Five hundred metric tons of uranium cores once found in 20,000 Soviet Union warheads have been converted into nuclear fuel and shipped to the U.S. for the past 20 years. However, that ends Tuesday after the final shipment is delivered to a port in Baltimore, Md., at which point the Russian-supplied portion of U.S. atomic energy will begin to dwindle from 50% to 20%, according to The New York Times.
The deal, called Megatons to Megawatts, earned Russia $13 billion and supplied 10% of America's electricity. Moreover, it cut down the number of nuclear bombs in the world — 17,300 weapons remain, 16,200 of which belong to the Cold War adversaries. Of those, the two nations each have around 2,000 warheads that can be launched right now, but they've pledged to lower that number to 1,550 by 2018, leaving the door open for more Russian shipments to America. Such a plan, though, may never materialize.
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"It's totally in our interest to continue to do this [...] but the Russians, for a long time, felt they were not getting the right price for that uranium," Sharon Squassoni, director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Mashable. "It's tangled up in a whole lot of things, including the Russians' perspective now that they don't need us. They're not poor and starving anymore, and why should they really do this?"
Russia and the U.S. have also been at each other's throats on a number of fronts just over the last year — from the Edward Snowden asylum debacle to destroying chemical weapons in Syria — making their relationship more strained than it was 20 years ago.
On top of that, if Russia did want to sell its nuclear energy somewhere, the U.S. might not be the best potential buyer.
"There has been considerable talk about another possible deal over the past several years, but Russia has also indicated that it might look for other suitors," Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, told Mashable in an email.
China, which has 17 nuclear reactors compared to America's 104, is planning a building frenzy over the next few years. With 30 more reactors currently in the works, the Chinese government plans to have 200 reactors completed by 2030. If that pans out, China's appetite for nuclear energy would be huge, turning it into an attractive buyer should Russia decide to sell.
But for now, a small part of Russian nuclear energy will continue to circulate throughout the U.S. This last shipment will sit in American nuclear reactors for years to come, according to Ferguson, supplying a few U.S. citizens with electricity until around 2018.
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Image: Flickr, Peretz Partensky