Megatons to Megawatts: Dismantled Nuclear Weapons Currently Provide 10% of America’s Electricity

Currently, hydropower provides 6% of the USA’s electrical power, and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal combined provide 3%.

Dismantled nuclear weapons currently provide 10%. Quite literally, swords to plowshares – an oddly reassuring discovery.

As we rapidly approach peak oil, is it possible that predictions of possible resource wars culminating in a nuclear exchange will not happen, because if it got to the stage where any country was prepared to use nukes to secure their energy supplies, it would simply make more sense to dismantle them and use them as fuel?

The fissile material from Russia’s ex-weapons currently provides about 45% of the fuel in US nuclear reactors, and former American weapons provide 5%. This programme was instituted in the 1990s as a means to secure the weapons no longer needed with the fall of the USSR. It has meant a cheap and plentiful supply of fissile material, and also massive financial savings from not having to maintain the warheads themselves, along with the missiles and other delivery systems they used to be part of.

Nuclear disarmament appears to make extremely good sense from an economic point of view, and it is also a cheap and plentiful source of energy. It is  a win-win strategy for the increasingly resource constrained world we seem to find ourselves moving into.

The current supplies of fissile material, from the previous rounds of disarmament, are scheduled to run out in 2013. Interestingly, the US and Russia are currently negotiating a treaty to further reduce their stockpile of weapons.

To quote the New York Times, which has an excellent article on this:

“Treaties at the end of the cold war led to the decommissioning of thousands of warheads. Their energy-rich cores are converted into civilian reactor fuel.

In the United States, the agreements are portrayed as nonproliferation treaties — intended to prevent loose nukes in Russia.

In Russia, where the government argues that fissile materials are impenetrably secure already, the arms agreements are portrayed as a way to make it harder for the United States to reverse disarmament.

The program for dismantling and diluting the fuel cores of decommissioned Russian warheads — known informally as Megatons to Megawatts — is set to expire in 2013, just as the industry is trying to sell it forcefully as an alternative to coal-powered energy plants, which emit greenhouse gases…

…In the United States, domestic weapons recycling programs are smaller in scale and would be no replacement for Megatons for Megawatts. The Nuclear Fuel Services, in Erwin, Tenn., in 2005 began diluting uranium from the 217 tons the government declared surplus; so far 125 tons have been processed. It is used at the Tennessee Valley Authority plant.

The American plutonium recycling program is also well under way at a factory being built at the Energy Department’s Savannah River site in South Carolina to dismantle warheads from the American arsenal; a type of plutonium fuel, called mixed-oxide fuel, will come on the market in 2017.

In total, the 34 tons to be recycled there are expected to generate enough electricity for a million American homes for 50 years.”