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Atomic watchdog, U.S. to help Russia find lost nuke
material
June 24, 2002
By Louis Charbonneau
VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - The United States and Russia will join forces to hunt down missing radioactive material across the former Soviet Union to prevent it from being used in "dirty bombs," the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Monday.
The aim of the two former Cold War rivals is to recover "orphaned" nuclear material, such as atomic-powered field generators and radioactive powder left scattered with no regulatory control after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said it would manage the search.
"September 11 has made it clear that we need to restore these potentially dangerous materials to regulatory control," IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
Details of the plan were to be announced Tuesday.
The United States has pledged at least $25 million this year toward the project, sources told Reuters.
Fleming said the IAEA had become concerned about significant orphaned quantities of cesium-137, a highly radioactive powder the Soviets used to keep stored grain from rotting. A priority of the joint U.S.-Russian plan will be to track down the cesium-137.
Earlier this year, the IAEA helped authorities in the former Soviet republic of Georgia recover two canisters containing highly radioactive strontium-90. The containers were part of abandoned military field generators and seriously injured three Georgian men who found them.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, fears have grown that radical groups might try to acquire nuclear materials to make "dirty bombs," crude devices that use conventional explosives to spread dangerous radioactive material.
The worry is not just dirty bombs.
According to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, there are about 650 metric tons of weapons-grade fissionable nuclear material spread across the former Soviet Union, not including material in nuclear warheads.
The RAND Corp., a U.S. security think tank, has said that a country that got hold of just 11 pounds of plutonium or 33 pounds of highly enriched uranium could theoretically build a full-fledged nuclear bomb in just a few days.
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