Megatons to Megawatts

The Megatons to Megawatts Program, successfully completed in December 2013, is the popular name given to the program which is also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement. The official name of the program is 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", dated February 18, 1993. Under this Agreement, Russia agreed to supply the United States with low-enriched uranium (LEU) obtained from high-enriched uranium (HEU) found to be in excess of Russian defense purposes. The United States agreed to purchase the low-enriched uranium fuel.

The original proposal for this program was made by Thomas Neff, a physicist at MIT, in an October 24, 1991 Op-Ed in The New York Times. On August 28, 1992, in Moscow, U.S. and Russian negotiators initialed the 20-year agreement and President George H. W. Bush announced the agreement on August 31, 1992. In 1993, the agreement was signed and initiated by President Clinton and the commercial implementing contract was then signed by both parties.

Under this Agreement, United States and Russia agreed to commercially implement a 20-year program to convert 500 metric tons of HEU (uranium 235 enriched to 90 percent) taken from Soviet era warheads, into LEU (less than 5 percent uranium 235). The terms of the agreement required that it be implemented on commercial terms without government funds. The agreement named the Department of Energy as the executive agent for the US side. The DOE appointed the newly privatized United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) as the commercial agent, its executive program contractor. The Russian Federation designated Techsnabexport (TENEX), a commercial subsidiary of its Ministry for Atomic Energy (Minatom), as the agent to implement the program on commercial terms. On January 14, 1994, the commercial contract between USEC and TENEX (HEU-LEU Contract) was signed. The terms also required that the HEU be converted by dilution (downblending) to LEU in Russian nuclear facilities. USEC would then purchase the low-enriched fuel and transport it to its facilities in the US. The first shipment of LEU took place in May 1995.

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