FAS Nuclear Weapon Non-Proliferation Project

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HELPING DEVELOP NON-PROLIFERATION AND ARMS CONTROL CENTERS WITHIN THE RUSSIAN NUCLEAR COMPLEX

As part of the non-governmental work on the Nuclear Cities Initiative, FAS has encouraged and supported nascent arms control and non-proliferation initiatives involving scientists and engineers working in the Russian nuclear weapons and reactors institutes.

Read about these growing Russian arms control centers at: "New Russian Arms Control Centers in the Weapons Complex"

HELPING RUSSIA'S THREE "PLUTONIUM CITIES" FIND ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES TO THE SEPARATION OF MORE PLUTONIUM

Three of Russia's "closed" cities (Chelyabinsk-65, Tomsk-7 and Krasnoyarsk-26) were largely built to produce plutonium for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Now there is no need for weapons plutonium, they are looking for other missions. The path of least resistance appears to be to go into the business of reprocessing spent power-reactor fuel -- as the corresponding establishments in Britain and France have already done. Indeed, already 17 years ago, Chelyabinsk-65 began to reprocess spent fuel from first-generation Soviet light-water reactors that had been built in Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe and Finland. And Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy recently received permission from President Yeltsin to seek foreign investors to build a huge reprocessing plant in Krasnoyarsk-26.

The economic and environmental justifications for reprocessing are, however, respectively wrong and unconvincing, and the separation of plutonium makes the weapons-useable material accessible for theft and sale on the black market. Russia is already struggling to deal with the security of the surplus plutonium coming out of its dismantled weapons and Chelyabinsk-65.

Nevertheless, it is important that the plutonium cities, which have responsibility for the security of huge quantities of weapons- useable fissile material, not collapse economically. Alternative missions must be found.

At the suggestion of the F.A.S., a workshop on this subject was held in Moscow during April 1995. Leaders of Krasnoyarsk-26 shared their conversion proposals. F.A.S. is now helping seeking potential U.S. partners.

F.A.S. has also raised in Germany (in May 1995) the possibility of an international consortium buying Russian weapons plutonium and converting it into reactor fuel at a facility which is being abandoned by the German utilities because of local opposition to the recycle of German plutonium. The idea is that, if the German utilities agree to abandon reprocessing of their fuel in Britain and France, then it should be acceptable to use the facility to dispose of Russian weapons plutonium -- and (if Russia too agrees to abandon further plutonium separation) even already separated power-reactor plutonium in Russia. In addition to disposing of surplus Russian plutonium, this project would create work for the Russian plutonium cities in converting the plutonium components of weapons into plutonium oxide in preparation for its fabrication into fuel in Germany. This proposal is now being seriously debated in Germany.