Soviet-era nuclear warheads provide 10 percent of US electricity

Soviet-era nuclear warheads provide 10 percent of US electricity

Dec 11th 2013, 14:48, by Kwame Opam

For the past 20 years, bomb-grade uranium from Russia's decommissioned nuclear weapons have provided 10 percent of all the electricity the US consumes. That fact, NPR reports, is the result a deal made after the fall of the Soviet Union, which allowed for "20,000 bombs' worth of nuclear material" to be repurposed for American power needs.
The deal was brokered in the early 1990s by Philip Sewell, then-deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy. According to Sewell, it was his job to find ways to collaborate with Russia, which had by then crumbled as a global power. The Russian government had been storing their surplus nuclear weapons in abandoned buildings in the countryside, and Sewell saw an opportunity to get rid of them....
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