Removal of Highly Enriched Uranium from Kazakhstan Nuclear Reactor

Kazakhstani worker at Ulba Metallurgical Plant sorting HEU fuel pellets in a glove box as part of the blend-down process.

Up to two dozen nuclear bombs' worth of highly enriched uranium was at a civilian nuclear power reactor slated for shut-down in Aktau, Kazakhstan, on the Caspian Sea near Iran. This highly enriched uranium had fallen through the cracks of international efforts to secure and dispose of other nuclear weapons materials in Kazakhstan, so NTI joined with the government of Kazakhstan to take action.

Highly enriched uranium is the raw material of nuclear terrorism, but today, because of NTI's cooperative work with the government of Kazakhstan, the material from the reactor in Aktau will never be used in nuclear weapons. Instead, it has been transformed into low enriched uranium that can be used only for commercial or scientific activities.

There were several steps in the process. Nuclear workers in Aktau loaded fresh highly enriched uranium fuel assemblies designed, but never used, for the BN-350 reactor onto rail cars. The fuel assemblies were transported to the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, where security upgrades were installed to permit highly enriched uranium storage. A blend-down line and additional security upgrades to allow the conversion of highly enriched uranium to a safer, non-weapons-usable form were designed, licensed and installed to carry out the operations. These facilities will remain available to transform other nuclear weapons-usable uranium into material that cannot be made into a nuclear weapon.

	HEU containers at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant. The containers are separated to prevent a nuclear chain reaction.

The project was carried out in coordination with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.S. Department of Energy and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources of Kazakhstan.

In October, NTI board members traveled to Kazakhstan to join with Kazakhstan's President Nurlsultan Nazarbayev to announce the success of our joint work. President Nazarbayev said, "It's important that we do everything possible to secure and eliminate bomb-making materials so terrorists cannot use them to build a nuclear weapon. All of us in Kazakhstan are proud of what we have done with NTI to advance that goal." U.S. President George Bush and Mohammed ElBaradei, Director General of the IAEA, sent statements of support for the project that were read at the ceremony.

Eliminating up to two dozen nuclear bombs' worth of material is progress, but the message this project sends is just as important-there are steps we can take to dramatically reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism by securing and eliminating nuclear weapons and materials around the world. As Dr. Graham Allison, Director of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, has said: "No nuclear material. No nuclear weapon. No nuclear terrorism."

For more information about this operation, read the NTI news release and to learn more about Kazakhstan’s history and activities related to nuclear, biological and chemical weapons visit its country profile.

HOME  |  CONTACT US