Some nonproliferation news came out of President Joe Biden’s first trip to Asia today, when Biden and the Japanese prime minister announced the Savannah River Site and Y-12 National Security complex had taken delivery of a combined 30 kilograms of uranium from three Japanese facilities.
The shipment, completed in March, was part of a four-year effort announced under the U.S.-Japan Bilateral Commission on Civil Nuclear Cooperation in 2018, the National Nuclear Security Administration wrote in a press release.
The shipment contained all of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) that had been in the University of Tokyo’s Yayoi Research Reactor in the coastal city of Tokai about 80 miles by road from Tokyo in Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture, plus all the HEU from two Japan Atomic Energy Agency facilities: the Deuterium Critical Assembly in Oarai, Ibaraki and the Japan Research Reactor 4 at the Nuclear Science Research Institute in Tokai.
The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Transport Solutions, a subsidiary of the Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and operator of three ocean-going nuclear transport ships, moved the HEU across the ocean, NNSA said.
The HEU used in the Japanese research reactors “will be down blended to low-enriched uranium and/or dispositioned, permanently reducing the risk it could be used to produce an improvised nuclear device,” the NNSA wrote in its release.
