The United States and Russia have significant opportunities to collaborate on cleanup of nuclear contamination and the prevention of nuclear terrorism, even as they remain antagonists in other spheres, according to a report issued this week by nongovernmental groups from both nations.
The report, “Pathways to Cooperation,” resulted from a February 2016 meeting of experts organized by the Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies (CENESS).
In total the report offers 51 ideas for cooperation in five sectors: nuclear science, nuclear energy, nuclear safety, nuclear security, and nuclear environmental remediation.
Andrew Bieniawski, NTI’s vice president for material security and minimization, briefed Russian and U.S. officials on the report during a trip to Moscow this week. The response was positive, NTI spokeswoman Cathy Gwin said by email on Friday. The proposals in theory could receive a warm reception from President Donald Trump, who as recently as his press conference Thursday cited the value of improved relations with Russia and the danger of nuclear weapons.
“Moving forward with projects such as those proposed in this report would also allow the United States and Russia to begin to rebuild the trust critical to putting bilateral relations back on track,” former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), NTI CEO, and former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said in the introduction to the report. “If they do not change direction and the acrimony continues to build, these two nations will continue down an increasingly dangerous path and will have missed a crucial opportunity to cooperate on a wide range of urgent nuclear issues.”
Nuclear Cleanup
Both the United States and Russia are wrestling with the contaminated legacy of their Cold War nuclear weapons programs, as well as managing the byproducts of extensive nuclear power operations.
The U.S. government’s environmental liability just this week was estimated at $447 billion in a Government Accountability Office report of high-risk federal programs. Much of that liability results from nuclear weapons operations at the Departments of Defense and Energy.
Meanwhile, five U.S. nuclear power plants have closed in just over five years, and more closures are on the horizon, according to the Energy Information Administration. Each site will eventually have to be dismantled.
“Both countries would benefit significantly from improved cooperation to lower the costs and risks posed by cleaning up their respective nuclear complexes with similar legacy challenges,” the NTI/CENESS report says. “In addition, the United States and Russia should share best practices, experiences, and lessons learned pertaining to nuclear environmental remediation with other countries facing similar challenges.”
Among the report’s recommendations for the U.S. and Russia:
- Establishing shared strategies for decommissioning and remediating nuclear sites, which could be used at over 350 facilities across the globe.
- Research and develop environmental remediation systems in areas such as decontamination of uranium mining and processing centers and radioactive source disposal facilities, faster deactivation, robotics, and waste conditioning.
- Improving systems for cleanup of contaminated soil and groundwater, with potential focus areas such as site characterization, advanced modeling, and long-term monitoring.
Nuclear Security
The two nations have a decades-long history of cooperating to secure and eliminate materials that could be used to produce s nuclear weapons or a radiological “dirty bomb,” through initiatives such as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program. But that collaboration fell off in recent years as tensions rose over hot spots such as Ukraine and Syria.
However, that doesn’t have to be the end of the story, NTI and CENESS said. Their recommendations include:
- Joint U.S.-Russian technical projects to secure or extract possible dirty-bomb materials stored in hospitals, universities, and other sites Central Asia.
- Advancing programs to reduce the use of nuclear weapon-usable highly enriched uranium, including via additional reactor fuel removals and strategic plans in each nation for HEU minimization.
- Cooperation, including with the International Atomic Energy Agency, to ensure that nations that are establishing new nuclear programs have effective security programs.
The potential terrorist use of nuclear materials or other weapons of mass destruction was also on the mind of a panel of experts who testified this week on global terrorism threats before the House Armed Services Committee.
Michael Sheehan, a counterterrorism specialist who served at the Departments of State and Defense, said the Nunn-Lugar model should be looked at as a model for safeguarding national weapons materials. “I think that was a very successful program, obviously a big and expensive one; maybe on a smaller level we can use those types of programs to make sure that weaponized systems by any country that has these types of systems are controlled.”
Sheehan said his top worry regarding this threat is Pakistan, where potential terrorist access to nuclear weapons has long been a concern for other governments (a fear vehemently denied by leaders in Islamabad).
Meanwhile, the best way to prevent a terrorist organization from developing an improvised weapon using loose WMD material is to destroy the group to the extent that it is “unable to develop the type of sophistication to develop these type of weapons,” Sheehan said.
“If you allow them to sit in sanctuary and give them the time in order to develop these things I think they will,” he said. “But if you keep them on the run, if you keep the pressure on them, it becomes very, very difficult to do that.”
