An Atomic Threat Made in America and The Search for a Magic Fuel

    Part I: An Atomic Threat Made in America
    By Sam Roe
    The Chicago Tribune


Nuclear fission takes place at a US-supplied research reactor in Pitesti, Romania. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

The urgent call reached Armando Travelli in Vienna.

Get to Romania as soon as you can, the voice on the phone told Travelli, an Argonne scientist-turned-diplomat. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is considering returning the bomb-grade uranium America had given him.

Within days, Travelli stepped inside a sprawling nuclear research reactor in the southern Romanian city of Pitesti. There he saw firsthand the chilling consequences of using highly enriched uranium to cement alliances with backwater dictators.

He watched as one worker reached into a pipe and nonchalantly pulled out a spaghetti-like jumble of electrical wires. Later, he learned that other workers had wedged a hunk of wood between two uranium-filled rods to keep them from jostling in the reactor pool. The makeshift repair backfired when the wood swelled and couldn't be removed.

But Travelli, who shuttled back and forth to the facility from Chicago for several years in the 1980s, didn't know the worst of it. When his mission bogged down, Romania secretly used the reactor and the enriched uranium to help separate plutonium - the first step in building an atomic bomb.

Ceausescu has long since faced a firing squad, and his successors disclosed the secret effort. But a quarter-century after Travelli's first visit to the reactor, some of the dangerous material remains there.

Romania is but one example in a world that reverberates from the fallout of the United States' Cold War folly known as Atoms for Peace, a program that distributed highly enriched uranium around the world.

That uranium was intended solely to be used as fuel in civilian research reactors. But it is potent enough to make nuclear bombs and can be found everywhere from Romania, now a crossroads for nuclear smuggling, to an Iranian research reactor at the center of that nation's controversial nuclear program.

Three dozen other nations also obtained highly enriched uranium from the U.S. Then in 1974, India set off its first nuclear weapon, and America scrambled to get the bomb fuel back - an effort led by Travelli out of Argonne National Laboratory near southwest suburban Lemont.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the mission a new sense of urgency: For terrorists or rogue nations, highly enriched uranium is by far the easiest way to build a nuclear bomb. Only 55 pounds are required. Double that and terrorists would need only limited technical skill to slam two pieces together to start a chain reaction - the same technique used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Even since 9/11, though, the worldwide mission to retrieve this uranium repeatedly has fallen short. Now, through exclusive access to the government archive chronicling the effort, the complete story behind that failure can be pieced together for the first time.

When Travelli embarked on his quest in 1978, he thought it could be accomplished with relative ease, taking maybe five years. He was wrong.


Armando Travelli and his family in the early 1950s. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

In the middle of Rome sits one of the city's most famous fountains: the marble and bronze Fontana delle Naiadi, depicting four nymphs riding a swan, snake, horse and dragon.

During the waning days of World War II, when Armando Travelli was just a boy, he and his mother would stop at the fountain on their way home from church or while walking in the neighborhood.

"I wish you could see it with the electricity on," he recalled her telling him. "It is so beautiful with lights and the water running."

When the conflict ended after the U.S. dropped two atom bombs on Japan, Travelli became part of the nuclear generation that grew to fear atomic energy but also marvel at its power. U.S. officials predicted nuclear bombs would blast holes for harbors, and electricity would be so cheap it wouldn't be metered. Travelli envisioned cars, boats - even his neighborhood fountain - powered by the atom.

Such dreams were energized by a bold new American experiment called Atoms for Peace. Unveiled by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, the program promised to share some U.S. nuclear technology with foreign nations that vowed to forgo atomic weapons.

"It was the grand bargain," said Ellie Busick, who helped oversee non-proliferation efforts at the State Department in the 1980s and '90s. "We were way ahead in building bombs, but we were not naive enough to think that nobody could ever do this but us."


Hear Eisenhower's 1953 speech. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

The Soviets started sharing nuclear technology, too, and a Cold War chess match ensued, with the two superpowers and a few other nations supplying uranium and dozens of nuclear research reactors to their allies. U.S. reactors, for instance, went to Iran, Pakistan and Colombia; Soviet reactors to Libya, Bulgaria and North Korea.

Romania, a Soviet satellite courted by the Americans, got two reactors: one from the U.S., another from the Russians.

Reactors became the equivalent of international status symbols; church groups funded some to win overseas converts. U.S. firms vied for lucrative contracts, and Argonne became the heart of Atoms for Peace research, building foreign-bound reactors dubbed Argonauts.

By the mid-1970s, Travelli was a rising young star at the lab. He was designing a research reactor so powerful that it would need two tons of highly enriched uranium fuel - enough, in the wrong hands, to make 72 nuclear bombs.

The Eisenhower administration decided to supply foreign nations with only low-enriched uranium, which would be far less useful to bombmakers. But in the early 1960s, when reactor operators complained about the fuel's effectiveness, the U.S. government started providing highly enriched uranium instead.

"That was dumb - to send the easiest material in the world from which to make nuclear bombs to civilian facilities all over the world," said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear fuel expert and science adviser to the Clinton White House.

America initially provided this dangerous uranium fuel with the provision that foreigners return the used material, which remained weapons-grade. But in 1964, the Johnson administration started selling the fuel with no such requirement.


Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi examines a rock at a nuclear test site in southeastern India in 1974. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

After India detonated its first nuclear weapon, built with the help of a reactor from Canada and heavy water from America, everything changed.

One of its first attempts played out 10 months later, in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War. Two federal nuclear engineers volunteered for a daring raid in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. The mission: rescue bombmaking plutonium from a research reactor supplied by the U.S.

With sniper fire crackling all around, the engineers sneaked inside the reactor, packaged the material and were airlifted to safety. Hours later, the Viet Cong overran the area.

Only later was it determined that the engineers had made an embarrassing mistake: In the chaos of the mission, they took the wrong container. They hadn't rescued plutonium, but rather polonium-210, a radioactive material not as useful in weaponry (though the substance recently captured headlines when it killed a former KGB agent).

Rather than relying on haphazard missions such as the one in Vietnam, the U.S. decided it needed a formal, concerted effort to retrieve bombmaking material, particularly highly enriched uranium fuel, that America had shipped overseas.

President Jimmy Carter knew something about reactors as he had done graduate work in nuclear technology. But he faced a diplomatic quandary: He couldn't just demand the fuel back, because other nations legally owned it.

Instead, the U.S. set out to do what it had failed to do in the 1960s: Invent a variety of replacement fuels that could adequately power the reactors but be useless for bombs. Then the U.S. could offer these replacement fuels to foreign nations in exchange for the highly enriched uranium.

To lead this effort, Energy Department officials wanted someone who knew reactors inside and out.


Armando Travelli. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

Then 44, Travelli had built an impressive résumé that included teaching at MIT and designing and testing advanced reactors at Argonne.

Colleagues found him genial, meticulous and restrained. "You could yell at him and he wouldn't yell back," recalled Jim Snelgrove, an Argonne fuel specialist.

Travelli also had an international flair: He was dapper, well traveled and fluent in Italian, English, French and German.

When his bosses asked him if it were possible to develop fuels that could replace highly enriched uranium in research reactors, Travelli concluded it was.

But when they asked him whether he would lead the effort to invent these new fuels and persuade foreigners to make the switch, he was taken aback.

His life's work had been to spread nuclear technology, not rein it in. Now he was supposed to do a complete turnabout and remove enriched uranium from research reactors, facilities that didn't produce one watt of power?

"I didn't want this to be the accomplishment of my life," Travelli recalled. "My goal was to try to find a source of energy for the whole world."

But his bosses convinced him it was foolish to use weapons-grade fuel in reactors if something safer could be substituted, and so he decided to give it a shot.

Operating out of a small office in Building 362, a three-story brick structure on Argonne's 1,500-acre campus, Travelli started with just two staffers, a $645,000 annual budget and little idea of where to begin.

No one even had a list of all the research reactors the U.S. had exported. He assigned one of his workers to try to track down the reactors by scouring the scientific literature and government documents. Occasionally the staffer would burst into his office and exclaim: "I found another one!"

CIA agents eventually started coming to Travelli for information, not the other way around.

Travelli hung a 5-foot-long metallic map of the world in his office, putting green triangular magnets in spots with Atoms for Peace reactors.

But his first mission would be so secret - and so odd - that he promised at the time never to utter a word about it, let alone mark it on his office map.

The State Department was sending him to Taiwan, which U.S. officials suspected of secretly developing nuclear weapons.

There, in the countryside, sat a research reactor that looked fairly typical: a large, circular, windowless building with a domed roof.

But when Travelli stepped inside, he was astonished. The dark room the size of a theater was completely empty except for a massive, tomblike structure rising 30 feet. There were no signs of researchers or experiments. Soft Chinese music flowed from hidden speakers.

Squinting through the dim, green-tinted light, Travelli and his team quietly moved forward, as if entering a temple. Their Taiwanese hosts led them to the structure in the middle, a concrete block that held the reactor core and its valuable nuclear material.

Later, out of earshot of his hosts, Travelli would tell his colleagues: "There is no research going on in there. That's just a machine for churning out plutonium for a nuclear weapon."

The State Department told Travelli's team that everything they saw in Taiwan must be held in strict confidence, more so than a standard classified mission. Nothing could be committed to writing. No trip reports, memos or notes.

It wasn't just because the U.S. believed the Taiwanese were trying to build the bomb. The secrecy was to protect Canada.

Canada not only supplied Taiwan's reactor, but the facility's core was identical to the one that the Canadians had provided to India, which had used the reactor to help build that nation's first bomb.

So the Americans took the responsibility for trying to neutralize Taiwan's reactor by altering its fuel. Unlike the other reactors Travelli would encounter, this one was fueled by natural uranium, not highly enriched uranium. But when natural uranium is burned, it produces plutonium, which also can be used to make nuclear bombs.

For two years, in 1979 and 1980, Travelli traveled back and forth to Taiwan, poring over schematics of the reactor and calculating how best to change its fuel. At one point, Travelli's team was invited to a reception held by the Taiwanese defense minister.

"I assure you that the reactor you are interested in has no military connection whatsoever," Travelli recalled the minister saying. "There is nothing sinister about it."

Travelli thought this statement peculiar, given that no one from his team had directly accused the Taiwanese of trying to build weapons.

Not long after, the Taiwanese, weary of the scrutiny, decided to shut the reactor.

Travelli went back to his Argonne office and looked at his wall map. The Taiwan case had taken two years to complete. How could he possibly address all of the other research reactors on the U.S. target list in the next three years, as he originally envisioned?

The U.S. thought its plan would go smoothly: Argonne would develop new fuels, America would offer them to other nations, and the foreigners would quickly trade in their enriched uranium.

Though some nations agreed to the plan, most fiercely opposed it. They feared such a swap would slow their reactors, interrupt research and result in costly safety reviews.

Profit and prestige also played a part. Some reactor operators charged scientists tens of thousands of dollars to conduct experiments. If the facilities used a less powerful fuel, they might be seen as second-rate. A few reactors even displayed brass signs boasting: "Fueled with highly enriched uranium."

But the greatest obstacles to retrieving bomb fuel were of America's own making.

When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980, the retrieval effort fell out of favor. With memories of India's test fading and terrorism still viewed as a foreign problem, the Energy Department in 1981 proposed shutting down Travelli's mission, according to government records.

Though the program survived, the message was clear: Influential forces in the department didn't have much use for it. "They just wanted it to all go away," recalled Busick, the former State Department official.

As Travelli wrestled with his own government, he had an unsettling encounter that magnified his plight.

In 1981, during the height of the Cold War, he was attending a nuclear conference in what was then West Germany when a thin man in black glasses and a black suit approached him, stony-faced. The details of that conversation always have stuck with Travelli:

"Is my understanding of U.S. policy correct, that you are trying to retrieve highly enriched uranium from research reactors?" the man asked.

"And the reason is to reduce the chance that this material might fall into the wrong hands?"

"And the primary emphasis is on reactors that the United States supplied to its allies?"

Travelli did not know whether this man was a scientist, bureaucrat, spy or some combination. But the meeting made him realize he had little idea what the Soviets and their satellites were up to.

He soon would find out: Travelli became deeply involved with the reactor in Romania, a facility beset by problems since America provided it in the 1970s to Ceausescu, the repressive and mercurial dictator.

Those working at the reactor were not immune to Ceausescu's bizarre policies. Every spring and fall, buses would pull in front of the facility, and its scientists were herded aboard and driven to nearby fields to plant corn or pick tomatoes.

"Why can't they get the peasants to do this?" one of the scientists, Corneliu Costescu, recalled complaining. "We're nuclear scientists."

But Romania's dictator believed it was much easier to round up scientists at nuclear facilities than peasants in villages.

Travelli invited Costescu and two other Romanian physicists to America to study whether the bomb fuel used in their facility could be replaced by something safer. After months of work, the Romanian scientists concluded that it could. But higher-ups in Romania weren't convinced, especially because the U.S. refused to pay for the new fuel.

Normally, America didn't cover the cost of replacement fuel when swapping it for bomb-grade material. Instead, the U.S. waited until countries used up all theirs, then asked them to pay for the replacement fuel.

But Romania was operating its reactor less and less in order to conserve its highly enriched uranium. A standoff ensued, and several years passed with no progress.

During this long delay, Romania, unbeknownst to the U.S., used the American-supplied reactor to help separate plutonium, a serious violation of international rules governing the development of nuclear weapons.

Travelli and U.S. officials would not learn of the Romanian action until after the Berlin Wall came down and Ceausescu was executed by his own people. In 1992, seven years after the nuclear infraction, the new Romanian government voluntarily reported the case to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The agency, satisfied that corrective action had been taken, reported the infraction to the UN Security Council for informational purposes only - one of just a handful of cases ever reported to the council.

But even after Romania's admission, the American government did not invest more in its effort to retrieve bomb-grade fuel worldwide.

Despondent over a lack of progress, Travelli began to neglect his wall map. When people brushed up against it, shifting the magnets around, he didn't bother to fix them.

It wasn't as though he had made no headway: By 1993, he had helped retrieve bomb fuel from 19 reactors - about a quarter of all U.S.-supplied facilities - and invented safer fuels that could be used in several dozen more.

But in further cost-cutting moves, the Energy Department had eliminated his research budget, preventing him from developing the new fuels needed for the remaining reactors still using highly enriched uranium.

Worse, the U.S. was refusing to stop using enriched uranium in more than a dozen reactors on American soil. In fact, in 1993 President Bill Clinton backed a plan in Tennessee to build a giant, $3 billion research reactor complex - a facility that would use bomb-grade fuel.

The plan eventually was canceled, but foreigners derided America's attitude as a colossal double standard: It was OK for the U.S. to use bomb-grade fuel but not for other countries. The foreigners began holding on to their uranium more tightly than ever.

With few champions in Congress or the federal bureaucracy, Travelli's program became an orphan, bounced from agency to agency. When Travelli tried to apply pressure from behind the scenes - appealing to congressional staffers for more support, for example - he alienated those in Washington already skeptical of a national security program being run by scientists out of Chicago.

Allan Krass, a retired State Department official, supported Travelli's effort but realized others did not. These officials "really saw it as a bunch of guys who just wanted to get more money so that they could keep their program alive but who didn't have any good ideas and weren't making much progress," Krass said.

Just when it appeared Travelli's quest would die, the State Department in the mid-1990s became increasingly alarmed at reports of thieves stealing small amounts of highly enriched uranium in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

Travelli proposed an idea: What if he expanded his efforts to include the tons of highly enriched uranium the Soviets had distributed over the last three decades?

The State Department had a similar idea. It gave Travelli $1.5 million - money that could be spent only overseas - and in 1993 he flew to Moscow. It was his first trip there, and he did not know what to expect.

To his surprise, he discovered that the Russians had been monitoring his work for years. They had read all of his papers, knew all of his team members' names - even copied his effort by retrieving some of their own nuclear fuel.


Nikolay Arkhangelsky. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

He also was startled to see the same mysterious, stony-faced man who had approached him 12 years earlier in West Germany and pumped him for information. The man's name, it turned out, was Nikolay Arkhangelsky, an influential nuclear official. But Arkhangelsky remained elusive.

Travelli would go on to meet with him about 20 times and even travel with him to three countries to tour nuclear facilities. But he never learned basic information about the Russian. His business card simply read "scientific adviser," and some members of Travelli's team came to suspect that he was working for the Russian secret police - a charge Arkhangelsky later would laugh off.

Over the course of several more visits to Moscow, Travelli proposed to Arkhangelsky and the other Russians that the two countries work together to solve the fuel problem once and for all.

Retrieving it one nation at a time, he concluded, was failing desperately. There were just too many reactors requiring too many kinds of fuel.

But what if the U.S. and Russia started from scratch, returned to the lab and tried to invent a single fuel that could replace bomb material in every reactor in the world?

No longer would they have to fear rogue states, friends becoming enemies, unchecked reactors or nuclear terrorists. All the world's bombmaking fuel could be removed from civilian use, and the Atoms for Peace debacle would be over.

After considering it, the Russians agreed to try. Even the reluctant U.S. Energy Department was willing to help pay for the effort.

    Part II: The Search for a Magic Fuel
    By Sam Roe
    The Chicago Tribune

Former Cold War rivals face scientific riddle in race to spare world from nuclear peril. Last of a two-part series.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nuclear terrorism suddenly seemed plausible - the new worst-case scenario. Americans wondered whether Osama bin Laden could get his hands on the bomb and whether the U.S. was doing enough to stop him. Suitcase bombs, yellowcake and WMD entered the nation's lexicon.

Quietly, though, the U.S. government was trying to defuse a ticking threat of its own making.

At Argonne National Laboratory, scientists worked feverishly to eliminate terrorists' easiest route to a nuclear device: the highly enriched uranium used in dozens of research reactors that the U.S. and Soviet Union had scattered around the world during the Cold War.

A small team of scientists, working out of aging labs near Lemont, hoped to invent a new fuel that could be used in reactors but be useless for bombs.

If they succeeded, the U.S. might finally be able to secure tons of weapons-grade material.

If they failed, it would set back by many years the heart of U.S. efforts to deny terrorists access to such material - keeping the nation, and the world, vulnerable to nuclear nightmare.

After 25 years, tens of millions of dollars and dozens of classified missions, America's quest to retrieve the world's most potent nuclear fuel had come down to this: a secret meeting in the heart of Moscow.

At one end of a conference room sat Russia's top nuclear scientists and bureaucrats. At the other were the Americans, led by Argonne National Laboratory's Armando Travelli, who had traveled to the Russian capital in the winter of 2003 to hear the results of a scientific test with grave implications for U.S. national security.

The unlikely research partnership of former Cold War rivals hoped to create a nuclear fuel that would persuade nations with highly enriched uranium to trade it in for something better and safer.

If the test was a success, Travelli might finally retrieve tons of the bomb-grade material that America and Russia had provided over decades. If the test failed, it would set back U.S. non-proliferation efforts for years.

The Russians told Travelli's team that there were some minor problems but nothing to worry about. They would do additional work and get back to the Americans.

"I'm sorry," the head of the Russian team replied. "There are no pictures available."

The Russian, Travelli recalled, then abruptly stood up and walked out, followed by his colleagues.

Travelli approached the last Russian packing his belongings, a low-level scientist who had been quiet at the meeting.

The man leaned down and pulled three 8-by-10, black-and-white photographs from his briefcase, then put them on the table.

Travelli picked them up. One by one, he studied them, knowing that America's future - and his own - was at stake.

A top nuclear physicist, Travelli had spent the last quarter-century trying to bring home weapons-grade uranium America had supplied to dozens of nations in an ill-conceived program launched by President Dwight Eisenhower called Atoms for Peace.

Toiling in the twilight zone where hard science and clandestine missions intersect, Travelli had weathered congressional indifference to his project, research budgets set at zero and, by some accounts, his own missteps.

A persuasive scientist-diplomat, he had even managed to patch together a promising solution with the scant resources at his disposal. The question was whether it would work.

Or was he banking too much on unproven science and his own ability to charm the Russians, other foreigners - even his own bosses?


Enriched uranium. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

Nuclear research reactors are like sports cars: They run faster with a high-octane fuel - in this case, highly enriched uranium.

A powerfully fueled reactor can conduct an experiment in a week; a poorly fueled one could take a month. For private reactor operators producing and selling radioisotopes for medical uses, such as cancer radiation, that gap can mean the difference between profit and loss.

The challenge facing Travelli and his team of Argonne scientists was to invent a fuel strong enough to satisfy reactor operators, but weak enough to be useless to terrorists trying to build a nuclear weapon.

By the early 1990s, Travelli's team had solved this riddle for many reactors around the globe. He carefully noted each success story by replacing a green triangular magnet with a red one on a large metallic world map in his office.

But dozens of other reactors still would not operate on anything but bomb-grade fuel. And because none of these reactors were precisely the same, the Argonne scientists faced the overwhelming task of inventing a special fuel for each one.

Plus, dozens of reactors worldwide used bomb-grade fuel supplied by Russia, and no one was addressing those.

So in 1993 Travelli traveled to Moscow and eventually helped cut a groundbreaking deal: U.S. and Russian scientists would team together to craft a single, all-purpose fuel that would work in all the reactors, regardless of make, model or country of origin.


Examining results of prototype-fuel experiments at Argonne. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

To do that, they had to make a fuel with a low percentage of uranium-235, the potent isotope behind the atomic chain reaction that causes nuclear explosions.

U-235 is unsteady, so the trick was to find some way to stabilize it while packing it densely enough to give the fuel the necessary power. Travelli's team knew that adding certain elements could calm the uranium; his team tested more than 20 before deciding to stake their work on molybdenum, a hard, gray metal used to strengthen steel.

Officially, this exotic, experimental mixture was called "uranium-molybdenum dispersion fuel." For the cause of disarming the threat of nuclear terrorism, Travelli's team hoped it would be the magic fuel.

Unlike race cars, reactors run on solid fuels; that meant Argonne scientists were using metals, powders and plates. They knew the tiniest mistake in making a nuclear fuel invited failure. "It's not a blacksmith's job, that's for sure," said Jim Snelgrove, a fuel specialist at Argonne.

Work began in earnest. Argonne scientists melted together chunks of uranium and molybdenum, machined the mixture into powder, added aluminum, then pressed and rolled the metal into thin, shiny plates the size of credit cards. These miniature fuel plates were placed in a research reactor in Idaho for a full year of testing. The radioactive plates then returned to Argonne in special casks inside a hazmat truck.


Testing fuel cells at a reactor at Idaho National Laboratory. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

Workers wearing protective bodysuits and using mechanical arms cut the plates with fine instruments and photographed the pieces under an electron microscope. The early results were encouraging: no evidence of cracks, swelling or bubbling.

It quickly began splintering. The Russian scientists, still suspicious from the recent Soviet past, were hesitant to share information, turning in lab reports that offered scant detail. Later, they accused Travelli's team of trying to steal their technology.

Further complicating matters, the U.S. in 1999 placed economic sanctions on Travelli's partner in Russia, a nuclear contractor called NIKIET, for allegedly providing "sensitive missile or nuclear assistance" to Iran.

Travelli struggled to find a new lab, at one point appealing to his influential friend in the Russian nuclear bureaucracy, Nikolay Arkhangelsky. But Arkhangelsky demurred, upset like his colleagues at the U.S. sanctions.

After nearly two years and three more trips to Moscow, Travelli finally found a new laboratory. Work on the magic fuel picked up dramatically.

One night, after reviewing the Russians' progress at a Moscow lab, Travelli was walking down the hallway of his hotel when Gerard Hofman, a fuel development specialist at Argonne, called him into his room.

Travelli's eyes locked on the TV as the World Trade Center towers crashed to the ground.

In the tense weeks that followed Sept. 11, many wondered whether terrorists could obtain an atomic weapon, whether a bomb could fit into a suitcase, whether the U.S. was doing enough to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

U.S. officials didn't call emergency meetings. Congress didn't hold hearings on the issue. President Bush and Capitol Hill didn't even provide more money for the effort.

The lack of action exasperated those who knew that the highly enriched uranium scattered around the globe was the quickest way for Al Qaeda or other terrorists to build a crude nuclear device.

Jack Edlow, whose company, Edlow International, ships nuclear fuel back to the U.S., was in his Washington office on Sept. 11. He looked out his back window and saw smoke rising from the Pentagon.

"I thought they would get themselves a couple of hundred million dollars, and we would get the whole thing cleaned up in a couple of years," Edlow recalled. "I thought everybody would say, 'Let's go get this stuff before it comes back to haunt us.'"


Inspectors with the IAEA in the Vinca research reactor in Serbia. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

Eleven months after the terrorist attacks, the U.S. did manage to remove two nuclear bomb's worth of uranium from Serbia and ship it back to Russia. But to pay for the mission, the State Department asked the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-profit group founded by Ted Turner and former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, to donate $5 million; that was more money than the government contributed to the mission.

Even after Sept. 11, America was relying on funding from a non-profit for critical national security work.

"It was embarrassing," recalled Allan Krass, a State Department official involved in the operation. But officials, he said, had no choice: "We needed the money."

After the terrorist attacks, Travelli felt more pressure than ever to succeed. That feeling intensified when he learned a competing team of French scientists was trying to invent a nearly identical magic fuel.


A "fresh" fuel element. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

Throughout 2002, the French and the U.S.-Russian teams both reported great progress with their fuels, predicting the material would be ready for reactors in three years. They were so confident they began planning training seminars so other nations could learn about the fuel and place orders.

At an international conference in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2003, Travelli's team and the French scientists told colleagues and the trade press that their separate fuel programs were right on track.

But privately, the French were telling a far different story, Travelli recalled.

They pulled Travelli's team aside at the convention center and laid out pictures of their latest tests. The often-unstable uranium particles looked fine. But there were bizarre, meandering cracks - like the hairline fractures of a bone - in the aluminum portion of the fuel in which the uranium particles were embedded. Travelli had never seen anything like it.

Alarmed, Travelli and his team flew back to Chicago and immediately began sifting through dozens of photos of their own tests. Was it possible their fuel had the same problems, but they had somehow missed it?

Sure enough, they began to recognize tiny little bubbles - almost imperceptible - inside the fuel plates. They were aligned in such a way that if the Americans were to jump ahead with advanced testing as the French had, the tiny bubbles would likely multiply and connect, forming the same cracks seen in France.

Travelli's Russian partners hadn't run any tests yet. But his former partners had.

NIKIET, the Russian nuclear contractor still under U.S. sanctions, was quietly developing its own reactor fuel. Travelli had heard NIKIET was experiencing similar failures as seen in France.

Aware of the dire implications, Travelli's team flew to Moscow in December 2003 to see if it could learn of NIKIET's results.

The crucial meeting was held at the Bochvar Institute, the lab working with Travelli. His Russian allies from the lab and the government were on hand. NIKIET, barred from contact with the Americans, was represented at the meeting by subcontractors.

After the Russians assured Travelli that there were only minor problems with the NIKIET fuel, they walked out of the meeting. But the last one to leave pulled out detailed pictures of the tests from his briefcase and gave them to Travelli.

He studied each of the three photographs carefully. He could see the small meandering lines in the aluminum portion of the fuel, just as he had seen in France.

Feeling as though his life's work had collapsed, Travelli returned to his hotel. A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was a State Department official. He wanted an update.


Travelli at Argonne. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

After his dream fuel failed, everything changed for Travelli.

In the summer of 2004, Energy Department officials began taking firmer control of America's effort to retrieve bomb fuel. They wanted it run out of Washington, not Chicago. They wanted the fuel work managed out of a federal lab in Idaho, not Argonne. They wanted new scientists involved, not the same group that had been leading it the last 26 years.

And three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, they finally asked to double the budget.

Travelli heard about these changes piecemeal. Then one day, an Argonne administrator, Phillip Finck, called him into his office. Finck told the longtime scientist that energy officials wanted him out. He could stay on as a scientific adviser, but an Argonne colleague would replace him.

Moreover, energy officials wanted Travelli to make this announcement that weekend at a conference in Vienna - one that Travelli himself had organized.

Travelli was stunned. He had fought to keep the effort alive for nearly three decades, often in the face of little support. Now that Sept. 11 had finally moved his work to the top of the national security agenda, he was supposed to step down?

But Finck, Travelli recalled, told him he didn't really have a choice; funding from the Energy Department was at stake.

Five days later in Vienna, at a jammed conference with dozens of familiar faces, Travelli announced the leadership changes. Later, an energy official read a proclamation in his honor. When she finished, the crowd gave Travelli a standing ovation. People chanted for him to speak. But he declined, afraid of what he might say.

Many experts were surprised that such an eminent scientist would be removed during America's war on terror.

"I had never come across anyone in public service who had accomplished so much for national security with so few resources provided by the government," said Alan Kuperman, a non-proliferation expert and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

But Edlow, the owner of the nuclear shipping firm, thought Travelli had it coming. "He was looking for the perfect fuel," Edlow recalled, "and always looking and always looking and always looking."

Krass, the retired State Department official, offered a pragmatic assessment. In his view, Travelli was treated unfairly. "But," he said, "somebody has got to walk the plank."

Energy officials deny that the magic-fuel bust prompted Travelli's removal. They said they simply wanted the program run out of Washington, where it could get the attention it deserved.

After Travelli was removed, he stayed at Argonne for eight months as an adviser, earning the same $172,000 salary.

At one point, an energy official overseeing the effort to retrieve bomb fuel sent Travelli an e-mail demanding that he address a pressing financial mess. An arm of the State Department had withdrawn $500,000 related to work on the magic fuel in Russia - the first time it had ever asked for money back.

It had not gotten regular reports, and the program had stretched far beyond the original plan. Feeling as though he was being unduly blamed for the failure of the magic fuel - a failure that occurred independently in three countries - Travelli submitted his resignation, effective July 2005.

The man who had been charged with retrieving America's scattered uranium, partly because of his diplomatic skills, submitted a blunt, angry letter.

"Fear of being fired has replaced the pursuit of excellence as a motivator for our work," he wrote in resigning, "and the main concern today is to satisfy every wish of frequently incompetent and unpredictable bureaucrats in Washington."


The shuttered Vinca research reactor in Serbia. (Photo: Chicago Tribune)

In the last year, energy officials say they have made great progress. Six more reactors have given up using weapons-grade fuel - a far faster success rate, the officials said, than Travelli had accomplished.

And in December, the U.S. helped relocate nearly 600 pounds of uranium from a former East German lab to a specially secured Russian facility. The U.S. also has spent tens of millions to bolster security at some overseas reactors, providing fences, cameras, heavy-duty doors and vaults.

But there are other signs that efforts actually have gone backward. For instance, in the most difficult cases of securing bomb fuel - particularly in Russia, where officials are reluctant to cooperate - the U.S. has simply quit trying.

Travelli has not given up. He was hired by Ted Turner's non-profit group to work as a consultant on addressing the fuel issue in Russia. Last spring, Travelli traveled to Moscow, once again teaming up with Arkhangelsky, the once-mysterious Russian who served by turns as his rival and partner over Travelli's quarter-century quest.

But Turner's group has struggled to raise enough money to keep the effort alive.

So the 72-year-old Travelli spends most of his time visiting with his three grown sons and puttering around his suburban Hinsdale home, a three-bedroom split-level with a large back-yard garden.

Over 26 years, Travelli and his team helped 22 nations stop using bomb-grade fuel in 33 reactors, eliminating the use of 3.3 tons and ridding the world of 120 potential nuclear weapons. But more than 100 reactors still use the dangerous fuel, with an estimated 40 tons out of U.S. control.

Travelli also spent eight years trying to develop a magic fuel. In the end, it failed. His successors continue that mission, but they are at least several years away from a solution.

The metallic world map Travelli had used to carefully chart his work still hangs on the wall of a small, rarely used office on Argonne's campus.

To chronicle America's failed quest to retrieve uranium, Tribune staff reporter Sam Roe obtained exclusive access to the government archive of the effort.

This archive, provided by scientist Armando Travelli, contained thousands of records never before publicly reviewed, including scientific trip reports, internal memorandums and e-mails, and government correspondence.

Roe also reviewed congressional testimony, previously classified records, foreign and US research papers, and reports by government agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He conducted extensive interviews with Travelli, who led the uranium retrieval effort for a quarter of a century. Roe also interviewed dozens of US and foreign scientists, nuclear reactor operators, and top energy officials here and in Russia.