Yesterday, I posted an entry about costing electricity generated by nuclear reactors in the United States. In the entry, I mentioned that the U.S. and Russia had an agreement to decommission old Soviet nuclear warhead. Today I am going to drill down into the subject of the Russian source of U.S. nuclear fuel.
In 1993, the U.S. and Russia signed the HEU-LEU agreement which is also known as the Megatons to Megawatts Program. HEU stands for highly enriched uranium which is used to create nuclear warheads. It consists of uranium in which the natural one percent level of U-235 has been raised ninety percent. LEU is low enriched uranium which is suitable for fuel in nuclear reactors. The natural one percent level of U-235 has been raised to four percent. The agreement meant that five hundred tons of HEU from twenty thousand nuclear warheads would be downblended with natural uranium to make LEU for nuclear fuel. The HEU-LEU agreement ended in 2013.
The nuclear fuel from Soviet nuclear weapons over the past twenty years has supplied about forty percent of the fuel for the one hundred and four U.S. nuclear reactors. That represents about eight percent of the electricity generated during that time in the U.S. The Russians supplied HEU was made into U.S. nuclear fuel below the open international market price for uranium. The U.S. also began converting one hundred seventy five tons of its stockpile of HEU from warheads into nuclear fuel in 1996.
The Russians made almost nine billion dollars on the sales of the HEU they inherited from the Soviet Union. The Russians made good use of that money by investing in nuclear research and infrastructure focused on new uranium enrichment technology and nuclear fuel manufacture. Today, the Russians have four advanced gaseous centrifuge enrichment facilities in Siberia and the Ural mountains. This represents about forty percent of the uranium enrichment facilities in the world. The U.S. is the biggest consumer of nuclear fuel in the world.
The Soviet Union ended HEU production in 1996 when it had accumulated forty four thousand nuclear warheads. The U.S. stopped producing HEU for warheads in 1964 when our stockpiles reached thirty thousand warheads. The U.S. did continue to produce some HEU for submarine nuclear reactors but that ended in 1992. The U.K. and France stopped HEU production in the 1990s. India and Pakistan are still producing HEU for their arsenals. The estimated total world production of HEU since the nuclear age began is about two thousand tons. It at least a third of it has been recycled into nuclear fuel so far. The nuclear armed nations are not going to recycle all their HEU into fuel so there is a limit to how much fuel can be obtained by downblending.
The United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) which contracts with the Russian company TENEX for nuclear fuel has just signed a new contract for LEU which will start being delivered in 2013. However, this LEU is from the Russian enrichment facilities and will cost considerably more than the fuel made from Soviet HEU. This price increase will have an impact on commercial nuclear power prices in the United States. The USEC has been working on their own enrichment facilities but their equipment is not as advanced as the Russian equipment and, despite huge investments, the USEC facility is behind schedule and racked with problems.
United States Enrichment Corporation logo:
