U.S. Declares Massive HEU Elimination Over Decades

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States is planning to eliminate 200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from its nuclear weapons stockpile, converting most of it into fuel for the U.S. Navy, a senior government official said yesterday (see GSN, April 5).

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the material would be freed up as a result of a Bush administration decision in May to cut the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal, unofficially estimated at about 10,000 warheads, by nearly half.

“That decision enables us to dispose of a significant amount of weapons-grade nuclear material,” he said here during the Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference.

The 200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium is the equivalent of 8,000 nuclear warheads, he said. There was no immediate explanation for how the administration would obtain that much material as it does not appear to be eliminating that 8,000 warheads.

Bodman said 160 metric tons of the uranium would be put to use in powering U.S. Navy nuclear ships and submarines.

The “swords-to-plowshares” plan, Bodman said, would “have the added benefit of postponing the need for construction of a new uranium high-enriched facility [for producing Navy fuel] for at least 50 years.”

An additional 20 of the 200 metric tons would be reserved for space missions and for research reactors that currently use highly enriched uranium pending their conversion to low-enriched uranium, he said.

The final 20 metric tons of highly enriched uranium would be converted to low-enriched uranium for use in civilian nuclear power reactors or research reactors, he said.

Bodman did not give a time frame for the removal to occur.

An Energy Department press release yesterday however said the “up to” 200 metric tons would be removed from the stockpile “in the coming decades.”

The United States, through a program called “Megatons to Megawatts,” has blended down as of last month 250 of a planned 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons, Bodman said.

“That’s the equivalent of 10,000 Russian warheads rendered harmless,” he said, leading to the production of low-enriched uranium “available for use in American civil nuclear reactors.”

Bodman said the 200 metric tons would be the largest amount of special fissile material ever removed from the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

He called the plan “both an energy security triumph and a nonproliferation triumph.”

The government could have gone further, according to Stephen Young, a senior analyst in Washington for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This is a positive outcome of the U.S. decision to reduce its Cold War-sized arsenal, but a better outcome would be to find ways to eliminate all use of HEU and downblend it, rather than saving it for submarine reactor fuel,” he stated by e-mail. 

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