Why is Pretoria so jealously guarding it fissile material?

In the early hours of 28 July 2012, three people, one of them an 82-year-old nun named Megan Rice, broke into the Y-12 Nuclear Security Complex near the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Y-12 is where all of America’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) – for making nuclear weapons – is made or stored: about 400 000 kg of it, according to The New Yorker magazine.

Rice and two others from the Plowshare anti-nuclear activist group managed to cut through three fences, paint slogans and splash blood on the football-field-sized building housing the Y-12 arsenal before a few of the 500-odd security guards finally arrived to arrest them. This demonstration by Plowshare – one of many over the last 35 years – was designed in part to show that America’s nuclear weapons were not secure from theft by terrorists. Which it did.

No double game in SA’s plan to enrich uranium

South Africa is fully within its rights as a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to explore the feasibility of enriching uranium and fuel fabrication provided this is done for peaceful purposes.

South Africa Has recently been accused of "playing both sides of the nuclear coin". This followed President Jacob Zuma’s speech at the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit last month, in which he said SA’s technical achievement in being able to generate medical isotopes through low enriched uranium (LEU) was "a welcome addition to the capability to produce such isotopes using highly enriched uranium (HEU)".

Zuma also said: "SA has adopted a policy on the beneficiation of our mineral resources, including uranium." Critics have suggested SA has a policy of enriching uranium and does not want to limit its options by giving up the production or use of HEU, and by implication will hold on to its existing stock of HEU, which it still has from the nuclear weapons programme of the apartheid government.

Pelindaba: Secret, apartheid-era technology for highly enriched uranium dismantled

Pelindaba and its uranium-enrichment facility at Valindaba were kept secret during the apartheid era because they were enriching uranium for warheads under the guise of fuel supply, by Sarah Wild, Business Day, 1 September 2011

South Africa is the only country in the world to have willingly halted its nuclear weapons programme, through the Treaty of Pelindaba of 1996. But the old infrastructure remains.

The US provided the Safari-1 reactor through its Atoms for Peace programme, and also supplied the facility with its highly enriched uranium (HEU).

For a full version of the article, click HERE

The Return of South Africa’s Highly Enriched Uranium to the US in Context

Noel Stott, Senior Research Fellow, Arms Management Programme, ISS Pretoria Office

On 17 August 2011, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the United States issued a press release announcing that the South African government, through the Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa), had returned 6,3kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) spent fuel to the US for safe storage and ultimately for destruction. NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the US Department of Energy (DOE) responsible among other things for maintaining and enhancing the safety, security, reliability and performance of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. The shipment arrived at Savannah River Site (SRS) on 16 August. The SRS is a key DOE industrial complex dedicated to nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship and nuclear materials destruction in support of the US nuclear non-proliferation efforts. It is situated 20 miles south of Aiken, South Carolina.

Subsequent press reports and releases by mainly US-based academics and NGOs lauded this development as a significant step in ‘reducing and securing vulnerable [emphasis added] radioactive materials held at civilian sites around the world’ and stated that it represents an important effort to ‘strengthen the world’s defences against nuclear terrorism’.

While at first reading these may seem reasonable assertions, a number of important caveats need to be highlighted.

Firstly, ‘spent fuel’ is defined as fuel whose elements have been removed from the reactor because the fissionable material they contain has been depleted to a level near where it can no longer sustain a chain reaction. The high concentration of radioactive fission products in spent power-reactor fuel creates a gamma-radiation field, which at a distance of a metre would be lethal. South Africa, or more accurately Necsa, no longer has any use for this material.

Secondly, the US and South Africa have been working constructively for a number of years on various peaceful use applications of nuclear material and in particular on the need to minimise the use of HEU. Examples of such co-operation are the conversion of South Africa’s SAFARI-1 reactor to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel as well as training in medical responses to nuclear and radiological emergencies. Indeed, today South Africa is leading the transition to produce the medical isotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) with LEU rather than HEU.

This joint work was given impetus by South African President Jacob Zuma’s attendance, in 2010, at the Nuclear Security Summit. Zuma was one of only five African Heads of State or government invited to develop concrete measures towards ensuring that nuclear materials under their control are not stolen or diverted (the others being Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria). They pledged to improve security as changing conditions may require, and to exchange best practices and practical solutions for doing so. The Summit’s final communiqué also highlighted the fact that ‘highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium require special precautions’.

Thirdly, the return is not unique. The repatriation of used and unused HEU fuel to its country of origin – either the US or Russia – has been an international goal since the early 1980s. Some 1,249kg of US-origin highly enriched uranium from sites around the world have already been returned, including from Chile in April 2010 just after the earthquake the previous February.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the spent fuel storage facility at Necsa is not, and has never been, ‘vulnerable’ – in the sense of being in danger of being accessed by organisations or persons with criminal intent or worse, with terrorist ideologies.

South Africa is fully aware of its obligations and is totally committed to the safety and security of such materials and sources. The nuclear material democratic South Africa holds, including the HEU from the Apartheid state’s nuclear weapons programme, is under constant and real-time surveillance and will never again be used, wittingly or unwittingly, to produce a nuclear weapon. This HEU does not pose ‘a potential security vulnerability’, as one academic alleges.

Given the developmental benefits of nuclear and other radioactive materials for Africa, there is a clear need to ensure the continued delivery of the benefits that nuclear materials and related applications provide, such as radionuclides intended for use in life-saving medical applications.

South Africa Ships HEU Back to U.S.

SAFARI-1 research reactor
Source: www.necsa.co.za

South Africa has sent 13.8 pounds of used weapon-grade uranium back to the United States, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration announced on Wednesday (see GSN, June 9).

The semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department worked with the South African Nuclear Energy Corp. [Nesca] to repatriate the spent U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium fuel that had been used at a nuclear research site.

“With this return, we have taken another important step in the global effort to minimize the use of HEU around the world, a vital part of implementing President Obama’s nuclear security agenda,” NNSA Deputy Administrator Anne Harrington said in released remarks. “The completion of this project is another example of the close partnership between NNSA and the South African Nuclear Energy Corp., and the significant technical expertise and professionalism of Necsa were key factors in the success of the operation.”

The material reached the United States on Tuesday and is going into "secure storage pending disposition," according to an NNSA press release.

The nuclear agency has supported withdrawal of 2,754 pounds of U.S.-made highly enriched uranium from facilities across the globe. In total, it has supported the extraction or management of 6,814 pounds of uranium and plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons, the release states.

South Africa and the United States have collaborated for years on reducing reliance on highly enriched uranium for civilian activities. Last year, the South African nuclear agency received as much as $25 million for a program to promote production of a key medical isotope through use of proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium rather than highly enriched material (U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration release, Aug. 17).

Source: http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20110817_7697.php