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player ready...An international team of nuclear specialists backed by armed security units swooped into a shuttered Bulgarian reactor and recovered 37 pounds of highly enriched uranium in an operation intended to forestall nuclear terrorism, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The mission, which was organized with the cooperation of Bulgarian authorities and involved the U.S. and Russia, removed nearly enough uranium to make a small nuclear bomb, the officials said.
The material was sent by plane Tuesday to a Russian facility where it will be converted into a form that cannot be used for weapons, they said.
It was the third time since last year that U.S. and Russian authorities have teamed up to retrieve highly enriched uranium from Soviet-era facilities in an effort to keep such material from falling into the hands of terrorists or enemy nations.
Experts worry that such caches of uranium scattered in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states represent one of the most vulnerable sources of fissile material for would-be bombmakers.
U.S. authorities have begun stepping up such joint operations with the Russians.
In August 2002, a team from the two countries retrieved 100 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from an aging reactor in what was then Yugoslavia. The second seizure of uranium took place three months ago, when 30 pounds was removed from a facility in Romania.
Officials have developed a schedule to recover all Soviet-originated highly enriched uranium and return it to Russia by the end of 2005 for conversion, said Paul Longsworth, the U.S. Energy Department’s deputy administrator for nuclear non-proliferation.
After last year’s mission, the State Department compiled a list of 24 other foreign reactors that use weapons-grade nuclear fuel, some in old and poorly guarded facilities.
The complexity of the Bulgarian operation demonstrated the challenges involved in such missions.
Officials focused on a former Soviet-designed, 2-megawatt research reactor built at the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy in the capital of Sofia in 1959. The reactor was closed in 1989, and the nuclear fuel assemblies stored since.
An International Atomic Energy Agency team, accompanied by U.S. and Russian nuclear engineers, removed seals from storage containers and verified the contents before the material was loaded into four special canisters.
The U.S. government paid the $400,000 bill for the mission. And the operation took 48 hours.
The uranium taken from the Sofia facility was 36 percent enriched.
“It’s quite useful to a terrorist,” Longsworth said. “You can handle it without protection.”