Locked up
The United States has just completed a big clean-out of highly-enriched uranium from nuclear research reactors in Poland, shipping more than 1,000 pounds of spent fuel to Russia. That’s approximately enough to make 18 nuclear bombs. The operation, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy, in cooperation with Poland, was ...
The United States has just completed a big clean-out of highly-enriched uranium from nuclear research reactors in Poland, shipping more than 1,000 pounds of spent fuel to Russia. That’s approximately enough to make 18 nuclear bombs. The operation, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy, in cooperation with Poland, was one of the largest in recent years, and took five shipments over 12 months. (One of the very first such operations, back in 1994, known as Project Sapphire, removed about 1,330 pounds of HEU out of Kazakhstan.)
The United States has just completed a big clean-out of highly-enriched uranium from nuclear research reactors in Poland, shipping more than 1,000 pounds of spent fuel to Russia. That’s approximately enough to make 18 nuclear bombs. The operation, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy, in cooperation with Poland, was one of the largest in recent years, and took five shipments over 12 months. (One of the very first such operations, back in 1994, known as Project Sapphire, removed about 1,330 pounds of HEU out of Kazakhstan.)
Here’s the official statement from the NNSA. There is a good overview piece in Nature, which makes an important point that was also evident last spring at the nuclear security summit: the difficulty in such operations is not just hustling the nuclear material off to a safe harbor. Much of it is contained in research reactors, and those scientists working with the reactors think they have an important purpose. In the case of Poland, the United States is preparing to convert the reactors to low-enriched uranium and supply the new fuel at a cost of about $70 million. The removed HEU was first brought to Poland more than 30 years ago by the Soviet Union.
President Barack Obama has pledged to lock down all vulnerable nuclear materials in four years. It is going to be a tough deadline to meet. The best overall look at vulnerable nuclear materials continues to be the annual report, Securing the Bomb [pdf].
David E. Hoffman covered foreign affairs, national politics, economics, and served as an editor at the Washington Post for 27 years.
He was a White House correspondent during the Reagan years and the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and covered the State Department when James A. Baker III was secretary. He was bureau chief in Jerusalem at the time of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, and served six years as Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous Yeltsin era. On returning to Washington in 2001, he became foreign editor and then, in 2005, assistant managing editor for foreign news. Twitter: @thedeadhandbook
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