The State Department has kept the moribund U.S.-Russian Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA) in a congressionally mandated annual report of arms-control compliance concerns.
The agency expended some 80 words of the roughly 5,000-word Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments report to warn that Moscow’s 2016 supension of adherence to the agreement “raises potential concerns with respect to Russia’s intent to comply in the future” with the decades-old swords-to-plowshares pact.
In its latest compliance report, State said “whether or not that potential concern has a basis can better be determined if and when the two sides re-engage under the PMDA.”
Signed in 2000 and modified in 2010, the PMDA called for the U.S. and Russia to each dispose of 34 metric tons of weapon-usable plutonium. Initially, the parties agreed to turn the material into mixed-oxide fuel — a mixture or uranium and plutonium — to be burned in civilian nuclear power plants.
Both countries ran into difficulties with their mixed-oxide fuel programs. Russia in 2010 got permission to burn mixed-oxide fuel in a breeder reactor instead of a light-water reactor. The United States subsequently decided not to use its surplus plutonium for electricity, but to suspend the fissile material in inert, concrete-like grout called stardust and bury it deep underground.
The U.S. pivot to what it now calls dilute-and-dispose angered Russia, which said the buried plutonium might be retrieved and reweaponized at some point in the future. Washington maintains the plutonium would be buried forever at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., which will naturally seal itself up after the Department of Energy ceases disposal operations there later this century.
The U.S. explanation won no hearts or minds in Russia, which in 2016 announced it would “suspend” its participation in the PMDA. Moscow said at the time it would still dispose of the 34 metric tons of plutonium covered by the agreement.
