Nuclear mattersU.S., Kazakhstan complete secret transfer of Soviet-era nuclear materials

Published 22 November 2010

In the largest such operation ever mounted, U.S. and Kazakh officials transferred 11 tons of highly enriched uranium and 3 tons of plutonium some 1,890 miles by rail and road across the Central Asian country; the nuclear material, which could have been used to make more than 770 bombs, was moved from a facility feared vulnerable to terrorist attack to a new high-security facility

In the largest nuclear transfer operation ever mounted, U.S. and Kazakh officials moved eleven tons of highly enriched uranium and three tons of plutonium some 1,890 miles by rail and road across the Central Asian country.

Working under extraordinary secrecy, the U.S. and Kazakh governments in the past year have moved nuclear material that could have been used to make more than 770 bombs from a location feared vulnerable to terrorist attack to a new high-security facility.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the transfer culminated a project spanning three American presidencies that was intended to prevent the material from falling into the wrong hands.

The last of twelve shipments arrived Monday at the new state-of-the-art storage facility in remote northeastern Kazakhstan, near the border with Russia and China. The 13-day journey began at the mothballed BN-350 fast-breeder reactor in the Caspian Sea port of Aktau. McClatchy agreed to withhold the precise location of the storage site for security reasons.

“The most immediate and extreme threat [to international security] is a terrorist acquiring nuclear material,” said Thomas D’Agostino, the head of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, the overseer of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. “This takes one of those pieces, a big chunk, off the table.”

The sparsely populated region where the storage facility is also is home to the defunct Semipalatinsk Test Site, a 7,000-square-mile expanse of steppe where the Soviet Union conducted more than 460 nuclear test explosions from 1949 to 1990 while Kazakhstan was a Soviet republic.

The United States spent $219 million on the project. Britain kicked in $4 million and Kazakhstan also contributed some funding, U.S. officials said. “The cost is very, very small compared to the cost of the wrong people getting their hands” on the material, asserted a U.S. official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the project publicly.

History

Former President Bill Clinton began the project in 1996, when the United States helped Kazakhstan inventory the spent nuclear fuel that had accumulated at BN-350, which started producing plutonium for Soviet nuclear weapons in 1972. The reactor also provided power to Aktau.

 

The year before the project commenced, Kazakhstan had returned 1,410 nuclear warheads to Moscow that it inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

U.S. experts helped shut down BN-350 in 1999 and build a storage facility there until a more secure site could be found for nearly 3,000 assemblies that