plutonium. Because of the delays in commercializing fast breeder reactors that would consume plutonium separated by reprocessing, all other major reprocessing countries except Britain have decided to use plutonium as MOX in LWRs, to avoid the buildup of large stores of separated plutonium. Russia has not yet taken this route, preferring to save both military and civilian separated plutonium for eventual use in breeder reactors (see below). Russia already has some 25 tons of excess civilian separated plutonium, and more is building up every year, in addition to the excess military plutonium resulting from arms reductions. Some use of MOX in VVER-1000s is now being considered for the long term, however, during the transition to a breeder economy that MINATOM officials envision. Whether that transition will occur within the next several decades, and what will happen to the stored separated plutonium if it does not, remain controversial.
If full-MOX cores proved acceptably safe, with enrichments of perhaps 5 percent plutonium in the fuel, two VVER-1000 reactors could transform 50 metric tons of weapons plutonium into spent fuel in 30 years.20 Each operational VVER-1000 is scheduled to be shut down for roughly one year for safety improvements under the ongoing program of international safety assistance. With enough lead time for proper design and preparation, the modifications necessary to handle a full-MOX core could be made during this period, without substantially extending the length of the shutdown. Alternatively, VVER-1000s scheduled for completion in the near future could be modified for this purpose as they are completed.
The public versus private issues in Russia are somewhat simpler, since MINATOM runs both the nuclear weapons complex and the civilian nuclear reactor industry. But as noted above, U.S. or international financial assistance may well be required if long-term disposition of excess weapons plutonium in Russia is to be accomplished in the foreseeable future. Just as private investment might help reduce up-front capital costs in the United States, private investment or loans from international financial institutions such as the World Bank or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development might help
19Evgeniy Kudriavtsev of MINATOM, for example, reported to the IAEA in April 1993 that "no serious investigations on military plutonium utilization in reactors of the WER-type have been conducted in Russia," though he indicated that a future facility for fabricating MOX fuel for WER-1000s is planned (see E. Kudriavtsev "Russian Prospects for Plutonium Accumulation and Utilization," unpublished paper presented to an IAEA meeting on problems of separated plutonium, April 1993). See also Yu. K. Bibilashvili and F. G. Reshetnikov, "Russia's Nuclear Fuel Cycle: An Industrial Perspective," IAEA Bulletin, Vol. 35, no. 3, 1993, and V.S. Kagramanyan, "Utilization of BN-800 Fast Reactors of Isolated Plutonium Being Accumulated in the Russian Federation," unpublished paper, April 1993.
20 If, on the other hand, these reactors were limited to one-third MOX fuel, at a relatively low enrichment of 2.5 percent, nine reactors would be required to accomplish the same task. Since there are only seven operational VVER-1000s in Russia, either completion of additional reactors or use of some on the Hanford reservation, and like WNP-1, could be modified to handle a full core of MOX fuel. This would require shutting down an operating reactor for modification, with the accompanying cost of lost revenue, and the utility that owns the reactor would have to be persuaded to allow its use for this purpose. This option, however, would have the significant advantage of providing two reactors and a fuel-fabrication facility on a single nuclear-weapons complex site. The time and cost for modifying and licensing WNP-2 might turn out to be lessummary of the