[NukeNet] Russians to Shut Reactor That Produces Bomb Fuel

[Bill Smirnow]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/world/europe/20russia.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=nuclear&st=nyt&oref=slogin
Russians to Shut Reactor That Produces Bomb Fuel

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By C.J. CHIVERS
Published: April 20, 2008
MOSCOW - Russia's state nuclear energy corporation is expected to switch off
a nuclear reactor on Sunday in a closed city in Siberia. The reactor has
been producing weapons-grade plutonium for four decades, a senior American
nonproliferation official said Saturday.

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The New York Times
Seversk and Tomsk, in Siberia, are bitterly cold in winter.

The reactor, ADE-4, is one of two in the city of Seversk that have been
extraneous remnants of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program since the
cold war. For 15 years, they produced plutonium that the Kremlin neither
needed nor wanted.

Opened in secret in the 1960s to feed the arms race, the reactors have
continued to operate because of their peculiar construction as
defense-industry suppliers.

The Defense Ministry stopped purchasing plutonium in 1993, rendering the
reactors' primary purpose obsolete. But the reactors could not be closed,
and plutonium was still produced, because the reactors were also a primary
source of heat and power to the bitterly cold regions along the Tomsk River,
where no equivalent utility sources had been built.

Russian energy officials said switching off the bomb-fuel reactors, which
are powered by uranium and produce plutonium as a byproduct, would have
meant cutting off a large fraction of the utilities for the cities of
Seversk and Tomsk. The cities have a combined population of about 600,000.

"That is obviously critical when you are facing temperatures of 40 below,"
said William H. Tobey, deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security
Administration, a semiautonomous agency in the Department of Energy that
coordinates nonproliferation programs.

Under a cooperative program between the Russians and the Americans, the
United States has provided $285 million to underwrite the refurbishment of a
coal plant to provide an alternate utility service to the region, Mr. Tobey
said.

The plant has been refurbished enough to switch off the first reactor this
week. It is expected to be completed and in full service by June, allowing
the second reactor, ADE-5, to be turned off as well.

Although an agreement on the program was reached in 1997 and work on the
coal plant began in 2005, Russia notified the United States of its plans to
turn off the reactor only on Friday, two American officials said. It had
been expected to close later this year.

Officials at Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation, could
not be reached Saturday.

Mr. Tobey declined to say how much plutonium the reactors had produced,
saying that Russia had opposed the public release of data related to its
nuclear programs.

But closing the reactors, he said, would prevent "tons of plutonium" from
being produced, he said, enough to make hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand have also donated money,
about $30 million, to replace Russia's remaining plutonium-producing
reactors with fossil-fuel plants, Mr. Tobey said.

The country's only other plutonium-producing reactor, in Zheleznogorsk, is
scheduled to be switched off and replaced with a fossil-fuel plant in 2010.
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