RUSSIAN-AMERICAN COOPERATION IN DEVELOPING A RUSSIAN PLUTONIUM REGISTRY

One of the most important new nuclear developments in the nineties was the joint Russian-American decision to withdraw considerable amounts of plutonium, no longer needed for nuclear weapons, from defense programs and make these materials available for civilian applications. [1-3]. Implementation of this political decision made by Russia and the USA is a complicated problem having quite a number of political, financial, scientific, technological and environmental aspects. Non-proliferation, predictability and transparency issues are of great importance. International consultations on the issue of plutonium management were initiated in 1992, marking an important step toward the development of a common international approach in this area. As a result of these consultations, “Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium” were issued as an IAEA document, INFCIRC/549. In 1998, the governments of 9 countries signed “notes verbales” committing them to submit annual reports to the IAEA on their civilian plutonium stocks. In Russia, Minatom and the State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation, Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (SSC RF IPPE) were assigned responsibility for implementation of the “Guidelines for the Management of Plutonium” and preparation of the relevant document drafts. SSC RF IPPE was designated for two reasons. First, SSC RF IPPE is a coordinator of research work on utilization of plutonium declared by the Russian Government to be no longer required for national defense purposes. Second, SSC RF IPPE is a coordinator of the Program of Russian- American Cooperation on the Plutonium Problem. In the process of cooperation, the material balance of plutonium produced and used during the whole history of the nuclear programs in Russia and the USA is a key issue, which has been discussed many times by experts from RF Minatom and the US Department of Energy. In 1996, a report entitled “Plutonium: The First 50 Years” was published in the USA [4]. This report outlined the data on production, separation and use of plutonium since the beginning of the US nuclear weapons program in 1944. When the report was issued, the US Department of Energy expressed the hope that that similar documents would be prepared and published in other nuclear weapon states, including Russia. The United Kingdom, for example, published a similar report in 2000. Because of some internal reasons, such a document has not yet been prepared in Russia. Nevertheless, Russian-American technical cooperation in 1999-2001 resulted in some progress in working out a plutonium balance in Russia. This paper presents basic results of work performed under two contracts between LANL (USA) and SSC RF IPPE aimed at creating a Russian analytical and historical database on plutonium entitled “Russian Plutonium Registry (RPR)”. The paper describes the main steps in this Russian-American cooperation.