The International Atomic Energy Agency's primary analytical facility remains underfunded even as the laboratory is increasingly looked to for spotting potential secret nuclear-weapon activities at sites around the world, Reuters reported today (see GSN, March 11).
The agency's 42-person analytical team at Seibersdorf, Austria, regularly analyzes bar-coded samples collected at nuclear sites for traces of weapon-grade uranium and plutonium.
"I consider these swipes to be priceless," IAEA unit head David Donohue said, displaying a small piece of cotton stored inside a sealed, sterilized bag with disposable gloves and a slip of paper. Each of the sampling packs costs between $70 and $90 to produce.
"They are a snapshot of a nuclear facility at one point in time. They are irreplaceable," he said.
The laboratory can be key to detecting traces of nuclear work that a country might hope to keep hidden. That proved to be the case of an Iranian facility that had used minute amounts of highly enriched uranium in centrifuge testing, Reuters reported.
"Dust is everywhere. It's in the cracks in the floor, it is impossible to clear. However hard you try to clean up you cannot remove 100 percent of the traces," according to Donohue.
The site receives between 700 and 1,000 samples each year, making it "the busiest laboratory in the world when it comes to processing of nuclear samples," said safeguards laboratory head Christian Schmitzer. One sample might need more than one analysis, he noted.
"The agency can continue to struggle on with growing restrictions and increasing risk, watching the quality of its services erode," IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei told his agency's 35-nation governing board last June. The board approved a 5.4-percent budget increase for the organization, a rare funding boost beyond inflation, but the amount still fell far short of the 11-percent increase requested by ElBaradei (see GSN, Aug. 4; Sylvia Westall, Reuters, Oct. 22).