Megatons to Megawatts
By Andrew Newman
Thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts program, half of U.S. nuclear energy comes from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads. Andrew Newman is a Harvard University research associate with the Project on Managing the Atom.
Nuclear power provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity, and roughly half of that total is generated by nuclear reactors fueled by uranium that came from a Russian nuclear weapon. The Megatons to Megawatts program is responsible for this remarkable achievement.
Established by the 1993 U.S.-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Agreement, the Megatons to Megawatts program will by 2013 have converted 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads into low-enriched uranium (LEU) suitable for U.S. commercial reactors. As of December 31, 2009, 382 metric tons of HEU had been recycled into 11,047 metric tons of LEU, equivalent to more than 15,000 nuclear warheads eliminated.
How Does It Work?
When a nuclear warhead is disassembled, the HEU metal is separated from the rest of the weapon, chopped up into shavings, purified, converted into a gas, and mixed with uranium containing mostly an isotope that cannot sustain an explosive chain reaction - a process called down-blending.
Conversion and dilution of the HEU takes place in Russia, and the resulting LEU is shipped to USEC facilities in the United States to be fabricated into reactor fuel. USEC was formerly the United States Enrichment Corporation, part of the Department of Energy until privatized in 1998.
USEC pays Tekhsnabeksport (TENEX), the executive agent for Russia, the market price less a modest discount for the LEU. USEC also replaces the amount of natural uranium displaced by the down-blended LEU. USEC then sells the LEU to U.S. energy utilities as fuel.
Who Benefits?
Megatons to Megawatts provides financial incentives to dismantle thousands of warheads, destroys hundreds of tons of weapons-grade material, and employs thousands of Russian nuclear workers all at very modest cost to the U.S. taxpayer. Without this deal, the proliferation risks from Russia's nuclear complex during the 1990s would have been far greater.
Beyond 2013
While Megatons to Megawatts is a nonproliferation success story, it will come to an end in 2013, and Russia still has hundreds of tons of HEU beyond the stocks needed for its military program. Rosatom (the Russian government's Atomic Energy Corporation) is not interested in extending the agreement. Rosatom officials complain that the United States and USEC (as the sole executive agent) use their economic leverage unfairly, pointing to the below-market price USEC pays for down-blended Russian LEU and to a 1992 anti-dumping duty imposed on U.S. imports of Russian enrichment products. The U.S. fear was that Russia would flood the U.S. market with cheap uranium, but the duty is supposed to be phased out beginning in 2011.
Russia, for its part, has had on occasion a somewhat unrealistic approach to the commercial nuclear market - for example, setting a "floor" price for selling uranium well above world market prices.
Another reason the current deal will end is that down-blending HEU is less lucrative than enriching uranium, and Rosatom expects to sign deals supplying enriched uranium to U.S. utilities directly in 2010.
There are, however, ways to restructure the agreement that would allow Russia to make billions of dollars in profit and support its strategic objectives of expanding nuclear power and nuclear exports by blending down more of its excess HEU. Ultimately, both Russia and the United States should declare all HEU - beyond the stocks needed to support small future nuclear weapon stockpiles and their naval programs - to be excess, down-blend it to reactor fuel, and keep the material in monitored storage until the commercial market is ready to absorb it.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
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