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Terrorists could easily make an atomic bomb from MOX fuel, says a confidential report Exclusive from New Scientist magazine Terrorists could easily make a crude atomic bomb from MOX fuel produced at British Nuclear Fuels' new plant in north-west England, according to a confidential report submitted to the British government and seen by New Scientist. The report comes as the state-owned company is trying to get the government's go-ahead to make MOX, a mixture of plutonium and uranium oxide, for reactor operators in Europe and Japan. Although the MOX plant, at Sellafield in Cumbria, was completed in 1996, the government has postponed authorising its start-up because of doubts over its economic viability. Last week, as a fourth consultation exercise on the MOX plant ended, Friends of the Earth lodged papers at the High Court in London calling for a judicial review of the consultation, accusing the British government of skewing the process in favour of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). The environmental group alleges that the £462 million invested in the plant so far has been disregarded in calculating its financial prospects, and that the results of an independent audit have been withheld from the public. "Terrifying possibility" But now the confidential report submitted to the government highlights another potential problem for the plant. Written by Frank Barnaby, a physicist who worked at the nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston, Berkshire, in the 1950s and later headed the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it spells out exactly how easy it is to make MOX fuel into a bomb. Barnaby says that terrorists intent on mass destruction would need no more technical know-how than that used to make the Lockerbie bomb. The expertise required is less than the equivalent skill used in 1995 by the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, to prepare sarin nerve gas for release into the Tokyo subway, he says. It would be "sheer irresponsibility" for the government to allow the new plant to open, Barnaby warns, as the theft of MOX fuel pellets would then become a "terrifying possibility". His report, which was commissioned by the Oxford Research Group, an independent body of scientists studying nuclear issues, comes in the wake of mounting concern about the poor security arrangements for radioactive materials worldwide (New Scientist, 26 May, p 10). Barnaby reveals three ways of chemically separating the plutonium dioxide from the uranium dioxide in MOX fuel. One, involving lanthanum nitrate as a carrier, was used in 1941 by the atomic pioneer Glenn Seaborg at the University of Chicago. The other two methods - one of which is currently used at the University of Kiev in Ukraine - depend on reactions with resins. The chemistry is less sophisticated than that required for the illegal manufacture of designer drugs, he says. All the details terrorists need are in the published literature or on the Internet, says Barnaby. A primitive bomb could be made with 35 kilograms of plutonium dioxide, or terrorists could use hydrofluoric acid to precipitate out the pure metal, Barnaby says. Only 13 kilograms of pure metal would be needed to create an explosion with a yield of 100 tonnes of TNT - 50 times the size of the largest terrorist bomb to date, in Oklahoma City six years ago. Hard to steal BNFL points out, however, that MOX fuel would be difficult to steal because it travels under armed guard. The security arrangements "are mature, comprehensive and robust", says a company spokeswoman. "We are 100 per cent confident in the physical protection measures we have." The company points out that turning plutonium into MOX fuel and burning it in reactors could reduce the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation by cutting plutonium stockpiles. Some plutonium also has to be returned to foreign customers because they own it. The risk of MOX fuel falling into the hands of terrorists is "minimal", BNFL insists. An atomic explosion in a city centre is "everyone's worst nightmare", says Frans Berkhout, a nuclear expert from SPRU (formerly the Science Policy Research Unit) at the University of Sussex, Brighton. But although turning fresh MOX fuel into a bomb is "theoretically possible", he thinks that in practice terrorists might find cheaper and easier ways of causing mass destruction. |
