Negotiations remain ongoing on the highly enriched uranium (HEU) shipment from the United Kingdom to the U.S. that was announced at the fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit earlier this year, according to documents published Tuesday from the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Euratom Supply Agency (ESA) announced May 31 during the summit that they would swap nuclear material based on a memorandum of understanding they signed in 2014 for HEU exchanges.
The U.K. government said that as part of the agreement, it planned to ship around 700 kilograms of excess HEU to the U.S. from the Dounreay site in Scotland in exchange for a different type of HEU the U.S. would provide to the European Atomic Energy Community for conversion into medical isotopes. Following “the largest ever single move of HEU,” these isotopes would be used to diagnose and treat certain types of cancer in the U.K. and other European states, a British government statement said.
However, in response to the latest request for information on Dounreay HEU – released via the Freedom of Information Act in the U.K. – asking for a date at which the NDA signed off on the HEU transport deal, the agency said “Negotiations are still ongoing.”
Asked whether the NDA plans to publicly release more information on the deal, the agency responded, “We do not currently have any plans to do so.”
A document accompanying the NDA’s response noted that the agency has approximately one ton of unirradiated HEU, most of which is stored at the Dounreay site. The document said that the ESA’s proposal “was made on the basis that the UK would participate in the transfer to the USA on commercial terms relating to the cost of transporting, processing and storing the material. Accordingly, we will need to put in place agreements with NNSA on terms which ensure value for the UK taxpayer.”
Tom Clements, director of watchdog group Savannah River Site (SRS) Watch, said in response to the initial announcement that the HEU would likely be shipped to SRS “under the guise of nuclear non-proliferation.” The Department of Energy site near Aiken, S.C., has regularly received shipments of foreign nuclear material for ultimate processing and disposal.
NNSA spokeswoman Francie Israeli said by email that the U.S. and U.K. “are still negotiating the terms of the removal agreement so we cannot provide further details nor comment on the destination of the material at this time.”
