By IPS Correspondents
MOSCOW, Apr 8 1996 (IPS)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry are joining forces to build a giant underground storage centre for the former Soviet Union’s stockpile of fissile material retrieved from dismantled nuclear weapons.

In a remarkable example of post Cold War cooperation the ministry (MinAtom) and the Corps of Engineers’ Transatlantic Programmes Centre will coordinate building of storage facilities for plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) near the city of Ozersk — formerly the top secret closed city of Chelyabinsk-65.

San Francisco-based company Bechtel has signed a 2.5 million dollar contract to act as design and construction contractor and to provide support to a Russian contractor in design, equipment, materials, construction and construction management.

The contract is for one year with four one-year options to follow. Construction has already been started at the site which will eventually boast a complex of 21 buildings including a train unloading building that will serve as a receiving, testing, temporary storage and preparation area.

The materials will be moved using remote handling equipment through the site’s inspection and analysis centres before being transferred into adjacent storage facilities. Once completed, the facility will be immediately placed under the control of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, according to Atomic Energy Minister Viktor Mikhailov.

It will contain about 40 percent of all Russia’s weapons-grade plutonium, he said. At present Russia stores weapons-grade plutonium at the Mayak chemical plant and at the Tomsk-7 and Krasnoyarsk-27 nuclear centres.

The nuclear facility at Tomsk-7 in Siberia was originally slated to host the new store but was dropped as an option after a serious accident in April 1993 when a reprocessing tank exploded.

Some 300 million dollars will eventually be invested in the Ozersk facility, with the U.S. providing 50 percent and also allowing Russian participation in a project to build a similar storage facility in the United States. Mikhailov said the U.S. had already allocated 75 million dollars for the construction.

However hopes that the store will keep the plutonium out of ciruclation have been dashed by Russia’s clear intention to continue and even increase the recycling of warhead plutonium.

Plans are in place to recycle more than 12 tonnes of highly- enriched plutonium obtained from decommissioned nuclear missiles in 1996, and another 25-30 tonnes in 1997, Mikhailov noted.

Last year MinAtom introduced new technology to recycle nearly six tonnes of plutonium, he said, adding that in 1995 the ministry’s enterprises met all their international obligations for destroying and reprocessing nuclear weapons.

Russian experts have managed to bring the cost of dismantling one nuclear missile down to 10,000 to 15,000 dollars, compared with the 50,000 to 100,000 dollars quoted in the United States.

Mikhailov added that specialists at the Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 nuclear centres continued to work on military projects, mainly to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons systems.

However conversion to civilian output is under way at 60 of the ministry’s defence enterprises and 30 of its research organisations, he said. Pure military production took up just ten percent of the overall work of the ministry last year.

MinAtom sees plutonium as a valuable potential energy resource. Russia currently has stockpiled 100 tonnes of weapons grade plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads and bombs as well as 30 tonnes of reactor grade plutonium mainly from reprocessing spent fuel from its small pressurised water VVER-440 reactors.

The RT-1 reprocessing plant at the Mayak Production Association near Ozersk, about 1,500 miles southeast of Moscow, is producing around 0.6 tonnes of plutonium a year. If it were working at full capacity this would rise to 2.5 tonnes.

MinAtom’s long-term plans involve using plutonium as a reactor fuel and to burn it in specially adapted fast breeder reactors (FBRs).

FBRs were originally intended to both burn and produce extra plutonium but now the designs have been changed so that plutonium is only burned. The plan involves using the plutonium in mixed oxide (MOX) fuel.

Russia has the most advanced FBR programme in the world with several operating research facilities at various institutes such as the Research Institute for Atomic Reactors (RIAR) at Dimitrovgrad in Ulyanovsk and at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering in Obninsk (IPPE).

It has also built two commercial-scale FBRs both of which are still operating — a 350MW reactor known as BN-350 at Shevchenko in Kazakhstan and the larger BN-600 at Beloyarsk in the Urals.

Designs for an even bigger and more advanced BN-800 are completed and approval has been granted for the construction of two or three at the Mayak site but these are on hold for financial reasons.

Russia now intends to build its first BN-800 at Beloyarsk instead, says plant general director, Valery Budziyevsky.

An alliance of national and regional power companies; the Rosenergoatom company, the Sverdlovsk Region administration, Beloyarsk plant, and the companies Sverdlovenergo and Uralenergo have set up a joint venture, BAES-2, to implement the project, costed at about 330 million dollars.

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