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Part II: The Search for a Magic Fuel
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Part
I: An Atomic Threat Made in America
By Sam Roe
The Chicago Tribune
Sunday
28 January 2007
How
the US spread bomb-grade fuel worldwide - and failed to get it back.
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Nuclear fission takes place at a US-supplied research
reactor in Pitesti, Romania.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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.
Atomic
Age Breeds Hope
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Armando Travelli and his family in the early 1950s.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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."
"What's
electricity?" he had asked. With the war on, he had known only candles.
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."
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.
Read:
President Eisenhower outlines his hopes in this previously
top-secret memo
Washington's
Bungled Moves
America
didn't give away its most potent fuel - not at first.
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.
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Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi examines a rock
at a nuclear test site in southeastern India in
1974.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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After
India detonated its first nuclear weapon, built with the help of a
reactor from Canada and heavy water from America, everything changed.
Suddenly,
the U.S. wanted its most valuable nuclear material back.
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.
They
turned to Travelli.
For
Scientist, a Quest Begins
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Armando Travelli.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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?
A
Path Strewn With Obstacles
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.
"That
is correct," Travelli replied.
"And
the reason is to reduce the chance that this material might fall
into the wrong hands?"
"That's
right."
"And
the primary emphasis is on reactors that the United States supplied
to its allies?"
"Correct."
"Not
those the Soviet Union supplied to her allies?"
"Correct."
The
man smiled slowly, shook Travelli's hand and walked away.
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.
Instead,
it took steps that ensured failure for several years to come.
Reaching
Out to Former Foes
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.
"It
was eerie, like meeting your long-lost twin brother," Travelli recalled.
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Nikolay Arkhangelsky.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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.
Finally,
Travelli felt success might be at hand.
Go to Original
Part
II: The Search for a Magic Fuel
By Sam Roe
The Chicago Tribune
Monday
29 January 2007
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.
The
Search for a Magic Fuel
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.
"May
I see the pictures of the test?" Travelli asked.
"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.
"I'd
like to see the pictures," Travelli said. "When might there be pictures?"
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?
Turning
to Science for a Solution
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Enriched uranium.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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.
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Examining results of prototype-fuel experiments
at Argonne.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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.
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Testing fuel cells at a reactor at Idaho National
Laboratory.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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.
But
the same couldn't be said of the U.S.-Russian partnership.
Read:
Armando Travelli's letter to the Russians regarding lack
of cooperation.
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.
"I
think you'd better see this," he said.
Travelli's
eyes locked on the TV as the World Trade Center towers crashed to
the ground.
US
Misses Wake-Up Call
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.
But
the American government didn't intensify efforts to retrieve uranium.
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
program's budget stayed flat at $5.6 million.
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.'"
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Inspectors with the IAEA in the Vinca research reactor
in Serbia.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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."
Cracks
Begin to Surface
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.
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A "fresh" fuel element.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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.
The
French fuel was failing.
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.
The
evidence now was overwhelming: The magic fuel was a bust.
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.
Back
in America, a Bitter Fallout
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Travelli at Argonne.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune)
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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?
Travelli
balked.
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.
Read:
Armando Travelli's proclamation of management changes at
RERTR.
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.
Read:
Alan Kuperman's letter protesting Travelli's removal.
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.
Read:
Armando Travelli's resignation letter.
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."
Threats
Left Unchecked
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The
shuttered Vinca research reactor in Serbia.
(Photo: Chicago Tribune) |
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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.
No
one tends to the map anymore.
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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.
He
can be reached at sroe@tribune.com.
