Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Nigeria commissioned its first nuclear research reactor yesterday, potentially undermining a U.S.-led push to eliminate the use of highly enriched uranium reactor fuel. Such fuel, either in its fresh or irradiated forms, could be used to manufacture nuclear arms if it was diverted to national weapons programs or stolen by terrorists.

This reactor, however, has been designed for peaceful purposes, officials said, and Nigeria has constructed the facility under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The U.N. agency will also monitor its operation.

“The reactor will solely be applied for scientific research which includes soil mapping to quantify different elements in the soil to boost agricultural production and to reduce the use of chemical fertilizer as well as for solid minerals identification in Nigeria,” Ibrahim Umar, director of the Ahmadu Bello University Center for Energy Research and Training, said in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “It will also be used in petroleum exploration and for identifying elements associated with diseases in the human body and other human-related research purposes.”

China supplied the NIRR-1 reactor and its fuel, nearly 1 kilogram of uranium enriched to contain 90 percent of the uranium 235 isotope, a weapon-grade concentration. 

The news comes on the heels of an international meeting in Vienna last month to give momentum to the U.S.-led Global Threat Reduction Initiative, an effort to secure highly enriched uranium from research reactors around the world mostly by returning the material to the nations that originally supplied it, primarily the United States and Russia (see GSN, Sept. 22). In addition, the initiative looks to develop lower-enriched fuels and to convert reactors to use those fuels.

The Nigerian reactor illustrates the hurdles the initiative faces as China continues to export reactors, Germany is constructing a domestic facility, and Russia considers exporting sea-based reactors to developing nations (see GSN, Aug. 27). All those facilities would use highly enriched uranium for fuel.

“The international community has not embraced the principle of HEU elimination in a consistent fashion,” said William Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

The Nigerian development is “very much at odds with the Global Threat Reduction Initiative,” he said.

While there is not enough highly enriched uranium at the Nigerian site to create a nuclear weapon, some nonproliferation experts expressed concern that terrorists could attack multiple sites to acquire sufficient material.

A well-coordinated terrorist effort against four or five poorly protected nuclear facilities could yield enough material for an atomic weapon, the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Laura Holgate told reporters at last month’s Vienna conference.

Such a multiple attack would not necessarily need to be done simultaneously to succeed, according to another expert. Stolen uranium could go unnoticed, due to poor security and accounting measures, or corrupted officials could fail to report the theft, said Matthew Bunn, a proliferation specialist at Harvard University.

Consolidating weapon-usable materials at secure storage sites would reduce the risk of theft, said Bunn, who criticized China’s decision to supply the Nigerian reactor.

“It is always a bad thing to spread highly enriched uranium to sites where it does not need to be,” Bunn said. “Particularly sites that are unlikely to be able to be guarded to the standards such material requires.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Nuclear Threat Initiative is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by National Journal Group.]