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
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Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs | Harvard Kennedy School 31 used code names for some 16 sites involved, ranking them according to proliferation risk on a scale of one to four, with four being the maximum risk. Three of the sites were found to be at this level of maximum risk, and were given the codes X, Y, and Z. 81 How best to remove the components was not immediately clear. The United States offered to pay for their repatriation to Russia. Stepanyuk said that Russia would accept the most sensitive piece of equipment but not two others, which Russian officials felt were likely to be so badly damaged as to pose little risk. The U.S. argued that there was no way to know for sure what con- dition the equipment was in until it was actually recovered. An agreement eluded the two sides until a meeting in St. Petersburg on June 1 and 2, 2006, when Russia agreed to accept two pieces of equipment back and entomb the third, at the “Z” site, in concrete in the tunnel. The effort was called Operation Golden Eagle and was carried out in 2007. At one point during the work on the “Y” site, crews attempted to breach a concrete wall in order to provide access to the nuclear materials behind it. During the work, the entire concrete wall collapsed, exposing the materials. “This was an emergency,” according to Stepanyuk. A decision was made by five experts from Arzamas-16, including Stepanyuk, to personally go in and retrieve the materials. A photograph made of them at the “Y” site on May 8, 2007 shows them in protective suits and wearing respiratory protection. Within a month, and with the help of Kazakhstan, the dangerous materials had been successfully moved to the “X” site for repatriation back to Russia. In a familiar pattern, scavengers continued to raid the tunnels during these negotiations. Ristvet, like Kadyrzhanov and other Kazakh scientists before him, confronted them on several occasions, only to receive a similar rebuff. By the mid-2000s, Kazakhstan was becoming an economic suc- cess story in Central Asia, its economy blossoming thanks to its oil, gas and mining industries. But in part because of the legacy of nuclear testing, the area around Semipalatinsk remained very poor. “I would tell the scavengers how dangerous it was for them to be out here, and they would say ‘my family is very poor and there’s still copper, aluminium, and lead’” down in the tunnels, Ristvet remembered. The Kazakh authorities were initially unwilling to take serious measures to stop the scavengers; mining in the region was a central feature of the government’s economic rehabilitation program. At one point, U.S. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made a personal call to a high-ranking Kazakh official and implored Kazakhstan to take action to end the scavenging at Semipalatinsk, which had yet to be made officially illegal. 82 The intervention proved successful. Kazakhstan agreed to officially declare Degelen Mountain an “exclusion zone,” which allowed U.S. officials to erect signs around a 60 kilometer boundary warning scavengers from mining. Kazakh secu- rity forces now had the authority to expel the scavengers from the site. In 2008, DTRA officials terminated a contract with a local Kazakh construction company—Degelen Mountain Enterpris- es—that they felt was responsible for slowing the work and also for various security breaches. A new company, Vostokavtoprom, was hired that proved capable of completing the work at a much brisker pace, Ristvet says. These decisions—arguably long overdue—finally put an end to the foraging in the tunnels. But it did not stop legitimate mining operations from winning permits to work in startlingly close 81 Stepanyuk, “Liquidation of Consequences.” 82 Interview with high-level DoD official on condition of anonymity. Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year mission to secure a dangerous legacy of Soviet nuclear testing 32 proximity to Degelen Mountain. 83 Even today, a full-scale fluoride mine operates within eyesight of the Degelen tunnels.
84 Should they choose, the mining operation could drill an underground tunnel to Degelen Mountain in a matter of weeks. 85
To prevent this and other theft scenarios, the U.S. funded and helped install an elabo- rate security system at Degelen Mountain in 2009. The protec- tion around the site included barbed wiring fencing, two-meter-deep trenches and large stones to prevent vehicle access, 500 sensors, including seismic, motion and trip-wire detectors, five video towers, and a small, unmanned aerial vehicle for the Kazakhs to use for surveillance. Find- ing equipment that proved reliable in Semipalatinsk’s harsh climate proved challenging. Equip- ment provided by Raytheon as part of a multi-million dollar contract broke the winter after it was installed. 86 One U.S. official said most of the detectors had been designed by Raytheon for the desert environment of the U.S.-Mexican border. The Kazakhs, on their own initiative, sourced equipment designed to withstand Siberian winters from a Russian military supplier; it cost half the amount of the U.S. contract, and easily survived the winter. 87 With knowledge and trust acquired from Operations Matchbox and Nomad, the remaining Kol- bas and end boxes were filled without major problems. But the work was still slow—and broken by long winter breaks. In 2009, newly-elected U.S. President Barack Obama announced an initia- tive to “secure all vulnerable nuclear material” within four years. As part of that initiative, Obama hosted a summit of 46 world leaders in Washington D.C. in March, 2010. At the summit, Obama arranged a personal meeting with Nazarbayev to address 83 For an example of legal mining operations in the former testing site, see the Naimanjal operation of Frontier Mining Ltd., a Cayman Islands incorporated company. http://www.frontiermining.com/index.html 84 Upon visiting the site, one of the authors (Harrell) estimated that the mine is less than 2000 yards away from the mountain. 85 An extensive literature exists about the proliferation risk associated with long-term underground burial of plutonium in the context of spent nuclear fuel—specifically, that the repositories could eventually become “plutonium mines for those searching for relatively low-cost sources of nuclear bomb fuel. Many of the issues would apply to buried plutonium residue at Degelen Mountain. See, for example, Swahn, J., The Long-Term Nuclear Explosives Predicament, Technical Peace Research Group, Insti- tute of Physical Resource Theory, Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, (1992) and: Edwin S. Lyman and Har- old A. Feiveson, “The Proliferation Risks of Plutonium Mines,” Science and Global Security, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1998), pp. 119-128. 86 Interview with DTRA officials, October 2012. 87 Interview with DTRA officials, October 2012. Source: Siegfried Hecker
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