Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
1/31/2014
The United States has finally secured an agreement with Japan for Tokyo to transfer 730 pounds of plutonium to the U.S., according to Japanese news reports. An announcement of the agreement is expected to come during the Nuclear Security Summit scheduled for March in the Netherlands, and Obama Administration officials declined to comment this week on discussions with Japan. “We are involved in a lot of material removal programs, and I can’t go into detail,” Anne Harrington, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nonproliferation program, said on the sidelines of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. The Kyodo News first reported the agreement Jan. 26.
The U.S. has used the Nuclear Security Summit in the past to cement agreements for the return of plutonium and highly enriched uranium from various countries, and the deal with Japan would represent a victory for U.S. efforts to secure global stocks of weapons-usable material. The United States has for years pushed Japan to give up the plutonium, which makes up a small portion of the country’s full plutonium stockpile but is believed to be more usable in a nuclear weapon than the balance of the country’s plutonium stockpile. According to reports, a portion of the material was produced in the United Kingdom, and the U.S. and the U.K. are working on an agreement that would allow the U.S. to take possession of all the material. Japan has balked at giving up the material because it is believed to be the country’s only source of research on how neutrons act in fast reactors. The material was given to the Japanese Atomic Energy’s Fast Critical Assembly during the Cold War.
