U.S. is Shipping Russian Nuke Waste to Scotland

by Judith Perera and Andrei Ivanov

In an operation codenamed "Auburn Endeavour," U.S. Air Force transport aircraft are to fly the nuclear cargo to Britain this for reprocessing at Dounreay in Scotland.

The British government argues that accepting the material -- four kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and 800 grams of spent nuclear fuel -- is in line with its commitment to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Washington is concerned to prevent the uranium from falling into the hands of terrorist groups or nations such as Iran and Iraq, suspected of having a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

However, Scottish Nationalist Party leader Alex Salmond says Scotland is becoming the "soft touch for the dirty end of the nuclear industry."

From 1956 it ran a IRT-2000 research reactor for work on nuclear physics, plasma radiation, radiation materials, biophysics, isotope research and elementary particle physics. The institute conducted joint research with Finland, France and Oxford, in England.

The reactor was closed for safety improvements after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and the shutdown became permanent following local environmentalists protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The reactor used highly enriched uranium as fuel and its spent fuel was stored in a cooling pond for a few years before being sent to Russia's Mayak reprocessing plant near Chelyabinsk in the Ural mountains. However, the last trainload of 44 fuel assemblies was sent in 1991.

The train was unable to take five extra assemblies and they were left in the cooling pond. When the Soviet Union collapsed a few months later, the institute was left with the five rods as well as 10 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.

Georgia then tumbled into civil war and little was done until the fighting eased in 1994, when the institute sent about six kilograms of six kilos of HEU to Uzbekistan, which has a similar reactor. The institute has never wanted to keep the material, Georgian plant director Giorgi Kharadze has said.

Estimates vary about how much is needed to make a nuclear bomb.

Some U.S. officials say the material left in Georgia would not be enough to make a bomb. But other experts are less sanguine. "I would worry if it were in the hands of Iran or Iraq," says Thomas Cochran, senior scientist at the U.S. Natural Resources Defence Council. "They could amass a technically competent scientific team to fabricate a weapon with a yield of a kiloton."

Washington has been trying to find a way to remove the material for over two years, and initially discussed the problems with Russia. Washington felt Moscow should be given the chance to resolve the problem and in 1996 Washington asked Russia to accept all the material.

The United States was to pay Georgia about $100,000 for the material -- its market value. However, Russia was reluctant to take the material and raised various objections.

Moscow insisted that the canisters to be used for transporting the fuel to Russia would need to be approved by Russian nuclear regulators. Washington offered to supply the canisters but to no avail.

Russia was also concerned about money, expressing reluctance to advance any of the costs of moving the fuel. The U.S. then agreed to advance Russia one million dollars, to be returned minus any fees paid to Georgia for packing and handling the shipment.

However, Russian officials balked at accepting the spent fuel, saying they had their own environmental laws to worry about. Under new Russian law, spent fuel taken from foreign countries must be reprocessed and the waste returned to the nation it came from. But Georgia has no storage facilities for such material.

Clearly Russia was not prepared to cooperate without some kind of reward, which was evidently not on offer.

Meanwhile, during the negotiations, Washington sent specialists to Georgia to improve the security of the reactor. An alarm system, television surveillance cameras and a brick barrier were installed to protect the highly enriched uranium.

Attempts to persuade France to take the material were equally unsuccessful. The U.S. itself was reluctant to accept the consignment because it contained spent fuel which would contravene its own environmental laws.

Moreover in 1994, Washington had organized a similar operation, codenamed Sapphire, to remove some 600 kilos of materials from Kazakhstan. In this case, however, it was only HEU, not spent fuel, which caused fewer legal problems.

While British officials are trying to take the high moral ground by raising the dangers of proliferation, Scottish environmental groups believe self interest is probably the real motive.

The plant's waste processing facilities continue operation, to the anger of locals. Dounreay has a bad record for the leakage of wastes into surrounding areas.

According to Scotland Against Nuclear Dumping (SAND) the government promised the local people that it would pay for the heavily contaminated site and surrounding area to be cleaned up and for the nuclear plant at the site to be taken apart.

However, SAND believes it is now trying to back out of this commitment by taking on a variety of commercial contracts to carry out the work that few other countries will touch: reprocessing of spent fuel, destruction of contaminated sodium and conversion of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons to new weapons grade material to be sold to other countries.

In a referendum of every person on the electoral register in the county of Caithness, where Dounreay is located, 65.5 percent of voters were against the importation of spent fuel for reprocessing.

SAND says there is a high level of leukaemia amongst children living near Dounreay, and many people believe that radioactivity which is dumped into the sea and air from Dounreay is responsible.