Megatons to Megawatts Program

The Megatons to Megawatts Program, also called the United States-Russia Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, was an agreement between Russia and the United States whereby Russia converted 500 metric tons of "excess" weapons-grade uranium (enough for 20,000 warheads) into 15,000 metric tons of low enriched uranium, which was purchased by the US for use in its commercial nuclear power plants. The official name of the program is the "Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Disposition of Highly-Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons", dated February 18, 1993.^[1] Under this Agreement, Russia agreed to supply the United States with low-enriched uranium (LEU) obtained from high-enriched uranium (HEU) found to be in excess of Russian defense purposes. The United States agreed to purchase the low-enriched uranium fuel.

The original proposal for this program was made by Thomas Neff, a physicist at MIT, in an October 24, 1991 Op-Ed in The New York Times.^[2] On August 28, 1992, in Moscow, U.S. and Russian negotiators initialed the 20-year agreement and President George H. W. Bush announced the agreement on August 31, 1992.^[3] In 1993, the agreement was signed and initiated by President Bill Clinton and the commercial implementing contract was then signed by both parties. The program was successfully completed in December 2013.

The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US.