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Uzbekistan: U.S. and Russia Prepare to Remove Nuclear Materials By Bryan Bender “We are working … on the shutting down of various research reactors,” Linton Brooks, director of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 27). “Our next step in that, I hope, will occur with the return of spent fuel [to Russia] from Uzbekistan later this year.” The United States and Uzbekistan signed an agreement in March to remove the spent fuel under the so-called Implementing Agreement for joint work on nuclear nonproliferation programs (see GSN, March 13). The nuclear material planned for removal — which is in the form of fuel rods fabricated from highly enriched uranium, some of weapon-grade — is located at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Ulugbek, approximately 30 miles from the capital of Tashkent. The institute, which houses a 10-megawatt reactor, is said to have fresh nuclear fuel, spent nuclear fuel and less than 100 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU), according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s 2001 Nuclear Status Report. Another private facility in Uzbekistan, the Photon Joint Stock Company in Tashkent, is said to contain at least 4.5 kilograms of HEU. Counterterrorism experts worry that these and similar facilities might be at risk of infiltration by extremists such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan — which is on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups — that are believed to be seeking to build a crude nuclear bomb or a dispersal device for radioactive material. The U.S. State Department plans to fund the Uzbek operation using its Nonproliferation Disarmament Fund, officials said. U.S. law stipulates that nuclear threat reduction funds can only be spent in the former Soviet Union. Lawmakers are in the process of rewriting the law to avoid a repeat of a situation earlier this year when the private Nuclear Threat Initiative contributed $5 million to cover the costs of removal and cleanup of 100 pounds of weapon-grade uranium and related materials at the Vinca Institute in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, because the U.S. government could not expend all the necessary funds. The uranium from the Belgrade facility is being reprocessed at the Ulyanovsk Nuclear Processing Plant in Russia, where the Uzbek material will also be taken for proper conversion or disposal. Removing the spent fuel from Uzbekistan will be more challenging than the Yugoslav operation, officials said. “That’s somewhat more challenging than the Vinca operation, which involves only fresh fuel, but we believe that the Russians have finally gotten their legal system in order to le this happen,” Brooks said. Until recently, Russian law prohibited the import of spent fuel. Like in the Vinca case, Russia is expected to agree to safely “blend down” the nuclear fuel so that it no longer poses a proliferation danger. NTI Vice President Laura Holgate urged lawmakers yesterday to support similar efforts at research reactors around the world, citing the need for “eliminating the stocks and the need to have continuous stocks of highly-enriched uranium at institutions and research facilities around the world.” She called for “accelerating the blend-down of highly enriched uranium currently tied up in weapons storage facilities.” Perhaps an outright purchase of plutonium as a way to accelerate the security and disposition of it.” The United States says it is working with other countries to remove weapon-grade nuclear materials from two dozen similar sites around the world (see GSN, Sept. 3). [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Nuclear Threat Initiative is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by National Journal Group.]
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