Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site: closure and current status

Página 1

Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Side: Now ♦ The last nuclear test conducted at the Semipalatinsk Test Site took place at Balapan in November 1989. [4] Peter Stegner and Tony Wrixon, “Semipalatinsk Revisited,” IAEA Bulletin, April 1998, www.iaea.org. ♦ Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, newly independent Kazakhstan inherited the site. ♦ Russian scientists and security personnel quickly departed without leaving information for the Kazakh authorities about the location of many of the tunnels or boreholes. ♦The Semipalatinsk test range was officially closed by Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev on August 29, 1991. [5] “The Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan,” IAEA, 20 June 2013, iaea.org. ♦Semipalatinsk Test Site facilities are now under the jurisdiction of the National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan, which is involved in civilian activities and conversion of the site to non-defense uses. [6] “STS History,” National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 12 February 2014, www.nnc.kz. ♦There is no perimeter fence around the site, and in the 1990s only the Baykal-1 and IGR research reactor complexes were afforded dedicated security forces. Additionally, beryllium, coal, and gold are mined throughout the site and table salt is produced from a lake located near the main test field. [7] From 1997-2000, 181 test tunnels and 13 test shafts at Semipalatinsk were sealed as part of a joint US-Kazakhstan effort under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. [8] The site was subsequently declared safe by US authorities, and no further cooperative work planned. [9] However, a lack of economic opportunity for local workers and booming global commodities prices lead to the site being overrun by metal scavengers even before the initial CTR work was completed. Evidence of illegal scavenging operations in sensitive portions of the site, including around sealed tunnels known to contain easily recoverable plutonium, was brought to the attention of US scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory by their Kazakh counterparts. [10] Leveraging existing friendships with counterparts in Russia and Kazakhstan, Los Alamos scientists proposed “Project Amber,” a joint Kazakh-US-Russian project intended to provide further support to Kazakhstan to eliminate sources of weapons-usable material at the test site. Different phases of the operation involved sealing boreholes used for subcritical plutonium testing, filling in large explosive chambers known as kolbas which were contaminated from past experiments with easily recoverable plutonium, and removing highly sensitive bomb components from some area of the site. [11] ♦At the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit in March of 2012, President Obama, President Medvedev of Russia, and President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan officially announced the formally secret program of Trilateral Threat Reduction Cooperation and recognized the subsequent work carried out at Semipalatinsk for the first time publically. [12] The official US estimation is that “a dozen” bombs worth of plutonium was secured at the site between 2005 and 2012, at a total cost of $150 million. The program’s efforts rendered the nuclear material on the site inaccessible except through a large-scale mining and recovery effort. 13] “Fact Sheet: Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS),” US Department of Defense, March 2012, www.defense.gov. ♦On 6 February 2003, ITAR-TASS reported that a laboratory will be opened in the city of Kurchatov (Eastern Kazakhstan Oblast) to monitor the radiological situation at the former Semipalatinsk Test Site. The establishment of the laboratory has been undertaken by the Scientific Research Institute of Radiological Medicine and Ecology (RME), in cooperation with the Scientific Research Institute of Radiation Safety and Ecology (RSE). [1] ♦According to RSE Director Larisa Ptitskaya, the provision of Semipalatinsk with special status and transfer of site management to the Kazakhstani National Nuclear Center (NNC), which would coordinate research activities and security measures at the site, was under consideration as of February 2003. Ptitskaya noted that these measures are seen as a way of preventing theft of radioactive metals and weapons grade plutonium, which have been discovered at some parts of the site. [2] According to NNC Director Shamil Tukhvatullin, the laboratory activities will be undertaken by medical doctors and physicists, who will research the entire region of Semipalatinsk, not only the former test site. [2] Sources: [1] Okal Karpishchev, "V rayone byvshego Semipalatinskogo yadernogo poligona otkroyetsya laboratoriya po provedeniyu analiza radiatsionnoy obstanovki," ITAR-TASS, 6 February 2003; in Integrum Techno, www.integrum.ru. [2] "Laboratoriya analiza radiatsionnoy obstanovki," Kazakhstan Today; in Delovaya nedelya, No. 5 (533), 7 February 2003, p. 8.