nuclear-news

Complexity of shipping Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU)

These reactors are using highly enriched uranium fuel pure enough for a bomb. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has grown increasingly worried that terrorists could steal the material or buy it. ….. these reactors aren’t very well guarded.

Nuclear Road Trip: Shipping Uranium A Complex Task,  NPR, by Geoff Brumfiel, 11 Oct 10, A shipment of bomb-grade uranium arrived at a secure facility in Russia on Monday, sent from a research reactor in Poland as part of a race to secure dangerous radioactive material around the world. There was no way to mistake the shipment for something innocuous like Polish sausage: The trucks were escorted by heavily armed police officers and plastered with large signs saying they carried radioactive material……Globally, there are more than 100 research reactors like the one in Poland.

“Most of them were supplied either by the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War, ……” says Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear security at Harvard University.

These reactors are using highly enriched uranium fuel pure enough for a bomb. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has grown increasingly worried that terrorists could steal the material or buy it. And Bunn says these reactors aren’t very well guarded.

“They’re just not places where it’s plausible that you’re ever going to have the kinds of military level security that is really, in my view, appropriate,” he says.

Nuclear Road Trip: Shipping Uranium A Complex Task : NPR

October 12, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, safety | antinuclear, enriched, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, reactors, uranium