The Penn Stater Magazine

How to Keep Nukes Away from Terrorists

April 13, 2010 at 9:59 am Tina Hay 1 comment

One of my favorite Penn Stater articles of the past few years is “The Hungary Job,” which Jason Fagone ’01 did for our Jan-Feb 2009 issue. It was a very ambitious story for us: We sent Jason to Hungary to embed with a group of U.S. officials on a cloak-and-dagger mission to remove highly enriched uranium from a reactor and ship it to Russia for safekeeping.

The point man for the operation was a Penn Stater: Andrew Bieniawski ’89 Eng, assistant deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration. For the past 14 years, the NNSA has been conducting secret missions like that all over the world, in an attempt to secure loose nukes and keep them out of the hands of terrorists.

Why am I telling you all of this now? Because Bieniawski and his program are back in the news, in a big way.

They’re in the news for two reasons, actually. One is the nuclear summit in Washington, D.C., this week. Dealing with the worldwide nuclear threat, it seems, requires a two-pronged approach. One part is preventing proliferation—that is, trying to keep countries that don’t have nuclear-weapons capability from getting that capability. The other part is retrieving and securing the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, that’s already out there, so that terrorists can’t get at it.

President Obama has said that the latter effort is the United States’ No. 1 national-security priority. And our man Bieniawski is at the center of that. Quoting an article in this week’s Time magazine:

It is Bieniawski’s job to convince countries to give up their HEU and send it to either the U.S. or Russia. So far, the NNSA has removed a total of 5,935 lbs. (2,692 kg) of fissile material from 37 countries and has its sights on 4,190 lbs. (1,900 kg) more. To meet that goal, Obama has asked for the program’s budget to be increased by 67% percent to $560 million next year.

The other reason that Bieniawski’s work is in the news is that the Time article reveals that his most recent nuclear-removal mission took place in Chile—during the Feb. 27 earthquake. According to the article, Bieniawski’s team had just finished packing up the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, into a shipping container the night before.

So just imagine how much an earthquake could screw up a delicate operation like that: How to transport the container across earthquake-damaged roads, to a port that had been devastated by the quake, while still dealing with aftershocks? They got it done, and the tale of how they did it is well worth the read.

You might also check out Time‘s slide show of images from the Chile operation. The photos remind me a lot of the shots Jason Fagone brought back from the Hungary job. (Bieniawski is the guy in the yellow jacket in the photo above, which was taken by his agency during the Chile operation). And the Washington Post had a story about the Chile adventure on Sunday.

By the way, the Hungary operation in which Jason was embedded ran into some roadblocks and tense moments of its own; you can read our story by downloading a PDF of it here. But nothing like an earthquake.

Tina Hay, editor

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Entry filed under: College of Engineering, Penn State alumni. Tags: Andrew Bieniawski, Jason Fagone, National Nuclear Security Administration.