Russia: - WikiLeaks



Russia: A Uranium Deal for U.S. Power Plants

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Summary

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Analysis

Russia’s Techsnabexport (Tenex), a unit of the Russian state-owned atomic[nuclear-power?] company Atomenergoprom, signed $1 billion worth of deals May 26 to supply U.S. energy utilities with nuclear fuel for electricity generation in nuclear power plants. The agreement with the California utility Pacific Gas & Electric and the Texas utility Luminant will see Tenex supply low-enriched uranium (LEU) nuclear fuel from 2014 until 2020 that will power 5 million homes in the United States. Following the signing, Tenex CEO Anatoly Grigoryev said he was confident that similar agreements with U.S. utilities will follow.

Until now, Russia had supplied LEU for use in U.S. reactors only as part of the 1993 “megatons to megawatts” agreement, a program that sought to “de-blend” the high-enriched uranium (HEU) from the former Soviet nuclear weapons arsenal into LEU for use in nuclear power plants. The latest agreement, however, is the first to open up the lucrative -- and sizable -- U.S. market to Russian producers of nuclear fuel from virgin uranium ore. The agreement may be the first of many that U.S. utilities will make with foreign suppliers of nuclear fuel as the United States faces a serious shortage of LEU when the 1993 agreement expires in 2013.

Uranium for use in most nuclear power-plant reactors needs to be enriched to contain a greater proportion of uranium-235, the isotope responsible for a fission chain reaction, than the amount naturally found in mined uranium ore. Naturally occurring uranium contains only about 0.7 percent of uranium-235, while most nuclear power reactors require 3 to 5 percent (which is why it’s called low-enriched uranium). Weapons-grade uranium contains 90 percent uranium-235 (which is why it’s called high-enriched uranium). Enriching processes are complex and energy-intensive and require considerable technical know-how, which makes it easier to control the global trade in enriched uranium. Four conglomerates control nearly all of the world's nuclear fuel production: Tenex, AREVA (France), Urenco (Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom) and the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC).

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One can compare uranium enrichment to oil refining in that the commodity needs to be processed before it can be used as a source of energy. Just as crude oil needs to be refined in order to be turned into petroleum products, so too does mined uranium ore have to be processed into enriched uranium in order to be used in nuclear power plants (although the Canadian technology of pressurized heavy-water reactors, so called CANDU reactors, can use non-enriched uranium as fuel). Just as many oil users have to import refined petroleum products, so too do many nuclear reactor operators have to import enriched uranium to fuel their electricity-generating plants. Many consumers of nuclear fuel, including the United States, also face a shortage of enriched uranium and are forced to import it.

The United States uses nuclear power for about 20 percent of its electricity needs, with around 40 percent of the LEU fuel for its 104 active plants[this is the U.S. total?] imported from Russia as part of the “megatons to megawatts” arrangement. The program is intended to offer Russians a commercial incentive for decommissioning their nuclear arsenal and therefore has nonproliferation benefits. It allows for the de-blending of 500 metric tons of HEU (enough for 13,000 nuclear warheads) out of approximately 1,250 metric tons of weapons-sourced HEU. Thus far, around 325 metric tons of HEU have been de-blended for commercial use and shipped to the United States. 

The de-blended uranium is imported from Russia duty-free by USEC, which is formerly a government-owned entity privatized in 1998. USEC has been allowed to import Russian nuclear fuel as long as weapons-grade HEU was used as the feedstock. Meanwhile, Russian LEU produced from virgin uranium ore (not de-blended from weapons-grade uranium) was restricted by a “suspension agreement” because of accusations by U.S. uranium-enrichment producers that Russia was dumping enriched uranium on the U.S. market. This trade restriction was lifted in February 2008 with a decision to allow non-blended enriched uranium to enter the United States from 2014 until 2020, but not to exceed 20 percent of total U.S. imports.

Russia's large enrichment capacity is a vestige of a military-industrial complex geared to compete with the U.S. military-industrial complex. Russia has more than 40 percent of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity, or approximately 25 million of a global total of 54 million “separative work units” (SWUs), which represent the energy needed to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238.[Is this a correct and adequate definition of SWUs?] Of this capacity, Russia needs only 8 million SWUs for domestic nuclear power uses. Moscow is not interested in renewing the "megatons for megawatts" program, largely because it can use the de-blended uranium for its domestic market and sell the uranium it enriches from virgin ore abroad, to the United States, Europe and Japan.

The United States is trying to increase its domestic production of enriched uranium, but its efforts will not be completed before the “megatons to megawatts” agreement expires in 2013, which will force the United States to import a significant proportion of its enriched uranium.

In 2007, the U.S. market required 14.2 million SWUs -- almost a third of total global enriched-uranium demand -- and 5.5 million of those SWUs (nearly 40 percent) were provided by Russia through the "megatons for megawatts" program. There is currently only one USEC enrichment facility operating in the United States that uses an older and much more expensive gaseous diffusion technology. The plant, located in Paducah, Kentucky, supplied approximately 5.7 million SWUs to the U.S. market in 2007. Today, with centrifuge-enrichment technology about 50 times more energy efficient than gaseous diffusion, the facility is slated to be phased out.

Replacing the Paducah facility will be two centrifuge plants currently under construction. The Louisiana Energy Services centrifuge enrichment facility in Lea County, New Mexico, is scheduled to begin operations in late 2009 and to be fully online in 2013, adding 3 million to 6 million SWUs to U.S. LEU production. USEC's centrifuge- enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio, eventually will bring another 3.8 million SWUs to domestic production when it becomes fully operational in 2012. Two other planned projects are a yet-to-be-approved plant in Bonneville County, Idaho, to be built by the French nuclear technology group AREVA and projected to produce 6.6 SWUs by 2019, and a "global laser enrichment" (GLE) facility to be built by GE and Hitachi in North Carolina, which could reach somewhere between 3.5 million and 6 million SWUs at some point after 2012.

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Projections for the four proposed U.S. plants are optimistic. Two of the facilities, the USEC Piketon plant and the GE-Hitachi GLE plant, will be using new technology and the AREVA plant may not be built (pending approval). Hence, production of enriched uranium in the United States most likely will not exceed 11 million SWUs by 2014, falling well short of total demand.

Since U.S. domestic enrichment facilities have no chance of meeting domestic nuclear- fuel demand by the time the "megaton to megawatts" agreement expires in 2013, importing Russian LEU from non-blended sources may have to become standard practice -- at least until the United States manages to ramp up its enrichment capabilities. Foreign sources of enriched uranium could become even more important as greenhouse-gas emissions and dependence on foreign sources of oil enter the U.S. energy policy equation[LINK?]. These concerns could push Washington to expand U.S. nuclear power capacity and build more reactors, thus increasing its domestic demand for enriched uranium even more.   

Global demand for nuclear fuel could also increase as Europe seeks to expand its reliance on nuclear power [LINK?] in order to diversify from Russian energy sources and as developing countries become more committed to nuclear energy. But as Europe weans itself from Russian [natural gas?], the United States could rely more on Russian enriched uranium, which would give Moscow another geopolitical lever to use however its sees fit.

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