Russian official says nuclear material has disappeared from plants

? The head of Russia’s nuclear regulatory agency says small amounts of weapons- and reactor-grade nuclear materials have disappeared from the country’s atomic facilities.

“Instances of the loss of nuclear materials have been recorded, but what the quantity is is another question,” Yuri Vishnyevsky, the head of the agency, Gosatomnadzor, said this week.

“Of those situations that we can talk about in actuality, they involve either grams of weapons-grade or kilograms of the usual uranium used in atomic power plants.

“Most often, these instances are connected with factories preparing fuel: Elektrostal in the Moscow region and Novosibirsk” in Siberia, Vishnyevsky said.

He did not give further details on when the losses were discovered or how the material might have gone missing.

The International Atomic Energy Agency lists two known thefts of uranium from Elektrostal, in 1994 and 1995. In both of those cases, the uranium was recovered by Russian police.

The agency also lists the 1994 seizure in Germany of 400 grams of plutonium brought in from Moscow.

A few grams of Uranium-235, the most common weapons-grade nuclear material, would not be sufficient to make a bomb. But reactor-grade uranium can be enriched to weapons-grade through a complicated process believed to be possessed by some countries trying to develop nuclear weapons, such as Iraq.

Russia’s nuclear security has been a high concern in the decade since the Soviet Union’s collapse brought financial troubles that reduced funding for state facilities and induced poverty that could motivate nuclear workers to sell atomic materials.

“After Sept. 11 of last year, the situation with regard to security at all Russian nuclear facilities changed for the better, but it still has not reached perfection,” Vishnyevsky said.

He estimated that bringing security to its ideal level at Russian nuclear operations would require about 6 billion rubles, or $200 million.