Russia opens world’s first nuclear fuel bank

Russia announced yesterday that it had created the world’s first international atomic fuel bank as part of a global effort to curb the spread of nuclear arms to nations such as North Korea and Iran.

The Rosatom state atomic energy corporation said the Siberian fuel reserve which will operate under the auspices of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear watchdog will have enough material to refuel two civilian nuclear power plants.

“The purpose of this facility is to reduce the risk of other countries processing their own uranium to a minimum,” former Foreign Intelligence Service chief Gennady Yevstafyev said. “This will dramatically improve control over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

The Angarsk bank is the first of about a dozen facilities proposed by various nations following the 2003 discovery of covert enrichment activity in Iran.

The plant now stores 120 tonnes of low-enriched uranium (LEU) that has been enriched to between two and 4.95 per cent. Scientists say it can satisfy the electricity needs of a 12-million-strong city for up to a year. The fuel is considered safe because the weapons-grade uranium desired by nations seeking to build nuclear weapons must be enriched to at least 90 per cent. The IAEA approved the Russian reserve’s creation at a historic but contentious two-day meeting in November.

The type of fuel stored in Angarsk is used by most of today’s civilian nuclear power plants. Russia first proposed the idea to the IAEA in September 2007 amid fears here that supply cut-offs could be used by Western nations for political purposes.

“This bank was created under the Russian President’s initiative to form a global nuclear energy infrastructure (that would ensure) reliable compliance with the nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime,” Rosatom said in a statement.