Todd Perry is a 1996-97 Peace Scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Maryland’s Department of Government and Politics, and a Washington Representative for Arms Control and International Security with the Union of Concerned Scientists.[1] He obtained much of the information in this report from research interviews with U.S. officials, Congressional staff, private contractors, and members of the U.S. nongovernmental arms control and nonproliferation communities. Descriptions of events and governmental positions for which sources are not provided come from internal, unclassified governmental documents that he obtained while monitoring U.S. nonproliferation assistance programs on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists.Since 1992, U.S. and Russian officials have attempted to conclude an agreement on ending Russian plutonium production for weapons. But, three Russian military reactors are still in operation because they provide heat and electricity to Russia’s "plutonium cities" and nearby municipalities.[2] One problem is that the reactors, two in Seversk (formerly known as Tomsk-7) and one in Zheleznogorsk (formerly known as Krasnoyarsk-26) use fuel that corrodes if not either properly stored, chemically separated, or "reprocessed" after it is removed from the reactors.[3] Moreover, the reprocessing of spent fuel from these reactors produces an estimated 1.5 tons of unsafeguarded, weapons-grade plutonium per year.
In June 1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin signed an agreement committing the Russian government to end plutonium production at the reactors "no later than the year 2000."[4] In the agreement, the United States promised to help Russia "identify funding" to replace the reactors, "on the same schedule" as the agreed time frame for ending plutonium production.[5] But, for the next two years, U.S.-Russian differences over the relationship between U.S. funding commitments and the timing of reactor shutdown prevented the entry into force of the 1994 agreement.
The two sides officially broke this impasse in January 1996, when U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Hazel O’Leary and Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) Secretary Viktor Mikhailov signed an agreement to convert, rather than replace the reactors. Converting the reactor fuel cores would allow the use of a fuel that produces at least 10 to 100 times less plutonium than is currently produced.[6] As importantly, the spent fuel produced in the converted reactors would not require reprocessing. And plutonium in this spent fuel would not be well-suited to weapons use.[7] Also, converting the reactors is considerably cheaper than replacing them with nuclear or fossil fuel power plants. At the same time, this "core conversion" option improves safety at the reactors over the short-term by, among other things, reducing the likelihood that a loss-of-coolant accident would lead to a reactor fire.[8]
Progress towards core conversion was delayed after the January 1996 agreement because of internal U.S. governmental arguments over how to manage and fund the U.S. contribution to the core conversion project. This delay was in part responsible for slowing renegotiation of the June 1994 agreement on ending Russian plutonium production to reflect the core conversion decision. By December 1996, after considerable pressure from nongovernmental and Congressional proponents of the program, a short-term management plan was completed, and the administration appeared prepared to request sufficient funding from Congress.
Negotiations held in Moscow in late January 1997 resolved a range of disagreements surrounding core conversion and related issues. Unless problems arise during either side’s internal, inter-agency reviews of these negotiations, the U.S. and Russian governments will sign a set of accords that provide for conversion of the reactors to a non-plutonium production mode, verify the nonmilitary use of the reactors after conversion, allow U.S. monitoring of most, if not all, of the nonmilitary plutonium produced in the reactors before conversion, and assure that highly enriched uranium (HEU) used to manufacture the fuel for the converted reactors comes only from dismantled Russian nuclear warheads. Under the agreement, the United States would fund roughly half of the $160 million project by providing technical assistance for converting the reactors, upgrading reactor safety, and improving spent fuel storage facilities.
This report explains why the United States officially dismissed the core conversion option between 1992 and mid-1996 and has still not fully resolved domestic funding and management issues surrounding the core conversion project. It first describes U.S.-Russian disagreements over how to end Russian plutonium production. After this, it traces the emergence of the U.S.-Russian consensus to pursue the core conversion option. The report then details U.S. inter-agency and Congressional disputes over how to fund and manage the U.S. contribution. The conclusion describes the issues that were resolved in January 1997 negotiations and discusses the broader significance of a successful conversion effort.
Over the next several years, formal deliberations on a cut-off were pushed aside by both nuclear superpowers as they devoted their attention to reducing deployed nuclear and conventional arsenals and settling broader strategic issues. But in January 1992, in response to domestic concerns about reactor safety and international concerns about plutonium production, President Yeltsin formally committed Russia to ending plutonium production by the year 2000. In July 1992, President Bush announced that the United States would no longer reprocess plutonium.[11]
Subsequent to these declarations, leaders of the nuclear weapons states (NWS) issued a number of statements on ending fissile material production. In September 1993, President Clinton proposed at the United Nations a negotiated global ban on the production of new fissile materials for weapons. The proposal was endorsed unanimously by the U.N. General Assembly. Conflicts in the U.N. Conference on Disarmament on how to proceed with cut-off negotiations and U.S.-Russian disagreements on how to verify a cut-off stalled further progress.[12] However, a consensus did emerge on the need to end Russian plutonium production as a necessary first step towards achieving either a bilateral or multilateral ban on fissile material production for weapons.
Some of the first discussions among mid-level U.S. officials about the need for the United States to act on the problem of Russian plutonium production were prompted by PNNL reports on the Kurchatov proposal. These discussions took on added urgency when Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) sponsored an amendment to the fiscal year (FY) 1994 Defense Authorization Bill withholding the $75 million U.S. contribution to a military plutonium storage facility near Mayak, Russia. The amendment required that the U.S. secretary of state certify to Congress that Russia had "committed to halting the chemical separation of weapons-grade plutonium," and that it "was taking all practical steps to halt such separation at the earliest possible date" before the funds could be disbursed.[13]
The Markey amendment created incentives on the part of both governments to end Russian plutonium production so as to not place the Mayak facility and other projects funded under the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) "Nunn-Lugar" Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program at risk.[14] Private communiqués between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin ensued, in which Yeltsin reiterated his commitment to shut down the reactors by the year 2000.[15]
In December 1993, Gore and Chernomyrdin agreed to form a working group within the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission (GCC) to examine options for closing the production reactors. Gore stated that the U.S. would support studies to identify replacement sources of power for the reactors. These commitments were reiterated at the January 1994 Clinton-Yeltsin summit at which Yeltsin endorsed Clinton’s September 1993 fissile material cut-off proposal.[16]
In a February 14, 1994, letter to Gore, Chernomyrdin outlined a series of options for replacing the reactors with fossil fuel power plants. Chernomyrdin also mentioned the core conversion option and emphasized that any option needed to address the "social needs" of the two regions. While U.S. officials might have interpreted this as a repetition of statements about the heating and electricity demands in and around Seversk and Zheleznogorsk, it would later become obvious that he was referring to the need for any option to take account of the thousands of jobs associated with the three reactors.
On March 16, 1994, O’Leary and Mikhailov signed a protocol summarizing their governments’ views on a range of issues surrounding plutonium production. In the protocol, the two governments declared their intent to:
Enter into a mutual agreement to cease the military use of plutonium after the date of the agreement. This agreement would include provisions for compliance. Further, the Russian side proposed that Russia, within one year after creation of an alternative source of energy, would cease production and chemical separation of weapons-grade plutonium.[17]The protocol adds that such a shutdown agreement would "require that each side permit inspection of its relevant plutonium production facilities as well as the storage sites for the plutonium produced by the reactors at Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk."[18] The next day, Secretary of State Warren Christopher certified that Russia had met the conditions spelled out in the Markey amendment.
The protocol reflects a U.S. bias towards replacing the reactors with fossil fuel plants, and states that the United States is prepared to assist in "securing financing for the completion of a feasibility study that would examine fully" a gas turbine option at Tomsk, and attracting international financing for a partially-completed coal-fired plant at Krasnoyarsk.[19]
Although the protocol reflects the Russian view that it is "possible to perform...conversion work on the Tomsk-7 and Krasnoyarsk-26 reactors," it adds that "the U.S. will only consider participating in this work if Russia obtains financing." The O’Leary-Mikhailov protocol was codified into a formal governmental agreement at a June 23, 1994, GCC meeting.
But statements made about the reactors at secretarial- and ministerial-level meetings reflected irresolvable differences between the two sides: U.S. expectations regarding reactor shutdown and verification were clearly spelled out in the agreement, while Russia’s desire for firm assurances as to U.S. or U.S.-supported multilateral funding mechanisms was not. Since no consensus could be reached on the extent to which reactor shutdown should be linked to the availability of outside funding, the relationship between these two issues was not clearly described.[20] As a consequence, Russian officials insisted that diplomatic notes finalizing the June agreement be exchanged before it could come into force. These notes were never exchanged.
Other difference over replacement power sources and fissile material safeguards emerged during the talks. Minatom wanted the reactors to be replaced by new nuclear plants, and repeatedly requested that joint feasibility studies be conducted for the nuclear as well as fossil plant replacement options. In addition, Minatom officials continually expressed their skepticism about the need for fissile material safeguards in Russia, arguing that since Russia possessed the largest stocks of weapons-usable materials in the world, there was little sense in expending resources to keep fissile material out of Russian weapons.[21]
There were other reasons why some in the U.S. government favored the fossil fuel option. Planning for construction for fossil fuel plants had already begun in both regions by the end of the Cold War.[25] Even though Minatom opposed all non-nuclear replacement options, local officials continued to voice their support for the fossil fuel projects.[26] For the United States, supporting regional governments that shared U.S. views on reactor replacement was especially important because at many levels, Minatom seemed unable to place technical, economic, or security criteria ahead of its parochial interests.[27] Faced with this reality, many U.S. officials believed that direct funding of Russian nuclear facilities through reactor replacement or core conversion would provide additional incentives for Minatom to engage in activities that the United States was trying to discourage, like reprocessing and further development of breeder reactor technologies.[28]
Concerns about Russia’s nuclear safety record only added to the U.S. government’s opposition to reactor core conversion. In the early 1990s, U.S. officials still had hopes that Russia could be persuaded to shut down its least safe reactors. They feared that conversion might signal U.S. approval of Minatom plans to upgrade other unsafe reactors, and they also were concerned about the moral and legal liabilities inherent in assisting Minatom in upgrading reactors that did not and could not meet Western safety standards. Beyond this, there was a general concern that "conversion might have the perverse effect of actually delaying implementation of a replacement energy plan by lifting the sense of urgency from the task."[29]
At the time, U.S. support of conversion might have also undermined the U.S. goal of supporting the emergence of an independent nuclear safety agency in Russia. In November 1993, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Ivan Selin had met with Yuri Vishnevsky, Chairman of the Russian Federal Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority (GAN). Vishnevsky urged the United States to support the permanent shutdown of the reactors for safety reasons. For U.S. officials, undermining Vishnevsky was especially unattractive because the U.S.-funded Materials Protection, Control, and Accountancy (MPC&A) program was getting underway, and one of the U.S. conditions for the collaborative MPC&A program was the inclusion of an independent Russian regulator.[30]
In December 1994, just as a compliance agreement covering the reactors and the storage of the plutonium was reaching conclusion, the Russians decided to halt compliance regime negotiations, citing the need for completing the Intergovernmental Agreement.[32] The United States attempted to bring Russia back to the table by acceding to Minatom’s demands for nuclear replacement plant feasibility studies.[33] But the overall argument about the relationship between reactor shutdown and replacement plant funding had finally caught up with, and politicized, the compliance agreement talks. Further negotiations would be put on hold until the broader financial and political issues could be resolved.
On-going Kurchatov-PNNL discussions about core conversion gave both secretaries greater confidence in the technical and political feasibility of this alternative. PNNL provided data on the operations of the Hanford plutonium reactors at a joint workshop in Hanford in late 1994. Kurchatov subsequently provided information about its three operating reactors at a joint workshop in Moscow in early 1995. This success mimicked the pattern of laboratory-to-laboratory contacts in the budding MPC&A program, and would create a successful pattern of circumventing cumbersome governmental structures on both sides, at least for the short term.
The secretaries’ attention to the core conversion option also reflected their respective governments’ growing concerns about effects of economic dislocation on reactor safety and materials accountancy.[34] According to one estimate, by April 1995, the organizations responsible for operating the reactors were being paid 20 percent less than the actual cost of reactor operation.[35] Meanwhile, living standards in the nuclear cities had dropped to levels considerably lower than those in surrounding areas.[36] Conversion held out some hope that the thousands of jobs associated with reactor operation could be sustained and that the marginal improvement in living standards might prevent material diversion.
In a joint statement at a May 1995 summit meeting, Clinton and Yeltsin pledged to never again build weapons from civil fissile material from dismantled weapons, excess fissile material, or newly produced fissile material.[37] The next month, O’Leary and Mikhailov signed a statement of intent to proceed with joint feasibility studies on the nuclear replacement and conversion options. The studies would be conducted by Kurchatov and PNNL. The statement established the mandate for a set of reciprocal, technical visits, including U.S. visits to the operating reactors and Russian visits to DOE’s Savannah River Plant (SRP). By allowing access to each others’ facilities, the statement cleared the way for negotiations on the modalities of a "Phase I" design and feasibility study for core conversion.
The feasibility studies estimated that conversion would cost roughly $160 million and would thus require an $80 million U.S. contribution, assuming that the costs were shared equally by both sides.[39] Furthermore, the studies demonstrated that if conversion were to be achieved by the year 2000, much of the funding would have to be allocated quickly. This urgency resulted from the anticipated overlap between the "Phase II" engineering design study and the "Phase III" implementation stage of the project, requiring procurement of Phase III equipment during Phase II.
The core conversion feasibility studies were reviewed by GAN, and the studies stated that GAN would participate in safety aspects of the conversion process. The relationship between core conversion and the U.S. policy objective of empowering GAN had been reversed by President Yeltsin’s 1994 decree limiting GAN’s access to Russian military nuclear facilities.[40] While earlier U.S. support for the conversion project would have contradicted GAN’s opposition to conversion, U.S. support for GAN involvement was now seen as a way of assuring at least some GAN access to these facilities.
The January 1996 talks added an additional wrinkle to the project. HEU fuel cores have been routinely used in some Russian reactors, and the Russian side proposed that HEU from Russian warheads should be used to fuel the converted reactors.[41] GAN and Minatom are in favor of HEU fuel use because this will allow the converted reactors to be certified for operation more expeditiously. They are joined by some in the U.S. government who argue that the low-enriched uranium (LEU) option could delay conversion due to the need to construct a new HEU-LEU blending capacity.[42]
Others in the U.S. government advocate the LEU option, and point to the fact that HEU use is at odds with U.S. attempts to strengthen the global nonproliferation regime by seeking to "minimize the civil use of highly enriched uranium."[43] Opponents of the HEU option also argue that since spent HEU fuel will contain large quantities of unused HEU, this option will encourage Russian reprocessing to recover the HEU, despite the fact that the plutonium in the spent fuel does not warrant reprocessing.[44]
Two options for short- and long-term funding had been generated internally in 1995 and were discussed at the January meeting.[45] First, given DOE’s history of involvement in the reactor replacement and conversion studies, DOE accounts were the obvious source of revenue. However, in spite of O’Leary’s efforts, Congress had already refused to fund some of DOE’s activities associated with ending plutonium production. In 1995, an FY 1996 appropriation for various site-related activities had been rejected.
To add to this, staff members with Representative John Myers (R-IN), Chairman of the House Energy and Water Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, had recently indicated the chairman’s belief that DOE had gone beyond its discretionary mandate by spending $3.7 million to help fund the 1995 reactor replacement and core conversion studies. He had been the driving force behind the rejection of the FY 1996 request. This placed DOE’s $3.5 million FY 1997 request for conversion work in jeopardy.[46] Myers’s general hostility to DOE’s nonproliferation activities dimmed prospects for obtaining additional reprogrammed (current year) funding for the new agreement, or for obtaining larger amounts of funding for program implementation.[47] The second potential funding source was the Nunn-Lugar CTR funds controlled by DOD. Given the size of CTR accounts, the DOD budget was viewed as the most likely source of long-term funding.
DOD representatives in the meeting reluctantly agreed to consider long-term funding under three conditions. First, other accounts would have to be identified to contribute the $10 million required for short-term funding. Second, specific milestones that could be used to demonstrate progress towards conversion would have to be identified. And third, the program would have to be managed by DOD and thus preclude PNNL involvement.
DOE representatives objected to the third condition, claiming that the technical expertise for the program resided in PNNL and hence in DOE, and that the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology had unique managerial competencies suited to the program. This claim was based on two lessons learned from prior years’ experience. First, PNNL and DOE staff had established a relationship of trust with Russian partners who were naturally suspicious of U.S. involvement in converting these sensitive facilities. According to DOE and PNNL officials, throughout the evolution of the PNNL-Kurchatov relationship and especially in the context of the reactor shutdown agreement negotiations, conservative Russian political forces inside and outside of Minatom had remained suspicious that U.S. defense and intelligence agencies intended to use U.S.-Russian cooperative structures to collect intelligence information. In this view, adding DOD to the process would heighten these suspicions.
Second, DOE and PNNL officials pointed to the fact that the multiple, overlapping phases of core conversion required an holistic understanding of the program so that long lead-time contracts could be entered into early enough to complete conversion by the year 2000. They added that DOD contracting procedures would only further complicate this process because they were more cumbersome than the contracting procedures that had already proven successful in the MPC&A program.[48]
Despite an effort by National Security Council (NSC) staff to resolve management and funding issues prior to the April G-7 "nuclear summit" in Moscow, DOE and DOD officials remained deadlocked over these issues well into the spring of 1996.
During the House deliberations, committee and personal staff to Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA), Richard Lugar (R-IN), and Pete Domenici (R-AZ) had been crafting an amendment to the Senate Defense Authorization Bill designed to greatly expand the scope of the Nunn-Lugar CTR and lab-to-lab MPC&A efforts. The draft amendment fully funded the core conversion project.
Upon learning of this provision in the draft amendment, senior DOD officials demanded that Senate staff delete core conversion funding. These officials had reluctantly supported core conversion in January, but had since grown hostile to the program when DOE staff balked at handing over managerial responsibility to DOD.[50]
In an attempt to forge a compromise between DOD and DOE, Senate staff asked DOE and White House Office of Science and Technology staff to determine what level of funding would be necessary to sustain the program for the coming year only. Funding levels for conversion in the amendment were subsequently reduced to $16 million, with $6 million coming from the DOE Russian Plutonium Production Reactor Shutdown Program, and $10 million from DOD CTR accounts to be transferred to DOE.
Despite this change, the DOD officials once again demanded that Senate staff either remove all core conversion funding from the amendment, or designate DOD as the lead agency to manage core conversion. Senate staff were at a loss as to how to proceed. In their view, sustaining momentum towards core conversion required authorizing program funding and maintaining DOE’s lead role in the project. Yet, from a political standpoint, these objectives had become mutually exclusive. The issue was discussed at the inter-agency level until early May, at which point the NSC Standing Committee on Nonproliferation called a high-level meeting to resolve the dispute.[51]
At the meeting, high-level DOE and DOD officials and Vice President Gore’s representative agreed that DOD should manage the program. High-level DOE officials were convinced that once funding was secured, the managerial problems could be worked out. The final Senate amendment placed DOD in charge of the program.[52] On June 26, 1996, the amendment, containing core conversion funds as well as nearly $100 million in additional CTR and DOE MPC&A funding, passed unanimously.[53]
NGO representatives pressed their case with Representative John Spratt (D-SC).[57] Spratt, a senior member of the House National Security Committee, was the co-sponsor with Representative Bill McCollum (R-FL) of a House bill similar to the Senate amendment, designed to generate support for Nunn-Lugar-Domenici amendment provisions in the House-Senate Defense Authorization Conference. As a veteran of U.S. legislative efforts to address problems in U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons facilities, Spratt had extensive knowledge of the issues surrounding core conversion and understood the danger of derailing the program by changing the management structure. In the House-Senate Conference on the Defense Authorization Bill the following month, Spratt successfully prevailed upon his colleagues to designate DOE as the lead agency on core conversion, and to require DOD to transfer the $16 million in funding to DOE for the project.
In early October, Spratt sent a letter to NSC head Anthony Lake asking for an explanation. After six weeks of inter-agency wrangling, Lake sent Spratt a response containing language intended to satisfy the spirit of the authorizing language on program management while allowing DOD a token role in overseeing the program.
In November, the NSC staffer and the DOD official most closely associated with funding and management disputes left the government. This gave DOE officials a new opportunity to make their case for maintaining a consistent management structure throughout all phases of the core conversion project. In December, with the assistance of new NSC staff, DOE and DOD agreed that DOE should serve as the technical advisor to DOD for one year in all aspects of the project, with DOD responsible for requesting the needed funds from Congress.
While convinced that this division of responsibility can work, project proponents within DOE worry that if DOD should decide not to renew this arrangement in 1998, the continuity in management needed to integrate Phases II and III may once again be lost. This said, the administration is now prepared, for the first time, to pursue a cohesive approach to ending Russian weapons-grade plutonium production after nearly a year of leaderless confusion.
The plutonium monitoring issue and all other outstanding issues now appear to have been resolved in a series of intensive negotiations that took place in Moscow in late January 1997. In these negotiations, a set of agreements was concluded that now requires only internal, inter-agency review before being signed by Gore and Chernomyrdin (or other high-level officials) and entering into force. The agreement that covers plutonium monitoring will allow the United States access to an "estimated nine tons" of plutonium produced in the reactors. This estimate represents the amount of plutonium believed to have been produced between early 1995, soon after Russia’s October 1994 declaration of non-weapons use, and the year 2000, when the last reactor is scheduled for conversion.
In Moscow, negotiators also concluded agreements on how to verify that the reactors are operating in the agreed to, non-plutonium production mode, and on how to verify whether the HEU used for reactor fuel has come from Russian warheads. Thus, for the first time since Gore and Chernomyrdin endorsed the June 1994 agreement to end Russian plutonium production, both governments appear poised to sign and implement agreements needed to manage and fund a range of cooperative projects related to ending plutonium production at the three reactors. Assuming these agreements enter into force, the only remaining matter requiring resolution is the HEU versus LEU fueling issue. This issue need not be resolved before the entry into force of the agreements, but a fuel choice will need to be made before the Phase III implementation phase is scheduled to begin in 1998.[58]
Given Russian and, in some instances, U.S. reluctance across the range of nuclear issues to improve transparency, it is noteworthy that government-to-government negotiations to end plutonium production have advanced as far as they have. Much of the credit for this progress can be attributed to patterns of interaction established by the MPC&A program, in which lab-to-lab, secretarial-level, and GCC talks have paved the way towards resolving narrow issues incrementally, using reciprocal information sharing practices as a point of departure.
This said, the divided nature of the U.S. policymaking process poses significant and enduring obstacles to the success of various cooperative efforts. Even if the January 1997 agreements negotiated in Moscow enter into force, remaining tension between the DOD and the DOE, and/or failure by Congress to fund the U.S. contribution to the project could still jeopardize timely implementation of the agreements. As this case study shows, the U.S. policymaking processes become especially cumbersome when Russian nuclear issues involve conflicting U.S. policy priorities. In its relations with Russia in the nuclear area, the U.S. government has often been hard pressed to balance its nonproliferation, arms control, reactor safety, and energy policy goals. The dynamic nature of Russian political institutions and preferences has only complicated this balancing act.
A more centralized U.S. decisionmaking process might have aided in the extremely difficult task of ranking U.S. negotiating priorities and thus resulted in more U.S. leverage over reactor shutdown and over other goals, such as a fissile material production cut-off for weapons.[59] But, if signed, the agreements negotiated in January 1997 would still remove the issue of Russian plutonium production from the broad array of obstacles that confront proponents of a bilateral or multilateral ban on fissile material for weapons. Meanwhile, like other cooperative projects in the former Soviet Union, a reactor shutdown agreement would help sustain a productive U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship during a period that is likely to witness new challenges to U.S.-Russian cooperative security efforts.