U.S. Announces It Intends to Move Tons of Uranium From Baghdad
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: May 22, 2004
IENNA, May 21 — The United States has informed an international agency that oversees nuclear materials that it intends to move hundreds of tons of uranium from a sealed repository south of Baghdad to a more secure place outside Iraq, Western diplomats close to the agency say.
Advertisement
nytimes.com/travel
Check out what to see, eat and do in London!
Also in Travel:
Visit the home of the Loch Ness Monster
Hike through Snowdonia National Park
But the organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has taken the position that the uranium is Iraqi property and that the agency cannot give permission to remove it, a diplomat said. The diplomat said that the United States was unlikely to be deterred by that position and that American officials had contacted the agency on the matter this year, before the Iraq insurgency flared last month.
"I think that if the stuff had not gone up in intensity," the diplomat said, "they would already have moved on this."
An official with the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad confirmed that moving the uranium was under consideration.
"The story I've heard is that no decision has been made as yet," the official said. "That was some months ago. When it was discussed, the view was that it was just too expensive to ship. I doubt that anything has changed."
The official added that keeping the material in storage, even amid the instability in Iraq, could be safer than trying to move it. Nuclear experts outside the government said that if the material was moved, it would probably be airlifted and placed in a repository in the United States.
A spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Energy Department, Anson Franklin, declined to comment directly on any possible operation involving the Iraqi uranium.
"We do not discuss potential future or ongoing operations," Mr. Franklin said.
The repository, at Tuwaitha, a centerpiece of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program until it was largely shut down after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, holds more than 500 tons of uranium, none of it enriched enough to be used directly in a nuclear weapon.
The repository was an object of widespread looting by villagers after the American-led invasion last year. The villagers were for the most part apparently interested in using the barrels that hold the uranium for activities like cooking and storing water. They simply dumped out the uranium sludge and took the barrels. Although most of the barrels and all but a small amount of the uranium were recovered, the episode was an embarrassment to the United States and left traces of radioactive contamination throughout the village.
Nuclear experts had mixed reactions to the possibility of moving the uranium. The president of the Institute for Science and International Security, David Albright, said officials had long privately discussed plans to take the uranium out of Iraq.
"I would say it's a wise thing to do," Mr. Albright said. "The idea of theft isn't crazy."
But Tom Clements, a senior adviser with the Greenpeace International nuclear campaign, said he believed that continuing problems with radioactive contamination in the village should be dealt with before any uranium was moved.
"We don't think that the United States has properly followed up on the radioactive contamination," Mr. Clements said.
Besides, he said, referring to occupation troops at Tuwaitha, "I would be concerned that they would be pulling some of the protective force off the site in order to deal with the problems in the rest of the country."
"I wonder if that's the motivation for moving it," Mr. Clements said.
Of the uranium, 500 tons is naturally occurring ore or yellowcake, a slightly processed concentrate that cannot be directly used in a bomb. Some 1.8 tons is classified as low-enriched uranium, a more potent form but still not sufficient for a weapon.
Still, said Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the low-enriched version could be useful to a nation with nuclear ambitions.
"A country like Iran," Mr. Cochran said, "could convert that into weapons-grade material with a lot fewer centrifuges than would be required with natural uranium."
The centrifuges are used to purify the material.
Because uranium takes billions of years to decay, it emits fairly small amounts of radiation. But it can still create health problems, and some villagers have complained of nausea and unexplained rashes.
Whatever its actual health risks, the uranium could sow terror over wide areas if dispersed by a conventional explosive. Such a "dirty bomb" remains a prime concern for counterterrorism experts in the United States and abroad.
Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited Tuwaitha in June after the looting reports. The team determined that at least 20 pounds of the uranium was unaccounted for, but decided that it had probably not fallen into the wrong hands.
"A few grams of natural uranium compounds could have remained in each of the approximately 200 emptied containers when upended by the looters," the agency wrote in its inspection report.
A second diplomatic official expressed puzzlement as to why the United States was considering moving the material, after the material has been presumably secured and resealed. Except for the incident immediately after the invasion, the official said, "this stuff has been there, secure, quiet, not a problem to anyone, since 1991."
Tuwaitha also contains dozens of other radioactive materials that cannot be used to make nuclear weaponry but that emit much stronger and more dangerous radiation than uranium. The officials said it was unclear whether the United States planned to move that material, too.
Because of the intense radiation, the potential dangers of transporting that material are higher, said Daniel Hersch, former director of the Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear policy organization in California.
"There, you have more problems," Mr. Hersch said. "But again, the situation in Iraq is so unstable that that material might benefit from transport to more secure locations."
