Nuclear mattersJapan and U.S. agree on nuclear counterterrorism road map

Japan and the United States are preparing a “road map” for cooperative efforts to prevent atomic site workers from stealing potential ingredients for an act of nuclear terrorism, a top White House counterterrorism official told Kyodo News on Friday.

Global Security Newswire reports that the plan would also address the development of “security-by-design concepts” for facilities such as nuclear energy stations and atomic fuel processing sites, said Laura Holgate, National Security Council senior director for WMD terrorism and threat reduction. The blueprint is slated for completion ahead of the second Global Nuclear Security Summit, slated to take place in Seoul in 2012.

“We did agree on a road map. We’re close to agreement. I guess I’m still waiting to hear the last formal feedback from our counterparts. But, we had an agreement at the table, certainly, of a shared approach to how we will implement the topics that were addressed in the ‘terms of reference’ that we agreed in October of last year,” said Holgate, the top U.S. delegate to the Japan-U.S. Nuclear Security Working Group when it convened for the first time last week.

“As you can imagine, this is a sensitive topic, so the details of what we’re going to do together, I think, are going to be not something I can talk about in public,” she said.

“When we talk about nuclear terrorism, fortunately most of that conversation is in the hypothetical,” Holgate said. “When we talk about nuclear theft, that’s not hypothetical, and we know what cases we have, and we can design around those risks.”

“The known cases of smuggling of weapons-usable material primarily are related to small amounts that were removed from large industrial facilities, by workers, or people who were able to get access to that material,” the official said.

Additional attention to nuclear security is necessary in the blueprinting of atomic plants, according to Holgate.

“‘Safeguards by design,’ that is relatively well understood, that if you think ahead of time about where, in a process, you need to monitor things and so on, from a safeguards point of view, it’s easier to build in moments where that can be done, that are less disruptive to the process,” she said.

Tokyo and Washington would cooperate in transferring mixed-oxide fuel, Holgate added. Both governments are planning processing sites for the fuel, which is derived from nuclear-weapon material.

The Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency would prepare “a handbook for security-by-design concepts,” offering useful information to nations purchasing nuclear energy materials from abroad, she said.

The plan would also call for technological sharing by Japanese and U.S. nuclear auditors, cooperation on nuclear forensics issues and collaborative work on nuclear fuel harder to tap for use in weapons (Kyodo News/Breitbart.com, 4 February 2011).

Meanwhile, Japan and Australia last week called for a panel of specialists to advance talks on a fissile material cutoff treaty, Jiji Press reported (Jiji Press, 4 February 2011).