Power lines come off the nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, with the operational plant run by Exelon Generation on the right, in Middletown, Penn. in 2019.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left in its wake one of the deadliest messes in human history: hundreds of tonnes of highly enriched uranium. Masses of weapons-grade material were stored across Russia and its satellite states, some of it in places with fragile security.
The Cold War was over but its most fearsome armaments − tens of thousands of nuclear warheads − remained, newly vulnerable to theft or export to other hostile regimes. Few would have imagined that Washington and Moscow, after decades as bitter foes, could co-operate to dismantle those threatening stockpiles.
But leaders of the two countries, with some involvement from Canada, France and other countries, worked together to collect 500 tonnes of bomb-grade uranium, enough for 20,000 nuclear weapons. They fashioned a unique commercial deal, paying Russia roughly US$17-billion for material that was then blended down and made into fuel for nuclear reactors. Over two decades, roughly half the fuel consumed by U.S. nuclear reactors came from those Soviet stockpiles − 10 per cent of all electricity generation in America over that time. Some went to Canadian nuclear plants, too.
A post-Cold War operation kept enriched uranium out of Iran’s hands decades ago
It is a little-known chapter in history but one that is “enormously relevant” again today, as Washington and another of its foes – Iran – battle over the future of another stockpile of enriched uranium, said Andrea Bartoli, a conflict resolution expert at Columbia University.
Iran’s estimated 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium amounts to a tiny fraction of what Soviet Russia had amassed. Iran remains firmly in the grip of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its people and politics unaltered by anything like the glasnost policy of media and political freedom that eventually swept the Communist Party out of power in Moscow. The prospect of co-operation with Tehran has grown more difficult to believe with each failed peace proposal − and each new round of deadly attacks.
And yet, “if you know that something succeeded, something similar could succeed again,” said Prof. Bartoli, who has spent years studying the 1990s-era Megatons to Megawatts Program.
Trucks carrying containers with uranium line up for loading at a port in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Nov. 14, 2013. The final shipment under the Megatons to Megawatts program arrived at the end of that year.Dmitry Lovetsky/The Associated Press
It was, after all, less than a decade from Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech − and barely two years after he announced the “Star Wars” project, “an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history” − that the U.S. and Russia agreed to work on nuclear arsenal reduction. Shortly thereafter, they began to co-operate on the transformation of Soviet uranium into feedstock for generating American electricity.
“The Iran problem is not a technical problem. The Iran problem is a political problem. If the actors involved are willing to seek a solution, Megatons to Megawatts can certainly help in offering options that could be in the interests of everybody,” Prof. Bartoli said.
It is an idea whose currency inside the current White House is difficult to gauge, as President Donald Trump and his cabinet vacillate between talks, threats and new air strikes.
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But for those who once worked to turn weapons-grade material into power for toasters, it’s a history worth remembering.
“Circumstances change, and you never know whether this once again will become a model,” said Jerry Grandey, who once held senior positions with the Uranium Producers of America and Cameco, the Saskatoon-based uranium producer, where he became president in 2000.
The seriousness of the post-Soviet nuclear problem was hard to overstate. After the dissolution of the USSR, money dried up to pay for scientists who occupied critical roles in Russia’s nuclear establishment.
“There was a high risk, given the need for hard currency in the Soviet Union, that weapons would be sold or scientists would be hired by nations like Iran, Iraq, Libya or North Korea,” Mr. Grandey recalled.
A military exhibition displays a Revolutionary Guard missile, the Shahab-3 missile, near a picture of then-Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Sept. 23, 2008.HASAN SARBAKHSHIAN/The Associated Press
In October of 1991, Thomas Neff, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed a solution: Pay Russia for the material and turn it into electricity.
At first, the idea raised alarm in Ottawa, which so feared the Soviet feedstock would damage the market for Canadian uranium that it threatened a NAFTA trade challenge. At that time, “45 per cent of American uranium imports came from Canada − mostly Saskatchewan,” recalled Guy Saint-Jacques, who was then a Canadian diplomat in Washington, D.C. Imports of low-enriched uranium from Russia “would result in substantial reduction of Canadian shipments.”
Talks with Congress and numerous U.S. federal departments, Mr. Grandey said, “convinced them that Cameco was probably the only enterprise big enough to handle the quantity of Russian materials that was going to come into the market and keep the price stable.” Price was important, not only to maintain corporate profitability but also to ensure that Russia would receive the revenues it had been promised.
The volume of low-enriched uranium involved in the deal was equivalent to about 430 million pounds of natural uranium, so much that Cameco and a French partner delayed developing a new mine. The agreement was structured to spread the program out over 20 years to avoid swamping the market. The bulk of the uranium was purchased from Russia and then resold in Western markets by Cameco and its French partner, then known as COGEMA and later as Areva.
Workers remove the warhead of a Soviet-era SS-19 nuclear missile at a military base near the Ukrainian town of Khmelnitsky as they prepare it to ship to Russia in April, 1995.Stringer ./Reuters
The processing of the uranium was done in Russia, under the scrutiny of U.S. inspectors to verify that 90-per-cent enriched uranium was being taken down to the 4- to 5-per-cent levels usable for electricity generation. It was shipped from St. Petersburg to the U.S., and the final shipment arrived at the end of 2013.
“All of this went into the production of electricity − every pound,” Mr. Grandey said. He estimates that between 3 and 5 per cent went to nuclear plants in Canada.
That history now stands as a talisman of a different time. Months after the last of the Soviet uranium reached U.S. shores, Russia invaded Crimea. U.S.-Russia treaties to reduce nuclear arms have lapsed, the last one earlier this year.
On Iran, meanwhile, Mr. Trump has flatly rejected the latest proposal from Tehran, accusing the country’s leaders of backtracking on a previous agreement that would have allowed the U.S. to remove its stockpile of enriched uranium.
Nonetheless, those who helped limit the post-Soviet nuclear arsenal remain hopeful, including Jeffrey Hughes, who worked on the deal across a range of roles in the U.S. government and last year published a lengthy manuscript documenting its history.
“Just as some cooperative projects that came to pass after the Cold War seemed impossible during it, so too, despite the war and tensions today, we should remain alert to future possibilities to turn swords once again into plowshares,” he wrote.