 |
|
|
IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, then-U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham,
and U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Brill at a press conference announcing GTRI in
Vienna in May 2004.
|
The United States has led efforts to reduce the civilian use of HEU. In 1978, it launched the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) program, which seeks to develop new LEU fuel and targets to replace HEU. In 1992, in order to encourage foreign users of U.S.-origin HEU to convert their reactors and production processes to LEU, the U.S. Congress adopted the Schumer Amendment, which restricts U.S. exports of HEU to facilities that meet a set of stringent conditions. In mid-1995, the United States also initiated the first of a series of operations to remove Soviet-origin HEU from vulnerable sites outside of Russia. The latest step in this campaign to reduce the civilian use of HEU was the unveiling of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) in May 2004. Among its goals, the GTRI seeks to "minimize and eventually eliminate any reliance on HEU in the civilian fuel cycle, including conversion of research and test reactors worldwide from the use of HEU to the use of LEU
fuel and targets." Through GTRI, Russia, the United States, and other countries
plan to accelerate their work with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
to return all eligible Soviet-origin fresh HEU to safer storage in Russia by the
end of 2006, to return all eligible Soviet-origin spent fuel to Russia by the
end of 2010, and to return eligible U.S.-origin research reactor spent fuel to
the United States within 15 years. GTRI partners also intend to convert all
eligible research reactors using HEU to operate on LEU fuel, focusing first on
the most vulnerable facilities, and to identify and secure nuclear materials not
covered by other cooperative programs. Many countries that possess HEU lack the resources or the political will to provide adequate security for this nuclear material. In these cases, moving the HEU elsewhere for safekeeping or downblending it to LEU is essential to reduce the risks of nuclear terrorism.
As of the end of 2006, DOE reported 45 of 106 reactors, or 42 percent
of the target group, as having been fully or partially converted to use
LEU fuel. It hopes to complete conversions on the remaining reactors
that can be converted using available LEU fuels by 2014. However, 55
research reactors, for various reasons, are not included in the DOE’s
reduced enrichment program.
DOE’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative has compiled data indicating there
are more than 120 research reactors or associated facilities worldwide where 20
kg or more of HEU is located. Since U.S.-funded threat reduction efforts began
in the 1990s, HEU from more than a dozen U.S.-supplied sites have been removed,
as well as HEU from four locations in former Soviet republics (Georgia,
Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Uzbekistan) and seven Soviet-supplied sites (Serbia,
Romania, Bulgaria, Libya, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the former East
Germany). From may 2004 to December 2006, GTRI has repatriated about 496
kilograms of fresh and spent HEU fuel to Russia. Click here
for descriptions of HEU removal operations.
Each of the removal operations required extensive planning and several of them involved substantial bureaucratic battles among different U.S. agencies and between national governments. Through GTRI and other programs, the United States, the IAEA, and other partners are studying ways to accelerate the process and reduce the costs of HEU removal, with the goal of returning all Soviet- and Russian-origin HEU (both fresh and spent fuel) to Russia by the end of 2010.
While the removal of Soviet-origin HEU is significant, a large amount of
U.S.-origin HEU also has been repatriated to the United States. As of
September 2006, about 3,300 kg of HEU in fresh and spent fuel had been
transported to the United States for final disposition. But this
represents roughly half of all the HEU fuel provided to other nations by
the United States. Vulnerable HEU, wherever it is housed, is a threat to all countries. Each nation, therefore, has a stake in seeing that nuclear weapons and materials are stored securely and properly accounted for. In spite of this pressing need, the few binding international standards for weapons and materials security are weak, leaving security issues to the discretion of the possessor states. In addition, there is no central information repository that tracks the security of nuclear materials worldwide and thus no means for the international community to know where security assistance is most needed.
With the April 2004 passage of UN
Security Council Resolution 1540, states are required to pass laws establishing “appropriate, effective” physical protection and accounting of nuclear and other WMD-related
materials. But the resolution, which has the potential of providing a
basis for international security standards, as yet does not include
specific language that defines what is meant by “appropriate, effective”
and few steps have been taken to help countries improve security systems
to meet their obligations. A modest step forward in enhancing the
physical protection of nuclear material was taken in July 2005 when the
Convention on the Physical
Protection of Nuclear Materials was amended, extending a legally-binding obligation to protect civilian nuclear materials. However, the amendment has yet to be ratified and the language of the amendment provides only general security principles as opposed to specific security standards.
|
|