The Nuclear Control Institute has played a leading role in advocating and supporting U.S. government efforts to end civilian uses of bomb-grade uranium (HEU). Commerce in such material is especially dangerous because of the relative ease with which it can be made into nuclear weapons. According to Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez,

With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half....Even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order.

In 1990, we intervened successfully before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to block the export of HEU fuel to a reactor in Europe capable of using an alternate, non-weapons-usable fuel. Result: the fuel was never sent, and Congress enacted a law two years later effectively cutting off U.S. exports of bomb-grade uranium.

International trade in highly enriched uranium was started with little foresight in the 1950s, under the Atoms for Peace program. Over the next three decades, the United States exported dozens of nuclear research reactors and tens of tons of HEU---the same material used in the Hiroshima bomb. If stolen or diverted, a tiny fraction of this material---less than 25 kilograms ---would be sufficient to build a nuclear weapon.

Not until the 1970s did the U.S. government begin to appreciate fully the proliferation dangers of such commerce. The Carter Administration realized that the HEU in research reactor fuel could be diverted and used directly by nations or terrorists in nuclear explosives. Most research reactors are on university campuses and at research centers where security is lax and access to this material relatively unfettered.

In 1978, the U.S. created the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors (RERTR) Program to convert reactors from bomb-grade fuel to low-enriched uranium (LEU), ensuring the same reactor performance without the proliferation risks. From the Carter Administration through the late Reagan Administration, much progress was made in curtailing global commerce in HEU. In the late 1980s, however, the program was endangered through neglect by the Executive Branch. For more than a decade, our Institute has been instrumental in maintaining and building support in Congress and the Executive Branch for the RERTR program and its objective of eliminating commerce in HEU.

Bomb-Grade Uranium Current Initiatives

Bomb-Grade Uranium Publications