Editor’s Note 05/14/2019, 9:50 a.m. Eastern: the story was corrected to read that the U.K. shipped highly-enriched uranium to an undisclosed U.S. location.
The United Kingdom has finished shipping 700 kilograms of excess highly enriched uranium to the United States from the former fast-reactor research site at Dounreay, Scotland, the U.S. and U.K. said Friday.
The weapon-usable material will be converted into low-enriched uranium, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) stated in a press release.
The operation was the “largest removal to the United States in the history of DOE/NNSA’s Office of Material Management and Minimization Nuclear Material Removal Program,” according to the NNSA’s presser.
The downblended uranium will be used as fuel for civilian nuclear power plants, according to a press release from the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
In return for the excess British HEU, the U.S. “is sending a different form of [HEU] to Europe, where it will be used as research reactor fuel and in the production of medical isotopes,” the NDA said.
Neither agency said when the excess uranium arrived in the U.S., or when it left the U.K.
The U.S. and the U.K. agreed to the swap as part of a 2014 memorandum of understanding between the two countries. The BBC reported it took about two years to move all the material by air to the U.S.
The retired Dounreay site is now undergoing environmental cleanup under oversight by the Nuclear Decommissionining Authority.
