"Megatons to Megawatts Program"

A bit off topic but was reading that under the "Megatons to Megawatts Program" which concluded in 2013 where basically Russia sells uranium to USA that's came from deactivated nuclear weapons. You can read more if you Google the agreement.

"A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. The program was the largest and most successful nuclear non-proliferation program to date. During the 20-year Megatons to Megawatts program, as much as 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using LEU from Russian HEU."

Yeah it flooded the uranium market and sent fuel prices crashing down when it was introduced. A lot of mines closed down.

d_taddei2 wrote:"A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia ."

Are these figures correct? This translates into 40 tonnes of HEU per warhead. Unbelievable.

Because of the , instead of .

Taken from a book called nuclear shadow boxing written by Vadim Simonenko and George Stanford. Am not sure of the process involved, but that's what the figures they provided. Don't shoot the messenger. Lol

I thought he was referring to the conversion of 500 tons of HEU to 15,000 tons of LEU, but that would be 30 times...

d_taddei2 wrote:Taken from a book called nuclear shadow boxing written by Vadim Simonenko and George Stanford. Am not sure of the process involved, but that's what the figures they provided. Don't shoot the messenger. Lol

Not shooting the messenger. Just trying to get a clarification. Usually a warhead in a ICBM has around 15kg HEU. The figures cited here were quite high.

Isos wrote: That was obvious...

How is that obvious? Most countries use the decimal system.

I would imagine that the warheads would have from various sizes. Some might have been prototypes etc. Scientists state a minimum of 15kg HEU is needed to what they deem to be a nuclear bomb. In comparison the bomb dropped on Nagasaki used 64kgs of HEU that produced a 16 ""kiloton"" yield.
Now early R-36 missiles had 18-25 """megaton"""" yield. Am certainly not a nuclear bomb expert and not sure of the finer details. What I believe is nation's never fully divulge nuclear information about weapons and capabilities. The Russians/Soviets could have told everyone a certain missile only has a 10 megaton yield when in fact it could be 20 megaton.

But whatever went on in the deal we will oy ever know what was divulged to the media.

The real point is that of the thousands of nuclear warheads both sides had during the cold war the Soviet warheads were used to power the US electricity grid and also provide money to the Russian state when it needed some. The US warheads went into long term storage... which is interesting.

If they wanted cheap energy to wean themselves off their dependancy on oil they could render their own nuclear weapons into thousands of tons of fuel rod material and use that to generate cheap power for themselves.

They also haven't met their commitments to destroy bio, and chemical weapons either.... perhaps Russia should start bringing these things up too every time they have talks about anything at all.