"It has a lot of qualifications," Nunn said of Kazakhstan. "It would be highly symbolic to put the fuel bank in a country that got rid of nuclear weapons."
The NTI co-chairman told The Associated Press he first approached the Kazakh leader about hosting a fuel bank "a couple of years ago." By this May 5, Nazarbayev's foreign minister was in Washington discussing the plan with Gen. James Jones, Obama's national security adviser.
Most intriguing, perhaps, was the fact that Nazarbayev's announcement came with Iran's visiting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, standing at his side. The Iranian called the fuel bank "a very good proposal." In fact, Tehran has suggested that an international consortium might also enrich uranium on Iranian soil.
Iran isn't likely to give up its controversial fuel facilities, which some fear could lead to an Iranian bomb. But Nunn said a Kazakh or other multinational fuel bank, by involving Iran in an enterprise with international oversight, "could be a very useful tool, not the whole answer but part of an answer" to what he called "the Iranian challenge."
First, however, the tool must win IAEA approval — something far from guaranteed, say sources familiar with the debate within the agency board.
Countries as diverse as Italy, Egypt and South Africa, none of which enrich uranium, have balked at the notion of an international stockpile — not in itself, but because such a framework would raise suspicions about any country that then chooses to enrich on its own, even if that remains legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Many who object to the treaty's "have and have-not" regime on nuclear weapons, which legitimizes only five nations as nuclear powers, don't want to see the same evolve on energy technology.
"We cannot have divides where some own nuclear technology and others not," Egyptian diplomat and nonproliferation expert Mohamad Shaker complained at the Rome conference. "Have-nots" must have an equal role in any technology consortiums, he said.
The NTI proposal may be put on hold until September while IAEA governors next month consider a Russian plan that is more developed and less ambitious, since it doesn't put the IAEA into the fuel sales business.
Instead, the Russians would maintain their own fuel stockpile at a Siberian enrichment plant, which they would make available via the IAEA, "depoliticizing" sales by leaving it to the U.N. agency to certify buyers.
The agency's ElBaradei, meanwhile, views these as early steps in a longer process that eventually would bring all new enrichment facilities under some multinational control, and then internationalize older, existing plants, including those of the U.S. and other nuclear powers.
"It's a bold agenda," he told a nuclear industry meeting in March. "It's going to take some time, but I think we need to start."
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