REPORT DETAILS EFFORTS TO SECURE NUCLEAR MATERIALS AT ‘PLUTONIUM MOUNTAIN’

A new report from Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs details a once-secret 17-year, $150 million effort to secure massive amounts of plutonium at the Soviet Union’s former test site in Kazakhstan that wrapped up late last year. The report by Eben Harrell and David Hoffman, “Plutonium Mountain: Inside the 17-year Mission to Secure a Dangerous Legacy of Soviet Nuclear Testing,” provides an in-depth look at the difficult task faced by U.S., Russian and Kazakh officials as they worked to ensure that plutonium left behind at the Semipalatinsk test site could not fall into the hands of terrorists. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, enough plutonium to make several dozen bombs was left at the site, where 456 tests above and below-ground tests were conducted, both in tunnels and bore holes as well as in abandoned equipment. Triggered by former Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Siegfried Hecker and other Los Alamos scientists during the 1990s, the project moved to ensure that material was secured, or in many cases was rendered unusable when the tunnels and bore holes were sealed in concrete, according to the report. At the same time, project officials battled scavengers that picked over the site for valuable metal and equipment, concerns from Russia about access to the site, and even where to dispose of some of the leftover nuclear material.