WASHINGTON—As the Bush Administration launches an effort to get other industrial nations to tighten controls on nuclear materials, the U.S. Department of Energy has its own control problem: 35,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium fuel the U.S. has spread around the world since the 1950s.
A report by the department's inspector general said the agency has had difficulty getting the material back from many of the 51 countries that use it to power research reactors.
The report said "large quantities" of the uranium—which can be made directly into nuclear bombs—are "out of U.S. control."
Much of the fuel is in Western Europe, but there are also quantities in countries such as Iran, Israel, Pakistan and South Africa.
While most of the fuel is regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the effort to retrieve it has been complicated by a lack of funds and the reluctance of some countries to disrupt their research projects. Furthermore, the program has been voluntary, and countries have had to bear part of the shipping costs.
The effort has a complicated history. Starting with the "Atoms for Peace Program" in the 1950s, the U.S. began leasing the uranium fuel, requiring nations to return it. After 1964, the U.S. began to sell the fuel.
Efforts to bring it back were blocked between 1988 and 1996 because environmental and antinuclear groups opposed establishing a nuclear-waste dump in the U.S.
Starting in 1996, the U.S. offered to take back fuel at cut-rate shipping fees. However, according to the report, the response from overseas has been slow. The IAEA regards quantities above 110 pounds of highly enriched uranium to be dangerous because that amount can be made into a bomb. Nuclear fuel that has been used in reactors can also be used to make "dirty bombs" that spread radioactive materials using conventional explosives.
Joe Davis, a Department of Energy spokesman, said the agency has formed a working group to assess the program, to consider adding more funding and to set up a system to get more fuel back, starting with unstable countries. The U.S. acceptance program ends in 2006.
"I think we should go after all of it," said Jon Wolfsthal, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who formerly managed the acceptance program as a DOE official.
Spending more money and effort to regain control over all such fuel, whether it's made in the U.S. or not, he said, "would be strongly supportive of our current non-proliferation goals."
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