Megatons to Megawatts

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Megatons to Megawatts is the common name for the Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Disposition of Highly-Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons .

Under the treaty, Russia mixed a total of 500 tons of highly enriched uranium (HAU) from around 20,000 nuclear warheads with uranium in 1993 and 2013 and sold the mixture, low- enriched uranium, to the United States . There it was processed into fuel rods and used to generate energy in American nuclear power plants.

Russia received a total of 17 billion US dollars ; at that time it urgently needed foreign currency .

The US promoted disarmament after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union ; In addition, there were fears at the time that criminal or terrorist organizations could use the temporarily critical situations in some of the successor states of the Soviet Union to take possession of HAU. At one point around 10% of the electricity generated in the US was generated with uranium from the Megatons-to-Megawatts agreement.

The physicist Thomas Lee Neff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered to be the father of the agreement. He presented his idea of ​​a purchase for the purpose of energy production to the public in an article in the New York Times in October 1991 .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Disposition of Highly-Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons (full text)
  2. ↑ Denver Nicks: 20-Year Deal Turning Russian Warheads to Atomic Fuel Ends. In: Time . science.time.com, September 25, 2013, accessed December 29, 2019 .
  3. ^ Military Warheads as a Source of Nuclear Fuel. In: Megatons to MegaWatts - World Nuclear Association. world-nuclear.org, February 2017, accessed December 29, 2019 .
  4. ↑ so the former US ambassador Steven Pifer. Tagesschau (ARD) from December 3, 2013: What was left of the Cold War http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/megatons-to-megawatts100.html ( Memento from December 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ^ William J. Broad: Thomas L. Neff's Idea Turned Russian Warheads Into American Electricity. In: The New York Times. nytimes.com, January 27, 2014, accessed December 29, 2019 .

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