Senate Intelligence chief Burr once helped ease export controls over bomb-grade uranium | McClatchy Washington Bureau

North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, whose prime mission as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is to ensure the government wages an effective fight against terrorism, played a central role 11 years ago in relaxing U.S. controls over the export of bomb-grade uranium.

In 2005, the Republican lawmaker won passage of controversial legislation to ease restrictions on U.S. shipments abroad of highly enriched uranium – material that terrorists could employ to build a Hiroshima-type nuclear bomb.

Burr said at the time that he wanted to ensure a steady supply of medical isotopes, which are chemical elements containing low levels of radiation. These isotopes can be used in nuclear imaging devices to detect heart disease and some forms of cancer. While Burr’s role was described in news stories at the time and was raised again during his 2010 re-election campaign, events since the legislation passed could cast him in a different light as he monitors U.S. efforts to keep weapons of mass destruction from the Islamic State and al Qaida.

There’s no evidence that any of the deadly material has fallen into the wrong hands.

But Burr’s legislation, which was co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond of Missouri, delayed for at least seven years the conversion of nuclear research reactors that use highly enriched uranium to technologies that avoid the use of material that could be weaponized.

In 2012, Congress reversed course and passed new restrictions. Lawmakers set a deadline of 2020 for isotope makers to convert their operations to low-enriched uranium. Burr voted for that bill.

The senator, who is seeking a third term, premised his 2005 legislation on fears that if Congress failed to ease particular export restrictions, it could impair Canada and four European countries from producing a crucial isotope, molybdenum-99, that’s used in making diagnoses. He warned that could lead to a shortage: Without the isotope, thousands of patients could be delayed in learning whether they had cancer or heart disease.

Molybdenum-99 is an element that breaks off during nuclear fission. As such, it is not what provokes terrorism concerns. Rather, what’s troubling to some is the bomb-grade uranium used during the controlled nuclear reactions.

Parties that support relaxed export controls have showered Burr with upward of $100,000 in campaign contributions since he first pressed his amendment in 2003 as a member of the House of Representatives, a year before winning a seat in the upper chamber.

Although the full Senate narrowly rejected Burr’s legislation in 2005 because of national security concerns, a House-Senate conference committee on which he served inserted a House-passed version of his bill into a broad energy package in a closed-door vote.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and a fellow Democrat, Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, voiced deep worries at the time that relaxing export controls would undercut U.S. efforts to contain proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Burr declined to be interviewed for this story, but his Senate spokeswoman, Becca Glover Watkins, said campaign donations never influenced his policy decisions.

An aide to Burr, who was made available only on the condition of anonymity, per the senator’s office policy, said, “The guiding concern driving his work on it was really around the necessity of having these medical isotopes available for patients.”

The senator wanted to ensure “you don’t suddenly exacerbate or create issues for patients” by causing shortages of diagnostic material, the aide said. “You could suddenly not have something that so many patients and their doctors and health care providers rely upon to provide the highest quality of care for them.”

While it may have appeared to Burr and others in 2005 that isotope shortages were looming, a recent study of Medicare data by Harvard University’s Health Policy Institute found that expenditures on nuclear diagnostic procedures plummeted from a peak of $1.77 billion in 2006 to $641 million in 2014.

That’s because radiologists are making greater use of other technologies that don’t require highly enriched uranium.

The concerns about shortages were “nonsense,” said Alan Kuperman, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas who’s the author of a 2013 book on the subject, “Nuclear Terrorism and Global Security: The Challenge of Phasing Out Highly Enriched Uranium.”

From 1992, when the original restrictions were passed, until they were relaxed in 2005, “the supply of medical isotopes was not in jeopardy,” Kuperman said in a phone interview and email exchanges with McClatchy.

“All Burr did was perpetuate commerce in bomb-grade uranium, thereby increasing risks of radical states and terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons,” he said.

A 2009 National Academy of Sciences study, which was requested by Congress, concluded that no major technical hurdles remained for converting medical isotope production from highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium.

Burr’s legislation lifting export curbs was sought by an Ottawa-based company now known as Nordion Inc., which has sold molybdenum-99 for four decades. Nordion relied on highly enriched uranium that a Canadian government-owned company, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., acquired from the United States. That was then used to conduct controlled nuclear reactions, of which molybdenum is a byproduct.

Armando Travelli, former head of the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors program at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, said he and other U.S. officials had met with Nordion executives on several occasions in the years before Burr’s legislation was enacted to encourage a shift to low-enriched uranium. They got promises but little progress, he said.

Travelli, who left the lab in 2004, said he was “very much disappointed” by the passage of Burr’s legislation. He said the new law caused “a chain reaction.”

It not only slowed Nordion’s ongoing conversion from highly enriched to low-enriched uranium, but it also “convinced everybody else to resist conversion,” he said.

Finally, under mounting pressure from the United States, the Canadian government decided several years ago to halt processing of highly enriched uranium for Nordion. Canada ordered the aged, government-run research reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, to be shuttered effective on Oct. 31, 2016.

Canada said the reactor would resume operations only if a molybdenum shortage developed.

As a House member in 1992, Schumer wrote a law restricting the export of highly enriched uranium amid deepening concerns that too much of the material had circulated worldwide.

His legislation permitted exports of highly enriched uranium for the production of medical isotopes, but only if manufacturers demonstrated progress toward developing a low-enriched uranium process.

Joining Nordion in the congressional lobbying effort was Mallinckrodt plc, a firm domiciled in Ireland that has a large presence in St. Louis. Mallinckrodt also has been a major player in the market for molybdenum, which it processes at a plant in the Netherlands.

Nordion and Mallinckrodt for years distributed the entire U.S. supply of molybdenum and more than 60 percent of the global supply. The molybdenum is later processed further to strip out technetium-99m, the isotope used in diagnostic devices.

With U.S. assistance, Argentina in 2002 developed a method of converting its isotope production process to function with low-enriched uranium. South Africa and Australia have since followed suit.

Nordion and Mallinckrodt took a different path. Nordion set up a U.S. committee, the Council on Radionuclides and Radiopharmaceuticals, to push for legislative relief.

The council, initially chaired by a Nordion senior executive and including representatives from Mallinckrodt’s parent company, hired a Washington lobbying firm, the Alpine Group, in 1999 and since has paid the firm over $6 million to represent it on Capitol Hill.

Kuperman, then with the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute, said he’d attended one early meeting with aides to Burr and other members of Congress and saw that a bill rolling back the 1992 restrictions was being crafted.

“I do vividly remember saying with incredulity to the Alpine lobbyists and the congressional staffers: ‘Do you really think the U.S. Congress is going to water down U.S. national security law just to benefit one foreign company?’ ” he recalled.

Phil Larabie, the general manager of Nordion’s medical isotope business, said in a phone interview that Nordion never touches highly enriched uranium, which is processed entirely by the Canadian government firm.

Kuperman said, however, that the Canadian reactor was vulnerable because it had been guarded like a civilian nuclear power plant. Those plants don't use bomb-grade material.

Larabie said Nordion now was spending “tens of millions of dollars” on building a new plant that could produce molybdenum-99 using alternative technologies and should be operational by mid-2018.

Mallinckrodt, which says it began efforts years ago to convert its operation to low-enriched uranium, never got there. It announced in August that it has reached an agreement to sell its nuclear imaging business to a French firm, IBA Molecular.

Kuperman later came into possession of a 2003 letter, drafted by an Alpine lobbyist, for doctors and radiologists to send members of Congress urging support for Burr’s legislation.

From 2003 to 2006, physicians, faculty and other officials at Wake Forest University’s medical school and health services unit, in Burr’s hometown of Winston-Salem, gave him more than $33,000 in campaign contributions. By comparison, Burr received only a few thousand dollars in donations from the school’s medical staff from 2007 to 2010, when he ran for re-election.

Since 2003, lobbyists for the Alpine Group, who also have represented unrelated clients, have donated more than $26,000 to Burr’s Senate campaigns.

He received $9,000 from the Radiology Advocacy Alliance, a political action committee supporting the legislation in 2003 and 2004. He has collected at least $3,500 from Mallinckrodt’s political action committee since the issue first arose.

The American College of Radiology joined in backing the 2005 legislation, but it also lobbies Congress on other issues. Its PAC has donated $27,000 to Burr’s campaigns since 2003. This year, the radiologists’ PAC has spent nearly $240,000 on radio ads supporting Burr.