Russia Earns $4 Billion from Nuclear Conversion

Ten years since the the implementation of a Russian-US 'megatonnes into megawatts' agreement, Russia has earned 4bn dollars for its budget, Russian Deputy Atomic Energy Minister and State Secretary Valeriy Govorukhin told journalists today in connection with the anniversary of the project.

He said that over the period of the project's implementation, "8,000 nuclear warheads have been dismantled and extracted uranium has been used as fuel for atomic power plants".

"All funds raised from this project have gone to the Russian budget and accounted for about 10 per cent of tax revenues anticipated by the government," Govorukhin explained. These funds "are a budget source to fund programmes for increasing safety of Russian atomic power plants, for converting defence productions and for ecological clearing up of territories contaminated as a result of the Atomic Energy Ministry enterprises' activities", he said.

Atomic Energy Minister Aleksandr Rumyantsev has said that the essence of the "megatonnes into megawatts" project is that "highly enriched uranium extracted from nuclear warheads is turned into fuel uranium for nuclear reactions". "Thus, half of the fuel uranium has been supplied to the USA," the minister said. "About 50 per cent of US atomic power plants are operating on uranium extracted from Soviet missiles at the moment."