WASHINGTON -- Spurred by a chilling report calling a nuclear or biological terrorist attack likely within five years, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., is urging President-elect Barack Obama to speed the creation of an international nuclear fuel bank to help prevent the spread of weapons.

Eric Kleiman, spokesman for Bayh, said such a resource would offer countries a source of nuclear power at a fraction of the cost of building their own civilian nuclear power plants, which can be used as covers for weapons development.

"It will help us take a huge step forward and prevent countries from taking the first step down the path to nuclear weapons," Kleiman said.

Bayh presented his views in a report released this week through the Progressive Policy Institute.

As a result of legislation co-sponsored by Bayh last year, Congress in August gave the International Atomic Energy Agency $50 million to help create the nuclear-fuel bank, which could take the form of either a single facility or a network of existing international sites.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, agreed to match Congress' $50 million appropriation if other agency member countries contribute a combined total of $50 million by next September, Kleiman said.

The resulting $150 million would be enough for the IAEA to begin the project.

Since then, the United Arab Emirates has contributed $10 million, and Norwayhas contributed $5 million. Part of the new administration's challenge will be persuading other member countries to provide the remaining $35 million.

Jim Arkedis, director of the Progressive Policy Institute's national security project, said that with the participation of uranium-rich countries such as Canada and Australia, the fuel bank should work well and make a good profit.

Any countries using the fuel bank's resources would be required to forgo enriching uranium themselves and submit to rigorous inspections, Bayh's report said.

Leonor Tomero, director of nuclear nonproliferation for the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation, said that in order to effectively inspect other countries for weapons production, the IAEA would need additional personnel and technology.

Tomero also said that while she supports the idea of a fuel bank, she is concerned about the logistics of transporting nuclear waste from participating countries back to an international source facility.

Leaving such waste abroad, she said, would give those countries a chance to reprocess it, extract plutonium and use it to make weapons.

"It gets politically complicated," Tomero said, "because no country wants to take back waste and because no country has an operating permanent, high-level nuclear waste facility."

Kleiman said that Bayh is confident that a fuel bank it would help limit the production of nuclear weapons and make it more difficult for nations such as Iran to bypass nuclear restrictions.

"If countries such as Iran rejected fuel-bank services, it would encourage others to support American efforts to impose tougher sanctions," he said.

The congressionally appointed Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission reported last week that the threat of a terrorist attack with such weapons was growing faster than the government's ability to fight it.

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