A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 15
Cool set-up for an action-thriller: Chile gives its last weapons-grade uranium to US:
SANTIAGO, Chile — Deep inside the containment building of a nuclear reactor that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet built for his army, an aging engineer in a white lab coat struggled with a common house key to unlock a closet door.
Opening a dusty wooden box he pulled from a shelf, he revealed an array of thin aluminum-coated plates, and lifted one out with his bare hands.
“This is it,” said Hugo Torres, the reactor’s operations manager.
“It” is highly enriched uranium 235, HEU for short. It’s the material that most worries anti-terrorism experts. Just 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of it in a nuclear bomb could devastate an entire city, in the same way the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
President Barack Obama’s major shift in U.S. nuclear strategy puts a new emphasis on securing this kind of weapons-grade nuclear material, recognizing that terrorists and rogue states pose a much more immediate threat than the old fears of a communist nation provoking nuclear Armageddon by attacking the U.S. or its allies.
“For the first time, preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is now at the top of America’s nuclear agenda,” Obama said before signing a new START treaty with Russia to sharply reduce the number of warheads each country has ready to fire.
Obama now hopes to enlist leaders of 47 other nations at a White House summit beginning Monday to help him keep an ambitious promise, made a year ago this week, to secure all the world’s vulnerable nuclear material within four years.
Obama has proposed a 68 percent increase in the Global Threat Reduction Initiative’s budget to $559 million next year, to recover more HEU and fight smuggling of nuclear material by strengthening border controls and port security.
But the U.S. needs extensive cooperation from other nations to get the job done — and Chile has become an example of how small countries can play a big part in the process.
Chile was among the first to agree to surrender its last HEU, 18 kilograms (40 pounds) it got from Britain and France for its two research reactors. A team of Americans finally shipped it out last month just after the country’s massive earthquake, weaving a convoy of trucks around shattered highways in the middle of the night to reach a functioning port.
The Associated Press documented the transfer, agreeing to keep the details secret until the material arrived safely in the United States.
The mission will be the first of many if Obama is to keep his promise.
— —
When the day finally came to remove Chile’s HEU, muscle, sweat and rock and roll helped put the years of planning and high-tech equipment into action.
A radio blasted Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” as Americans and Chileans strained together with nylon rope and a claw at the end of a 20-foot pole to wrestle six racks of highly radioactive HEU into a protective cylinder for transport. One by one, they lifted the racks from the ionized blue water of La Reina’s reactor pool, and inserted them inside a cylinder lined with 8 inches of lead and stainless steel to contain the radioactivity.
Any false move could have caused a major cleanup disaster if the racks tipped and spilled the plates, wafer-thin and nearly a meter (yard) long, onto the reactor floor. Luckily, the world’s worst earthquake in a half-century was still days away. The cylinder was closed and lifted out of the pool by a winch. Then, everyone backed off as Torres checked for leaks with a particle detector on a 10-foot pole.
“Fourteen millirems,” he announced, and the observers relaxed, just a bit: Someone would have to touch the outside of the cask for two hours to get as much radiation as a typical chest X-ray.
With Chilean Army MPs standing watched, the cylinder then was lowered onto a customized forklift, rolled out of the reactor building and lifted by a huge crane onto a towering metal cask with still-thicker walls. A U.S. contractor climbed up and spun a wheel, lowering the fuel from the cylinder into the cask without exposing radioactivity. The cask was then lowered into a shipping container that seems perfectly typical from the outside, but inside has a metal bed designed to prevent the contents from shifting on its ocean journey.
The team repeated the drill at the former military reactor in Lo Aguirre, just off a highway south of the capital. Another huge metal cask was filled with spent fuel, and fresh fuel from two wooden boxes was loaded into separate stainless steel barrels.
All told, it took two cargo containers weighing 30 tons each to protect just 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of uranium.
When the magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck, the radioactive material was already packed tightly away, ready for shipment. But the planned exit route was impossible — huge cracks in the highway and the crane at the port was out of commission. Working closely with the Chileans, the team figured out a roundabout, eight-hour way to reach a functioning port, and drove through the night to reach the U.S. ships.
I saw this story on “The Rachel Maddow Show” the other night and it blew my mind. You’ve got highly volatile and valuable radioactive material. Mix in some terrorists who attempt to steal said material. And what the hell, toss in an 8.8 earthquake.
Paging Jack Ryan. Your next plot is available at GITS aisle 9!
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