Chilean HEU Removed
On April 8, just prior to the summit in Washington, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that it had removed all HEU from Chile, making it the fifth country to remove all of its HEU since President Obama called for an international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years. The operation in Chile was successfully completed despite a massive earthquake on Feb. 27 and numerous aftershocks that occurred while the NNSA team was in the country.
The NNSA and Chilean Commission of Nuclear Energy removed 13.6 kilograms of HEU spent fuel from the La Reina Nuclear Center in downtown Santiago, Chile, along with 4.3 kilograms of slightly irradiated HEU and 0.3 kilograms of fresh fuel from the Lo Aguirre Nuclear Center located 40 km west of Santiago, and more than 400 U.S.-origin radiological sources.
The material was packaged into internationally licensed transportation casks, secured in shipping containers and transported in an armed convoy from the reactor sites to a nearby port for transport by sea to the U.S. The shipment was recently completed after the vessels arrived at a secure U.S. port in late March. The material was then delivered by flatbed trucks to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee for reprocessing. Photos of the removal effort are available form the NNSA website.
The project was part of the NNSA's Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI). To date, the GTRI has removed all significant amounts of HEU from 18 countries.
Summit Statements
For its part, the U.S. has been reducing its number of HEU-fueled reactors. The U.S. statement at the close of the summit notes that, "In 2009, the United States completed conversion of all 20 of our highly-enriched-uranium-fueled reactors that could be converted to use low enriched uranium fuel. There are six remaining highly-enriched-uranium-fueled reactors in the United States that will be converted to use low enriched uranium fuel once acceptable fuel has been developed."
For more summit details, see the documents and statements released late Tuesday.
Sources: whitehouse.gov, Canwest News Service, NNSA
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