Brazil realizes its nuclear ambitions

By Carmen Gentile in Rio de Janeiro for ISN Security Watch (16/05/06)

Brazil has taken yet another major step toward greater energy independence, an accomplishment that will not go unnoticed in some Middle East circles.

Following an April proclamation that South America's largest country was now capable of handling all of its own oil needs, Brazilian nuclear energy officials earlier this month inaugurated the country's first nuclear enrichment facility for fueling the nation's power plants.

Brazilian officials like Science and Technology Minister Sergio Rezende said the refining facility in Resende, some 144 kilometers outside of Rio de Janeiro, would save the country millions of dollars in the coming year since it no longer had to enrich its nuclear fuel at Urenco, the European enrichment consortium.

According to nuclear officials here, the Resende enriched uranium will cover 60 per cent of the energy needs of the country’s two largest power plants, Angra I and Angra II.

Combined, those facilities produce 4.3 per cent of Brazil's energy needs and 40 per cent of the energy used in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil claims to have one of the world's largest uranium reserves.

The announcement comes at a time when Tehran and Washington are at odds over Iran's own nuclear ambitions. The Bush administration has warned Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions or face the consequences.

Iran maintains it would like to produce the same fuel as Brazil to meet its own energy needs. In the latest round of their ongoing spat, Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday that his country would "absolutely not back out" from defending its right to produce nuclear fuel.

What sets Brazil's budding nuclear program from Iran's is a constitutional decree in Brazil that bans the use of nuclear energy, though both countries have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

Adding to its legitimacy in the nuclear energy game is the fact that UN nuclear regulatory officials have signed off on the Brazil uranium program.

"There are safeguard measures that have been agreed that will meet the agency's requirements that there will be no diversion of nuclear material," said Marc Vidricaire, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on Tuesday.

Washington has also apparently given its blessing to the Brazil program. Mentioning both Brazil and Iran in the same sentence, former White House spokesman Scott McCellan said the issue that separated the two nations was simply "trust".

"I think a difference here ... if you're talking about Brazil versus Iran - is one of trust," said McCellan in February.

That has not always been the case with Brazil, however.

Brasilia did battle with the IAEA over its own nuclear program not two years ago when it refused to let UN inspectors visit certain parts of its enrichment facility claiming they did not want to compromise homegrown enrichment techniques.

In 2004, nuclear officials here first asserted that Brazil had developed a refinement process at least 25 per cent more efficient than others and wished to protect its homegrown technology.

Some international observers speculated that Brazil would not allow inspectors to see its centrifuges because it was hiding its capability to refine uranium for nuclear weapons, an allegation Brazil has vehemently denied.

In April, Brazil was accused of refusing to allow inspectors to examine the Rio facility in February and March of this year, raising suspicions that Brazil may have had something to hide.

Brazilian officials countered by saying the inspections were unnecessary and intrusive since Brazil formally abstained from nuclear weapons development in the 1990s during the administration of then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The controversy was sparked when a former US Defense Department official told a leading Brazilian newspaper that the reason the UN was interested in inspecting a new nuclear facility in Resende was speculation that the technology at the plant was supplied by former Pakistani nuclear program head Abdul Qadeer Khan, who provided nuclear technology to several rogue nations over the years.

Henry Sokolski, head of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center said IAEA officials harbored concerns that "the source of the [Brazilian] centrifuge technology" was Kahn.

Some Brazilian scientists were outraged by the allegations.

The concerns over Brazil's nuclear intentions were first sparked in 2002, when then-presidential hopeful, now Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty was unfair. "If someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?" he asked in a campaign speech.

These remarks quickly became infamous among diplomatic circles in Washington, though Lula later clarified his position, emphasizing that he had no intention of restarting Brazil's weapons program.

The IAEA was also worried that other nations like Iran would see Brazil's reluctance to meet all requests as a means of concealing clandestine weapons programs.

Earlier this year, Brazil sought once again to subdue suspicions about its nuclear agenda, commenting specifically on the ongoing US-Iran tussle.

Aquilino Serra, a researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, noted that the Resende facility would only enrich uranium by 5 per cent, the limit for industrial and commercial use.

"In order to make a bomb, you have to enrich to 95 per cent," said Serra.

And in Brazil’s case, the government’s word is good enough to get the country's nuclear energy ambitions off the ground.

Carmen Gentile is a senior international correspondent for ISN Security Watch based in Rio de Janeiro. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bolivia for Security Watch, and Haiti, Venezuela, and elsewhere for United Press International, The Washington Times, and others.