VIENNA, Sept 19: World powers said on Tuesday that making nuclear reactor fuel available through UN-controlled supply centres could keep nations from enriching uranium themselves and learning how to make atomic weapons, a main concern in the Iran crisis.
Russia, Germany and the United States each backed the idea of setting up such centres under the control of the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), at a meeting in Vienna on Tuesday of the IAEA’s 140 member states.
Enriching uranium for the U-235 isotope is the key process in producing fuel for civilian nuclear reactors.
But it is also the key process in making atom bombs, and nations that master this technology are considered to have a ‘break-out capacity’ for manufacturing nuclear weapons.
Germany plus France, the Netherlands, Russia, Britain and the United States had in June proposed ‘a concept for assurances for a reliable supply of enrichment services or enriched uranium’, German economics and technology ministry state secretary Joachim Wuermeling said.
The idea was to get countries ‘to refrain from developing indigenous sensitive fuel cycle capabilities’, he told the week-long IAEA general conference.
Former US senator Sam Nunn told a special session at the conference that new answers to fighting the spread of nuclear weapons must be found urgently.
“Are we prepared to live in a world where dozens of countries have the capability and key ingredients to make nuclear weapons?” Nunn, a champion of non-proliferation during his 24 years in the US Senate, said.
“I want to make sure that every country that is a bona fide user of nuclear energy and that is fulfilling its non-proliferation obligations is getting fuel,” at a time when concerns about nuclear proliferation are growing, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said.
ElBaradei stressed that nations would still be free to decide whether they wanted to do fuel work.
Germany is proposing a site run by the IAEA on what would be territory with international status while Russia wants to set up an enrichment centre in Siberia that would be on Russian territory but run by the IAEA.
Russian atomic energy chief Sergei Kirienko told reporters that the differences between the proposals were not important.
“What is important here is that dual-use technology should not be spread around the world,” said Kirienko.—AFP
