In one of the great feel-good, swords-into-plowshares stories of our time, the New York Times recently reported that something like 10% of American electricity is generated by old Russian nuclear bombs.
No joke.
That’s more than all our hydro, solar, biomass, wind, and geothermal power, combined.
Here’s how it works. The leaders of the United States and Russia get together and decide to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal. They agree to decommission, say, 20,000 warheads over a couple of decades.
Great! Fewer warheads, safer world.
Of course, there’s a wrinkle. Those 20,000 warheads contain hundreds of tons of highly enriched uranium. You can’t just throw it away, or leave it lying around, or auction it off on eBay.
But you can recycle it.
The old Russian warheads are sent to formerly secret military-industrial cities in Siberia where they’re ground up and put through a chemical process that reduces their potency. The material goes from having about 90% of the isotope U-235 to having less than 5%, which is ideal for the fuel that powers nuclear reactors.
(Interesting sidebar: I saw a few pictures of these Siberian warhead-cracking facilities. One of the factories still sports a gigantic sign on its roof, a relic from Soviet days, which reads, if I’m translating it correctly, “All hail the working classes!” This, in a factory that is exporting 100% of its very profitable fuel to evil capitalist pig-dogs.)
The remanufactured fuel is shipped to St. Petersburg, where a private American corporation, called, without any hint of irony, the United States Enrichment Corporation, accepts delivery, and then distributes the fuel to a nuclear power plant near you.
As much as 45% of the fuel in American nuclear reactors is a product of Mother Russia. Heartwarming, isn’t it, the idea that the fiery core of Three Mile Island, just over Blue Mountain, might be powered by defunct Soviet nukes?
Unfortunately, this very successful program–which has been given the cutesy name of “Megatons for Megawatts,” probably to make the prospect of grinding down nuclear warheads and scattering their ashes to the corners of the world somewhat less frightening–is in trouble. The supply of decommissioned warheads is dwindling. 15,000 of them have already been processed, which only leaves a few thousand to go.
You might think that this was a good thing. And it is, from the perspective of handing our children a safer world.
But it’s a real disaster for nuclear power generators. They’ve gotten addicted to the cheap, pure stuff that has been flowing from Russia. Refining uranium ore into nuclear fuel is much more expensive than simply scoring it from your favorite international dealer.
The good news is that there are more arms reduction talks in the works. The current Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty expires on December 5th. Russia and the U.S. are working towards a new agreement that would limit the warheads on each side to about 1500. Which would mean a fresh supply of obsolete warheads for the nuclear fuel mill.
The United States Enrichment Corporation (www.usec.com), which benefits mightily from the current arrangement, is bullish on the future of Megatons to Megawatts. You can learn all sorts of interesting facts about the program on their website. For instance, that the energy from the uranium in 20,000 nuclear warheads is equivalent to 2.9 billion tons of coal, or 10.3 billion barrels of oil, or 62.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Those are truly staggering numbers. To help us understand what those amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas actually mean, the website offers a helpful comparison. The amount of energy in those warheads, or in that coal, oil, or natural gas, is enough to power the city of Seattle for 767 years.
Or the entire United States for 2 years.
But here’s the statistic, out of all the apocalyptic statistics I came across, that truly astonished me.
All of those megatons, or billions of tons or barrels, or trillions of cubic feet, would only power the world for four months.
Four months! And the global appetite for energy just keeps growing.
I’m all for shrinking the world’s nuclear arsenal. But the addiction to cheap energy is a deadly habit we all need to kick.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 19 November 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
