Huge shipment of uranium safely arrives in Russia

WASHINGTON – Enough processed uranium to make six nuclear weapons was secretly transported thousands of miles by truck, rail and ship on a monthlong trip from a research reactor in Budapest, Hungary, to a facility in Russia so it could be more closely protected against theft, U.S. officials revealed Wednesday.

The shipment, conducted under tight secrecy and security, included a three-week trip by cargo ship through the Mediterranean, up the English Channel and the North Sea to Russia’s Arctic seaport of Murmansk, the only port Russia allows for handling nuclear material.

The 13 radiation-proof casks, each weighing 17,000 pounds, arrived by rail at the secure nuclear material facility at Mayak in Siberia on Wednesday, carrying 341 pounds of weapons usable uranium, said Kenneth Baker, a National Nuclear Security Administration official who oversaw the complex project.

It is the largest recovery to date of highly enriched uranium provided either by the former Soviet Union or the United States under a program, begun in the 1950s, aimed at spreading the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The two countries have been working to return the spent fuel from reactors around the world because at many of the facilities, including the one in Budapest, security is lax, raising the possibility of the material being stolen by terrorists.

“It was a big shipment, the biggest one we’ve ever done,” Baker said after he received word that the shipment had arrived at its final destination in Russia.

Under the U.S.-Russian program, the NNSA, which is part of the Energy Department, has completed 15 recoveries of U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium from research reactors in more than a dozen countries since 2005. The agency also was involved in three earlier shipments of Russian-origin highly enriched uranium that were removed from the Czech Republic, Latvia and Bulgaria and returned to Russia.

But the project targeting the 341 pounds of highly radioactive used fuel from the Budapest research reactor was particularly complex and challenging, said Baker, the NNSA’s assistant deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.

It began at 3 a.m. in Budapest in late September and ended early Wednesday, Washington time, at the nuclear facility at Mayak in Russian Siberia. In between, the shipment moved without notice aboard truck and rail to the port of Koper in Slovenia and then by special cargo ship through the ocean shipping lanes that encircle Europe, always staying in international waters at least 12 miles from shore, according to Baker.

The unusual roundabout route was needed because “we couldn’t ship it through Ukraine” even though that would have been a more direct route to Russia, Baker said.

So in the early hours in late September, the 13 casks were secretly loaded onto trucks at the Budapest facility and taken to the city’s train station, where they were transported onto a special train – one cask per car – for an eight-hour trip to the port of Koper in Slovenia on the Adriatic Sea.

The shipments then moved through the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, up the Atlantic and into the English Channel, the North and Norwegian seas and then on to Murmansk by Saturday. From there the shipment was loaded on a train for the long trip to Siberia.

The Hungarian reactor now is being converted to use low-enriched uranium that can’t be used in a weapon and won’t be a potential terrorist target.