Nuclear fuel to be moved

Kazakhstan’s military forces this summer held a training exercise to thwart a fake terrorist assault on a Soviet-built nuclear facility near Almaty, the country’s former capital located on its southeastern border.

In the exercise, a reactor was the simulated target of terrorists trying to steal some of the deadliest nuclear material ever made. It came, by no coincidence, as U.S. and Kazakh officials put the finishing touches on a plan to move 300 tons of used nuclear fuel from a decommissioned Soviet nuclear reactor near the port city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea not far from Iran.

Starting early next year, the spent fuel will be transported from the Aktau-based facility via railway cars in five shipments of 60 tons each. The fuel will be stored in a permanent inland storage site at the Baikal-1 facility at Semipalatinsk, a former Soviet nuclear testing site near Kazakhstan’s remote northeastern border with Russia.

If reprocessed, the fuel would yield about 3 tons of pure plutonium.

“This material is like fruit from the forbidden tree,” Erlan A. Idrissov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the United States, told The Washington Times. “So it only makes sense to keep it as secure as possible.”

Plans to move the fuel by rail across the steppes of central Asia go back more than a decade, when officials were scrambling to contain the black-market dispersal of the former Soviet Union’s atomic arsenal.

In 1999, the Kazakh government signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to shut down and secure the Aktau-based BN-350 reactor, a commercial-scale “breeder reactor” originally loaded with highly enriched uranium, a potential fuel for nuclear weapons.

Ex-officials and experts interviewed for this story said that security planners saw Iran’s proximity to the reactor as a possible security threat.

“It is especially pure and very attractive for making nuclear bombs,” said Laura Holgate, a nuclear expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative think tank in Washington.

Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, which analyzes proliferation issues, estimates that the plutonium inside was more than 97 percent pure. By comparison, the fuel used by the U.S. in its arsenal is about 90 percent pure.

“It is better [quality] than the plutonium used in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile,” Mr. Bunn said.

Since it takes 10 to 15 pounds of plutonium to make a bomb, the Aktau reactor fuel contained enough for about 400 atomic bombs similar to one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in the final days of World War II.

At the time, officials in the Clinton administration cited Iran’s proximity to the reactor as a reason for moving the fuel - concerns that deepened after Tehran asked to open a consulate in Aktau, a city with scant economic or political clout.

Mr. Idrissov, the Kazakh ambassador, said the security concerns over Tehran’s intentions were probably overblown.

“The plan [to open an Iranian consulate] never materialized,” Mr. Idrissov said, dismissing the idea that Tehran had interest in getting close to the Aktau-based reactor.

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