August 2013 Plutonium Mountain Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing By Eben Harrell & David E. Hoffman Project on Managing the Atom

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs  |  

Harvard Kennedy School

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There was also the question of what to do about the IAEA.  Under its obligations as a signatory 

to the NPT, Kazakhstan was required to declare all weapons-usable nuclear material in its ter-

ritory and place the material under IAEA safeguards. But all three countries wanted to keep the 

plutonium at Degelen Mountain a secret from the IAEA. 

For Russia, this was secret material, and it was even more important to keep secrets from the 

IAEA (which includes staff from many non-nuclear countries) than from the United States.  They 

were concerned that the agency would insist on performing an inventory of the plutonium, which 

could reveal the isotopic composition. U.S. officials had their own reasons to go along with the 

secrecy: they felt that involving the IAEA would slow down and complicate the operation, and 

perhaps jeopardize the confidential nature of the work.

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 According to U.S. officials, the Kazakhs 

also favored keeping the IAEA out of the picture.  Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev had often 

promoted his nonproliferation credentials around the world, so admitting that Kazakhstan had 

undeclared nuclear material on its territory would have been embarrassing.

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All the parties agreed early on to refer to the plutonium in official documents as “nuclear waste” 

in order to maintain the charade that Kazakhstan was unaware it had undeclared fissile mate-

rial on its territory.

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 Referring to the plutonium as nuclear waste, however, made returning the 

material in secret to Russia impossible. Russian customs law forbids importing radioactive waste 

to Russia other than in used fuel rods from Russian-origin reactors in foreign countries. Thus, 

any plan to return “nuclear waste” from  Semipalatinsk would require the Russian parliament to 

change the law, which would have inevitably drawn attention from the nuclear industry, jeopar-

dizing the security of the operation. 

Though the material was never formally declared to the IAEA, one U.S. official said that the 

IAEA was kept in the loop about Semipalatinsk through informal channels, and “the diplomatic 

art of having non-conversations in hallways in Vienna” about the material there.

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 Olli Heinonen, 

the deputy director general for safeguards at the IAEA and a dogged investigator, reports that he 

was briefed on what the three countries were doing at Degelen both before and during a trip to 

Semipalatisnk in April, 2010 with U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, and concluded the ap-

proach was reasonable.

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  Nevertheless, U.S. officials interviewed for this paper say they helped 

Kazkahstan keep Heinonen far afield of sensitive areas on the testing site.

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   Interview with DTRA officials, October 2012.

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   This account of the reason Kazakhstan preferred to withhold information from the IAEA was provided by U.S. officials, who 

requested anonymity. Kazakh officials and scientists would not comment. Given that the U.S. and Russia had a strong preference 

to avoid involving the IAEA—and that the U.S. was funding the program—it seems at least possible that Kazakhstan went along 

at the behest of the United States and Russia.

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   Interview with Hecker, November 28, 2012.

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   Interview with Ristvet and a high-ranking Defense Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

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   Personal communication, July 2013.

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   Other than Heinonen’s visit, the IAEA seemed happy to play along. As part of its evolving ‘state-centered approach,’ in which 

the agency analyzes all information available to it about the nuclear activities of each state and focuses its safeguards resources 

most intently on those countries where the information seems to raise suspicions, agency officials felt confident that Kazakhstan 

had no intention of diverting or using the material at Degelen Mountain, according to two former IAEA officials knowledgeable 

of Kazakhstan’s safeguards agreement. “We need solutions that are cost effective,” said one. “We thought about safeguards and 

asked ourselves, ‘Is it worth the agency’s efforts to allocate scarce safeguards resources for this material?’ We decided it was not 

worth the cost involved of taking an inventory.” The IAEA itself, via a press spokesman, declined to comment for this report.

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Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing

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Though Hecker had not yet given up on finding a way to send the plutonium back to Russia, the 

obstacles on the Russian side were high and DTRA officials were worried about the costs, so 

scientists from the three nations turned their attention to how to secure the plutonium in place. 

For the bore holes still containing plutonium residue, inspiration came from the aftermath of the 

worst nuclear accident in history. Following the meltdown of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear 

Power Plant in 1986, Soviet scientists constructed a giant concrete dome around the crippled 

reactor to halt the release of radiation and materials into the atmosphere. The Russians at Semi-

palatinsk pointed out that such a sarcophagus could work equally well for the shallow bore holes. 

The scientists thought a giant concrete envelope over the site might deter most scavengers from 

breaking into the bore holes.

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 And even if it didn’t—the scavengers had already proven them-

selves remarkably determined—violating the dome would require a large industrial enterprise 

that could be quickly identifiable by basic monitoring techniques.  

Operation Groundhog, as the dome construction effort was known, was to get underway in Au-

gust 2000 with funding from the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program and with 

oversight from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. But very soon the operation ran into 

delays. All work at Semipalatinsk ceased during the winter, when temperatures in eastern Ka-

zakhstan regularly plummet to -40°C. Only a few months after Operation Groundhog began, 

the Kazakh crews put down their tools. When they returned to work in the spring of 2001, U.S. 

financial support for the project had been suspended. There were several reasons for the fund-

ing pause. The newly arrived Bush administration had ordered a complete review of the CTR 

program, which led to delays in 2001. Also, the administration carried out a “re-notification” to 

Congress of a shift in funds, a standard procedure, which also resulted in delays. The administra-

tion further had to certify to Congress that Kazakhstan was eligible to receive CTR money, but 

the overall umbrella agreement between the United States and Kazakhstan, signed in December 

1993, had lapsed at the end of 2000. A new agreement wasn’t approved by the Kazakh parlia-

ment until mid-2002.

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In the summer of 2001, scavengers returned to one of the test sites.

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 The only security put in 

place at the site in 2000 was a barbed-wire fence, which “did not provide the expected effect,” 

Stepanyuk recalled.

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   The concrete structure also contained an irrigation system, including a drain-pipe and external water stop to prevent the mate-

rial from leeching into the water table. It should be noted that the concrete sarcophagus at Balapan was much smaller than Cher-

nobyl—it contained 2075 cubic meters of concrete, compared to 400,000 cubic meters at the Ukrainian reactor. See Stepanyuk, 

“Liquidation of Consequences.” 

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   Between January and July 2002, CTR work in Kazakhstan remained at a standstill, in part because the country’s new criminal 

code required that all such agreements be extended by parliamentary ratification only. In the ensuing debate over ratification, 

some parliamentarians expressed concern that the framework agreement might allow the 41 firms serving as subcontractors to 

avoid paying taxes on non-CTR-related transactions. The lower house approved the umbrella agreement in April, 2002, and the 

upper house in May. See: Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Kazakhstan Nuclear Chronology,” pg. 16. http://www.nti.org/media/pdfs/ka-

zakhstan_nuclear.pdf?_=1316466791 (accessed on August 7, 2013). On the 2001 delays, the authors received information from a 

senior Defense Department official, and also relied upon: John Booker, “Overview of Fissile and Radioactive Material Prolifera-

tion Prevention (FRMPP) Program: Operation Saiga, Operation Groundhog,” Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 15 July, 2002, 

provided by the Defense Department.

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   Ristvet and other U.S. officials interviewed suspect that the scavengers were likely the same construction crews that had 

worked on constructing the dome the previous year. According to Ristvet, DTRA officials encountered scavengers brazenly using 

Degelen Mountain Enterprises mining equipment, though Ristvet could never prove that the company’s management was aware 

of such security breaches.

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