France to turn old U.S. warheads into fuel for commercial reactors

PARIS – Plutonium from U.S. nuclear warheads – enough to make nearly 20 Hiroshima-style bombs – is headed for France aboard armed freighters and a new life as commercial fuel that will ultimately light American homes.

But environmentalists fearful of terrorist attacks, accidents and the fuel itself, known as MOX, want to stop the shipment, a test run for a larger effort to help the United States and Russia disarm.

France, however, will reap the first benefits of the project to turn nuclear weapons-grade plutonium into MOX, a fuel used to fire nuclear reactors.

France’s state-of-the-art nuclear technology is being used to help fulfill the terms of a September 2000 U.S.-Russia disarmament accord under which both countries promised to destroy 34 tons of military plutonium each.

Radioactive material has been shipped to France in the past for conversion into MOX fuel, but this is the first time weapons-grade plutonium is being used.

The U.S. portion of the project is worth $250 million to $300 million to French state-run nuclear company Areva, which will start by turning 308 pounds of plutonium into MOX, a mixture of plutonium oxide and uranium oxide.

The environmental organization Greenpeace opposes the use of MOX to run reactors, saying it becomes hotter and more radioactive than the enriched uranium used to fuel most reactors.

The weapons-grade plutonium left Monday for France from Charleston, S.C., aboard the armed ships Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail, Areva said.

After unloading at the French port of Cherbourg, the plutonium will cross about 620 miles of France in an armed convoy to factories in the south, where it will be converted into four rods of MOX. For security reasons, neither U.S. nor Areva officials would give an expected arrival date.

The MOX is to be shipped back to the United States in early 2005 for burning at South Carolina’s Catawba Nuclear Station.

After this first test run, U.S. officials plan to build a MOX factory with French help at the Savannah River nuclear site near Aiken, S.C., to dispose of the rest of the plutonium the United States agreed to destroy.