Looking Back at Twenty Years of Implementation and Transparency Monitoring under the 1993 United States-Russian Federation Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement

The 1993 United States-Russian Federation Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) Purchase Agreement is often described as the world’s most successful nuclear nonproliferation program. In 2013, the United States and Russian Federation achieved the Agreement’s major goals of downblending 500 metric tons (MT) of Russian weapons- origin HEU to low enriched uranium (LEU) and delivering all resultant LEU to the United States. This LEU has been used to produce nearly 10% of all electricity generated annually In the United States since 1999. The Agreement requires reciprocal transparency monitoring to demonstrate that LEU delivered under the Agreement was derived from weapons-origin HEU, and that the same LEU was used for exclusively peaceful purposes in the United States. During the early years of its implementation, the technical development and implementation of on-site monitoring measures required by the Agreement were a major undertaking for both sides. As the Agreement matured, implementation of the Agreement became less burdensome. This paper describes the scope of U.S. transparency monitoring activities in Russian HEU processing facilities, as well as Russian monitoring in the United States. In addition, the paper discusses the results of twenty years of reciprocal transparency monitoring, and describes the unique government-industry partnership that supports the Agreement’s commercial implementation.