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An atomic threat made in America
How the U.S. spread bomb-grade fuel worldwide and failed to get it back
By Sam Roe
Tribune staff reporter
Published January 28, 2007
Tribune special report: How the U.S. spread bomb-grade fuel worldwide and failed to get it back.
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...
... COMING MONDAY: The search for a magic fuel.
How we reported this series
To chronicle America's failed quest to retrieve uranium, Tribune staff reporter Sam Roe obtained exclusive access to the government archive of the effort through scientist Armando Travelli.
Roe examined thousands of records never before publicly reviewed, including scientific trip reports, internal memorandums and e-mails, and government correspondence.
He also reviewed congressional testimony, previously classified records, foreign and U.S. research papers, and reports by government agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Roe conducted extensive interviews with Travelli, who led the uranium retrieval effort for a quarter of a century. He also interviewed dozens of U.S. and foreign scientists, nuclear reactor operators, current and former government officials, and top energy officials here and in Russia.
Front page multi-storied coverage in today's Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...1-story,1,7163234.htmlstory?coll=chi-news-hed
I'm sure no one was looking 50 years down the road, but still, giving nuclear materials to anybody who claimed to not be communist was a pretty shortsided and dumb policy.
And we haven't done a good job at collecting it back, that's what's scarier.
Would you give it back when there're plenty of people willing to pay for it? I haven't been all that impressed with the standard of integrity from most nations, so I can't imagine they would choose the former over the latter.
Now that is a problem. Then again, the US has some ways to punish, but chooses to try and entice compliance. What's the definition of insanity again?
I was thinking of 'doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results...' I'm not going to the wife's definition...
