom line is that a more comprehensive, more threat-driven program is required and that current efforts fall substantially short.” 

The Carnegie Universal Compliance report recommends that “all weapon-usable nuclear materials should be treated as if they were nuclear weapons, and the highest standards applied to weapons should become the global norm for all such materials regardless of use or location.”  Current progress shows this is far from the case.

Ongoing programs target 105 HEU-fueled reactors for conversion to LEU, 66 of which have not seen any action or planning.  Additionally, 35 of these reactors cannot currently convert with available fuel.  Moreover, these numbers do not include the estimated 56 reactors that the U.S. Government Accountability Office says are not being targeted for reasons such as their military status and location within uncooperative states. 

Despite the Universal Compliance recommendation that “[b]ecause civilian facilities are among the most vulnerable sources of nuclear materials worldwide, securing and eliminating these stocks of material should be given relative priority,” Bleek says that “[b]arring major unanticipated progress,” the repatriation of Russian-origin fresh fuel will not be complete by 2005 and that the goal of complete repatriation for spent fuel by 2010 may also take longer than initially planned. 

In fact, “none of the targeted spent fuel shipments have taken place to date, due principally to difficulties with Russia” and “to date not a single HEU-fueled reactor within Russia has been converted to LEU fuel.”  Russia is “consistently identified by U.S. and IAEA officials as a major roadblock to greater and faster progress,” partly because “there is a perception among many implementing officials that their Russian counterparts are more interested in profiting from operations than in genuine threat amelioration.”  An example of this is the recent extradition to the United States of former Russian Nuclear Energy Minister, Yevgeny Adamov, for charges of embezzling over $9 million from U.S. funding destined for security upgrades of Russian nuclear facilities. 

Bleek continues his grim assessment, adding, “Given substantial difficulties in dealing with some of the more threatening sites, program officials appear to be concentrating their efforts on the low-hanging fruit, which does not bode well for the pace once easier sites have been completed and only more challenging ones remain” and even now, “much material still remains outside their purview.” 

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Related Links:

“Global Cleanout of Civil Nuclear Material: Toward a Comprehensive, Threat-Driven Response,” Strengthening the Global Partnership Issue Brief #4, Philipp Bleek, September 2005

Universal Compliance, Carnegie Report, March 2005

IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB) 

“Acceleration of Removal or Security of Fissile Materials, Radiological Materials, and Related Equipment at Vulnerable Sites Worldwide,” NNSA Global Threat Reduction Initiative, Interim Report, Unclassified Summary, 2005

Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Graham Allison, August 2004 

“DOE Needs to Take Action to Further Reduce the Use of Weapons-Usable Uranium in Civilian Research Reactors,” GAO Report, GAO-04-807, July 2004 

“Securing the Bomb 2005: The New Global Imperatives,” Harvard University, May 2005