Gary Eppich ’06 keeps the world’s radioactive material safe with
his detective work. 

Events like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings keep Gary Eppich ’06 up at night. As tragic as that day was, Eppich’s mind jumps to a horrifying alternate scenario. What if, instead of the pressure cooker bombs used in Boston, someone had set off explosives strapped to stolen radioactive material? “The fear and chaos that would have occurred would be historic in the worst way,” he says.

Eppich’s job is to prevent that nightmare. He’s based at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence in Washington, D.C. “My work aims to make sure that nuclear material used for peaceful purposes — in power reactors and research facilities all over the world — stays where it belongs,” he says. Over the years, he’s hunted for clandestine weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from nuclear power facilities and tracked down the origins of radioactive contraband seized by police.

A career safeguarding the world’s nuclear supply was the furthest thing from Eppich’s mind as a Colgate geology major. After earning a master’s degree at the University of California, Davis, he was just looking for jobs that could make use of the technical expertise he’d picked up with scientific instruments in Lathrop Hall. Little did he know, one of the top U.S. centers for nuclear science, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, needed researchers like him. Ever since the Soviet Union collapsed and funding for the Eastern Bloc’s nuclear sites dried up, radioactive materials — the kinds Eppich knew how to analyze in rocks and volcanoes — kept turning up on the black market. At Livermore, Eppich found himself plunged into a high-stakes case. Australian authorities had recovered uranium during a raid of a Melbourne methamphetamine lab, and they had questions. Where had the uranium originated? And was it of the weaponizable, highly enriched variety?

Iran’s pledge to enrich uranium made headlines this spring. But enriching uranium is not necessarily nefarious. Enriching means altering the composition of natural uranium so it contains more of the form called uranium-235. This form fuels both peaceful power plants and weapons of war. Scientists tell the difference between those two applications by measuring the relative amount of uranium-235 compared to another form called uranium-238. 

The uranium seized in Australia turned out not to be weapons-grade. In fact, it had likely been used in a peaceful nuclear reactor, the kind made infamous by the Chernobyl disaster. Eppich and his colleagues gleaned that information just by analyzing the uranium’s chemical and subatomic properties. If it all sounds like a TV crime drama, that’s not too far off, Eppich says. But the results didn’t come back in time for a commercial break. It was painstaking teamwork that took weeks. 

Explaining thefts is only part of what keeps the world’s nuclear material safe. The other piece of the puzzle is inspecting nuclear power plants to ensure they are being used peacefully. In 2017, Eppich joined the International Atomic Energy Agency, a global center for nuclear cooperation, to do just that. In a countryside lab outside Vienna, Austria, he analyzed cotton cloths that agency inspectors used to wipe surfaces at power plants around the world. The cloths pick up stray atoms that leak from equipment, and identifying those atoms reveals whether governments are being truthful about their nuclear activities. “If you start with the scale of a human, we can measure the amount of uranium equivalent to a single hair on that person’s head, and we can measure the amount of plutonium equivalent to a single cell in that person’s body,” he says. When dealing with minuscule samples, natural uranium from everything — even people — is a possible contaminant. So Eppich worked in a lab like the ones where microchips are made, with airlocks and head-to-toe gowns. 

These days, Eppich’s hung up the lab gear. He now uses his expertise to help U.S. allies be the best possible stewards of their own nuclear material. He works with several nations, including Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic that inherited a nuclear test site and other facilities when the USSR collapsed. “We work with some of the most intelligent people in these countries,” he says. The challenge is helping them do the most rigorous analyses they can with more limited resources. It’s a far cry from the instruments at Lathrop, but it’s a fulfilling career, Eppich says.