Da Lat, Vietnam – About 10 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for a nuclear bomb, was removed from a research reactor in Vietnam on Saturday, part of a joint U.S. and Russian program to keep such material out of the hands of international terrorists.
The secret operation began Tuesday, when a U.S. team led by officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration arrived at the research reactor in Da Lat, about 130 miles north of Ho Chi Minh City.
Vietnam gave up 35 unused fuel rods containing the bomb-grade material in exchange for new fuel rods from Russia made with low- enriched uranium that would allow the reactor to continue operating.
When enriched to low levels, uranium can be used to generate electricity, but when more highly enriched, it can be used as the core of an atomic weapon.
The Da Lat reactor was built under the Eisenhower administration’s “Atoms for Peace” program and went into service in 1963. In the closing days of the Vietnam War, U.S. officials shut down the reactor and removed unused fuel. But the reactor was restarted in the 1980s with Russian assistance and a new load of fuel.
The end of the Cold War and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks created an urgency in the U.S. and Russia to better protect highly enriched uranium. The nations signed an agreement 2 1/2 years ago to cooperate more closely to stop nuclear proliferation.
The Vietnam mission was set in motion when President Bush signed a statement with Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet in Hanoi in November, pledging to increase nonproliferation cooperation and specifically to replace the fuel at the Da Lat reactor.
A nuclear-fuel-processing plant in Dimitrov grad, Russia, will convert the material to low-enriched uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
The project gained support Sunday, as 11 more nations signed on with original members Russia, China, France and Japan.
Under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, a limited number of countries, including the U.S. and Russia, would provide uranium fuel to other nations for powering reactors to generate electricity and then retrieve the fuel for reprocessing. This would deprive those nations of their own nuclear fuel enrichment programs.
