Skip to main content

A Non-Proliferation Success Story

Last night's edition of the NewsHour on PBS featured a piece on the joint efforts between the U.S. and Russia to dismantle Russian nuclear weapons in order to keep them from falling into the wrong hands.

Here's an excerpt from the report:
PAVEL FELGENHAUER: Decommissioning means that they're dismantled. But the material that they were composed of didn't disappear much. That means it's stored somewhere, most likely stored in much less secure conditions than it was when it was a nuclear warhead.

So dismantling nuclear weapons is good, but that means that the material is less secure as a result. It's not an easy situation, and it's made worse by a mutual lack of trust, by ambiguity over the direction in which U.S.-Russian relations develop.

Reading that, it's easy to get the impression that those warheads are just lying around, and that the U.S. isn't doing much at all to get rid of them.

But that's not the case.

For the last 11 years, the U.S. has been purchasing dismantled Russian warheads and downblending the highly enriched uranium (HEU) for use in American nuclear reactors. The program is called Megatons to Megawatts, and it's administered by USEC, a company based in Bethesda, Maryland.

As of last October, the program had dismantled an incredible 9,000 warheads, and is on track to hit the 10,000 mark this September.

Here are some more details from USEC:
The program will recycle 500 metric tons of bomb-grade uranium into fuel by its conclusion in 2013. Approximately ten percent of America’s electricity is produced using Megatons to Megawatts fuel.

Once blended down to low-enriched uranium fuel, the material is no longer usable in a nuclear weapon. USEC purchases approximately $450 million of the fuel annually. Russia uses that money to support nuclear safety, environmental and security programs. To date, USEC has paid the Russian treasury over $3.5 billion for purchases of the fuel. By the program’s end, total purchases from Russia will be approximately $8 billion.

So, Russian nuclear weapons get dismantled, the HEU is downblended into reactor fuel which we then use to generate electricity here in the U.S. What's not to like?

It's clearly one of the greatest success stories in the history of nuclear non-proliferation. But in last night's report, there wasn't even a hint that it existed.

After I found the transcript of last night's show, I sent a note to Charles Yulish, Vice President of Corporate Communications with USEC, asking him about the omission.
I watched the show and wondered about it myself. We have been after PBS and the News Hour for years, trying to get an appointment with Ray Suarez, all without success

In a subsequent note, Charles had this to say:
At the 2003 Global Economic Forum, our CEO spoke with Suarez about M2M and Ray said he wanted to know more about the program. I tried to follow through by contacting him on at least four separate occasions by mail and phone, and I never got even the courtesy of a reply. When I finally reached his assistant he declined to let me speak with Suarez even by phone. I guess he thought that the elimination of nuclear warheads was not newsworthy.

That's a shame. This story has been underreported, and deserves more attention.

Technorati tags: , , , , ,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin