government since the 1970s has spearheaded an international collaboration to eliminate HEU from research reactors by substituting low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel, the type used in nuclear power plants that is unsuitable for nuclear weapons. intervention fortunately evicted his troops and interrupted the plot before it could succeed. In 1990, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein secretly ordered a crash program to extract HEU from his foreign-supplied research reactor fuel to make an atomic bomb-after his invasion of neighboring Kuwait-but a U.N.
Energy Department is actually increasing the likelihood of that deadly scenario by supplying a new research reactor with enough weapons-grade uranium for a sizable nuclear arsenal. Now, however, in a stunning reversal, the U.S. nearly half a century ago initiated a program to gradually eliminate such dangerous fuel from these facilities. According to the late Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez, even high school students “would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half.” That is why the U.S. Perhaps the easiest path to making a nuclear weapon, for a country or terrorist seeking one, is to extract a sufficient amount of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the nominally peaceful fuel in a research reactor, the small type operating in dozens of countries, including many that lack larger nuclear power plants.
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