Project Sapphire 20th Anniversary

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2024-11-24 21:00:03

After the shipment, Andy Weber (third from right) and others toast the successful operation. Left to right: Alnour Mousaev, Bolat Nurgaliev, Ki Fort, Vitaly Mette, Weber, Tania Chomiak, Janet Bogue.

Elwood Gift of the National Security Programs Office at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who carried out the first mission to the Ulba plant with Weber in early March, 1994. A chemical-nuclear engineer, Gift had experience in most of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment.

While Weber and Gift observed in March, 1994, workers at the Ulba plant filed off pieces of the highly-enriched uranium for making an assay of the metal.

Andy Weber and the head of security for the Ulba plant in front of the trucks loaded with HEU at Ulba for transport to the waiting airplanes.

Washington, DC, November 17, 2014 – Twenty years ago this week a team of American specialists completed an unprecedented operation known as Project Sapphire, working with the government of Kazakhstan to secure more than a half-ton of highly-enriched uranium that had been abandoned from a Soviet submarine project during the Cold War, according to declassified documents, video and photographs posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).