US helps Russia move uranium to safer sites

US and Russian nuclear security officers are planning a joint operation with Uzbek officials to remove a large amount of enriched uranium from a reactor site in Uzbekistan considered vulnerable because of its proximity to Afghanistan.

An estimated 70kg - enough to make at least one bomb - is stored at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Ulugbek, near Tashkent, close to porous borders with Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Security at the site is considered very weak.

Washington will pay up to $4m (£2.6m) towards the cost of the operation.

Nikolai Shingariev, head of information at Minatom, the Russian civil nuclear authority, confirmed yesterday that the operation would go ahead within months, but declined to give any details.

"Shipments like this go everywhere with heavily armed guards," he said .

Both spent fuel and fresh nuclear fuel will be moved to a more secure location in Russia.

"[The security at] most of these old reactors is pretty scary," said Matthew Bunn, senior research assistant at the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University.

Security at the Ulugbek site was upgraded in the mid-90s by the installation of such essentials as hardened doors, and personnel access controls.

A source at Minatom said the US and Russian authorities were trying to persuade the Uzbek authorities to close the reactor down rather than convert it to use uranium that is less enriched and harder to convert into weapons-grade material.

Meanwhile it has become known that three tonnes of material with potential for use in a bomb has already been moved from the Aktau nuclear reactor in western Kazakhstan to a plant at Ust-Kamenogorsk, on the border between eastern Kazakhstan and Russia, considered more secure.

Aktau is on the Kazakh coast of the Caspian Sea, which also borders Iran, a state keen to obtain nuclear technology.

US officials were concerned about Iran's interest in the site in the late 90s and arranged to have spent fuel put into big metal drums difficult to move.

The reactor was shut down in April 1999 because the Kazak authorities considered it too isolated, but a large amount of material remained at the site.

"There were three tonnes of better than weapons-grade plutonium at this site that you could row a boat to," Mr Bunn said.

Its removal a few months ago was carried out by local companies associated with the plant but the security costs were met by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which is funded by the American media billionaire Ted Turner.

The material will be turned into a less enriched form of uranium.

Mr Turner through the NTI also financed the removal of kilos of enriched uranium from a crumbling Belgrade reactor in former Yugoslavia.