Current Initiatives: Bomb-Grade Uranium

NCI's efforts to eliminate commerce in bomb-grade uranium focus on these main areas:

• Assuring successful completion of the RERTR (Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors) program's original mandate. This includes both the conversion of reactors that can use LEU fuels already developed by the program and the development of new, advanced LEU fuels to enable the remaining reactors to convert.

• Supporting the U.S. take-back of spent, bomb-grade uranium fuel that was originally exported from this country. This serves two purposes. First, it removes weapons-usable material from commerce. Second, it induces cooperation from foreign reactor operators to convert to LEU fuel.

• Blocking plans to use HEU fuel in a new reactor in Germany, the FRM-II. It would be the first Western reactor built to use bomb-grade fuel in 16 years, since the establishment of the RERTR program. Over the past two years, our institute was successful in appealing to the U.S. government to cancel construction of a large, HEU-fueled research reactor, the Advanced Neutron Source, which likewise would have violated the international moratorium on HEU. The Department of Energy canceled the project, and now we are urging DOE and State Department officials to press the German government not to build the FRM- II with a core of bomb-grade fuel. We are active in Germany making the non- proliferation case for such action, working closely with a number of German federal and state officials and public-interest organizations.

• Appealing to South Africa to blend down its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, recovered from its dismantled nuclear weapons, into low-enriched uranium. We are also attempting to ensure that ongoing negotiations to establish a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in Africa will guarantee that this action be taken as an essential element of establishing the zone.

• Opposing the reprocessing of HEU research reactor fuel, in the U.S. or abroad because of the negative environmental and international-security impacts of reprocessing. If unsuccessful in blocking the reprocessing of HEU spent fuel, we will seek to ensure that the recovered bomb-grade material is blended down into a non-weapons-usable fuel.

• Opposing the re-enrichment of U.S. highly enriched uranium fuels in Europe to accommodate reactor operators trying to circumvent the U.S. ban on exports of fresh HEU.

• Promoting conversion of a EURATOM research reactor in the Netherlands, one of only two foreign reactors that are able to convert to low-enriched uranium fuel but refuse to do so. Our intervention before the NRC and subsequent enactment of a U.S. law have blocked further U.S. HEU exports to the Petten reactor.
  
  
  
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