ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN (dpa) – When the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan became independent in 1991, one item of dubious value it inherited from the Soviet Union was probably the largest stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium of non-military origin in the world.
The plutonium was produced by a 350-megawatt, fast-breeder nuclear power plant called BN350 located on the arid northwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, a few miles from the dusty city of Aktau.
It was designed to be shipped to other parts of the Soviet Union for use as fuel in other reactors like it, but only one, the BN600, was ever built. It took little or no plutonium from the BN350, so the material just accumulated.
By the time the plant closed in 1999, after 26 years of providing electricity and powering a water desalinisation plant to the Aktau region, there were almost 3,000 15-foot cylinders containing spent nuclear fuel, from which a total of 7,250 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium could be extracted with relative ease.
That’s enough to build more than 400 nuclear bombs.
Because about half the cylinders had lain for years in a cooling pond nearly the size of a football field, their radiation had dropped to levels in which they could be safely handled by men wearing light protection. The other half were too “hot” to be handled by anything but robots.
“When I walked in there the first time, back in 1995, it had all the security of a modern office building,” recalled Fredrick Crane, an American physicist familiar with the plant.
With each cylinder weighing 300 pounds, it would have taken just a couple of strong men with accomplices inside to spirit out the half- dozen cylinders required to make a bomb.
“It was attractive material and it was accessible,” added Trisha Dedik, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nonproliferation Policy.
Just 500 miles to the south lies Iran and what U.S. officials say is a covert nuclear-weapons programme. Eight hundred miles to the southeast is Afghanistan, home to Osama Ben Ladin, and due west, straight across the Caspian, Chechnya smolders.
So the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United States quietly set up a programme to immediately enhance security and, starting 1998, to package the cylinders in such a way as to make them impossible to steal.
Dedik and Crane were among several dozen Americans who worked on the project.
A torpedo factory in Almaty that had converted to civilian work was recruited to make big cylinders where six of the thinner cylinders – some “hot,” some “cooled” – were packed together and returned to the cooling pond. The resulting tube was far too heavy to be handled by anything but a large robot, and all of them now emit lethal doses of radiation.
This summer, after nearly three years and 43 million dollars in U.S. aid money, the 478th and last cannister was welded shut and lowered into the cooling pond.
At the plant, Crane said, there are now manned gates, closed- circuit TVs, X-ray machines and turnstiles with magnetic cards, along with sensors that monitor the nuclear materials around the clock.
