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Belarus only has 90 kilograms of uranium, expert says

Belarus only has some 90 kilograms of uranium, which is not highly enriched uranium, said the former chairman of the upper parliamentary house, Alyaksandr Vaytovich, while commenting on Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s allegation made on Wednesday, as quoted by BelaPAN.

As Mr. Lukashenka said, Belarus still possesses enriched uranium, including “hundreds of kilograms” of weapons-grade and lower enriched uranium. “I’ve been told for many years: ‘Move this uranium out of the country. To America if you like. We’ll pay you. Or to Russia.’ I say: ‘Why are you dictating to us? This is our commodity. We keep it under the control of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. We aren’t going to make dirty bombs or sell it to anyone. We use this uranium for research purposes….We once gave up nuclear weapons and what benefit do we have from that?’”

According to Mr. Lukashenka, he proposed that this issue be resolved at the negotiating table. “We won’t allow anyone to dictate to us,” he said. “Let’s sit down at the negotiating table and decide what to do with this large amount of enriched uranium.”

“We have about 90 kilograms of uranium and it is low-enriched uranium and cannot be used for making bombs,” said Dr. Vaytovich, who headed the Molecular and Nuclear Physics Institute of the National Academy of Sciences between 1992 and 1997.

“Belarus’ only uranium storage facility is located at the Sosny nuclear research center near Minsk,” Dr. Vaytovich said in an interview with the Belarus Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “The storage of this nuclear fuel is monitored by the IAEA. It was brought in for testing a compact mobile reactor dubbed Pamir, which was developed in Belarus. In the early 1990s, the Pamir program was shut down.”

“All statements by Lukashenka about uranium reveal his gross ignorance in this area,” said Stanislaw Shushkevich, Belarus’ formal head of state between 1991 and 1994 who had headed the nuclear physics department of Belarusian State University for 17 years. “Lukashenka confuses the terms ‘radioactive uranium,’ ‘highly enriched uranium,’ and ‘weapons-grade uranium.’ These are different things.”

“I can say with full responsibility that we don’t and will not have any appreciable amount of weapons-grade uranium,” Dr. Shushkevich stressed. “We have ‘dirty’ uranium, which is highly radioactive. After the reactor [at the Sosny center] was deactivated, this radioactive substance was extracted and put in special conditions in order not to trigger a nuclear reaction. This is far from being what an atomic bomb is made of. A whole industry should be in place to process this uranium. This requires expensive technologies, which we don’t have.”

Mr. Lukashenka began to talk about uranium because he felt hurt by being not invited to the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Dr. Shushkevich noted in an interview with the Charter’97 news site. “Lukashenka remembered that Belarus had been one of the ‘nuclear vaults’ of the Soviet Union and got depressed,” he said. “He expected he would be welcome everywhere. But that was not the case. He proved unwanted."