Nuclear Deal May Unravel

A landmark deal between the United States and former Soviet Union to convert Russian nuclear weapons into fuel for American power plants is unraveling, The New York Times reported today.

Quoting unnamed federal sources, the newspaper said Russia was to get $12 billion in badly needed cash in exchange for 500 metric tons of uranium from nuclear weapons. The United States would have then sold the fuel to power plants.

The deal would have been doubly beneficial: Russia would be partially disarmed and the United States would be certain that fuel did not end up in hostile nations’ arsenals.

The arrangement, first brokered by the Bush administration in August 1992 and continued by the Clinton administration, has fallen apart because of disagreements over pricing the uranium and trade disputes, the newspaper said. The Senate Energy Committee was scheduled to hold a hearing on the deal on Tuesday.

Five hundred metric tons of uranium is enough to build more than 30,000 bombs similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima, the Times said. It also could run every one of the 109 nuclear power plants in the United States for 10 years.

A small shipment of the Russian uranium was expected to arrive in the United States this month.

“It’s high stakes because of the big money and it’s complex because of all the different constituencies involved,” an Energy Department official told the Times.

Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Victor S. Chernomyrdin of Russia were expected to discuss the deal during a meeting this month in Moscow, the newspaper said.