| Russian bombs recycled into U.S. nuclear fuel
Russian bombs recycled into U.S. nuclear fuel
04/12/2003
By LINDA ASHTON / Associated Press
Bomb-grade uranium that once armed Soviet weapons of mass destruction today is being recycled in Russia and the United States for use in commercial nuclear power plants.
The "Megatons to Megawatts" program, a joint venture between the Bethesda, Md.-based USEC and the Russian Federation's TENEX, will have destroyed the equivalent of 20,000 nuclear warheads by the year 2013.
"Nuclear warheads that were once aimed at American cities are today
providing electricity for those cities," said Charles Yulish, a spokesman
for USEC. "It's a nice irony."
Since 1995, most of the 104 nuclear power plants in the United States have at some point used fuel rods made with Russia's recycled uranium. The Northwest's only nuclear power plant — Columbia Generating Station — is among them.
"We've got about 16 warheads' worth of material on hand or in the reactor," said Larry Linik, an nuclear engineer at the 1,200-megawatt Columbia Generating Station owned by Energy Northwest.
The 10-year-old Megatons to Megawatts nuclear-nonproliferation agreement grew out of the 1991 Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which has resulted in the destruction of thousands of nuclear warheads, missiles and launchers in the former Soviet Union.
The 20-year agreement calls for the conversion of 500 metric tons of highly enriched, or weapons-grade uranium from dismantled Soviet warheads to low-enriched uranium for fuel to generate electricity.
The commercial contract between USEC and TENEX was signed in 1994. The first shipment of low-enriched uranium arrived in the United States in 1995.
Uranium is a natural element that comes out of the ground. It's about as
common as tin and 500 times more common than gold.
Natural uranium is made up of three forms or isotopes — about 99 percent
U-238, less than 1 percent U-235 and less than 0.1 percent U-234.
U-235 is the fissionable form, which means the nuclei of the atoms can be
split to generate energy.
Enrichment increases the proportion of fissionable U-235. Low-enriched
uranium is composed of 5 percent U-235 or less. High-enriched uranium can have U-235 in the upper 90-percent range.
Once the uranium is diluted from high-enriched to low-enriched, it can be
used to create heat but not for bombs.
"It cannot blow up physically like a nuclear device," Linik said.
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union amassed vast numbers of nuclear weapons under the theory of mutually assured destruction.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford nuclear reservation was part of the Cold War arms buildup, producing plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal.
Since the Cold War ended, a number of bilateral anti-nuclear pacts have been signed, with both countries pledging reductions of stockpiled weapons.
Since Megatons to Megawatts began, the equivalent of 7,000 Russian nuclear warheads have been recycled into power plant fuel, Yulish said.
"That material is gone," he said. "It isn't a matter of safeguarding it. It
doesn't exist. It's fuel."
The program helps diminish the opportunities for terrorists to obtain
stockpiled bomb-grade uranium, Yulish said.
It's also a jobs program in Russia that has helped keep scientists and
workers from departing for nuclear-wannabe countries and sharing their
expertise, Yulish said.
"When we finish, we will have destroyed the equivalent of 20,000 nuclear
warheads," Yulish said. "That ain't all there is, but it's pretty impressive
when you want to keep this stuff out of the reach of terrorists."
USEC so far has purchased about $3.5 billion in Russian low-enriched
uranium, about half of its annual supply. The remainder is produced
domestically by USEC in Paducah, Ky.
Russia dilutes the uranium, ships it to the United States where additional
conversion work is done, and then it's sent on to a fabricator to make
nuclear fuel assemblies, or bundles of fuel rods.
At Columbia Generating Station, 292 fresh fuel assemblies will be loaded
into the reactor core next month during the biannual refueling outage.
Workers there are now inspecting the fuel assemblies, which are then stored underwater before being transferred to the reactor core.
A single assembly costs close to $200,000.
Columbia Generating Station is located on leased land at Hanford nuclear
reservation in south-central Washington but is not part of the U.S.
Department of Energy. The electricity produced at the nuclear power plant is sold by Bonneville Power Administration, a federal power marketing agency in Portland, Ore.
| 
