Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant CIA Files - Paperless Archives
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant CIA Files - Paperless Archives
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant CIA Files - Paperless Archives
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The SOl'ietjCEMA <strong>Nuclear</strong> <strong>Power</strong><br />
Programs and Their.Requirements<br />
for Enriched Uranium<br />
Introduction<br />
The strong growth of nuclear power in the Soviet<br />
Union and other CEMA I countries in the 1970s will<br />
continue in the 1980s and early 1990s. All nuclear<br />
power stations in the Soviet Union and most of the<br />
existing and planned stations in the other CEMA<br />
countries are built around Soviet-designed reactors<br />
that use uranium fuel slightly enriched in the isotope<br />
uranium-235 (U-235). The Soviet Union provides the<br />
fuel for all these reactors, placing an increasingly<br />
large burden on it!. enriched uranium production<br />
capacity.<br />
The Soviet uranium isotope separation plants Ihat<br />
produce enriched uranium for milit3ry purposes (nuclear<br />
weapons and the naval nuclear propulsion pro·<br />
gram) must also supply the enriched uranium for<br />
Soviet/CEMA n~clear power and the toll enrichment<br />
program, a comm'ercial endeavor in which the So~iet'<br />
Union sells enrichment services (riot the uranium<br />
itselO to Western nuclear power programs. Our estimate!>'<br />
of the production capacity available to supply<br />
enriched uranium for nuclear weapons necessariiy are<br />
based on subtracting nonweapon demand (particularly<br />
requirements for nuclear pOws:r programs) from estiolates<br />
of l0t31 cili:chmcnt capac:ty.<br />
Because of the complex variety of uranium enrichments<br />
necessary for various weapon and nonWC3.pon<br />
applications, both enrichment capacity and enrichment<br />
demand are usually expressed in terms of<br />
separative work units (SWU) rather than Quantities of<br />
maierial. The SWU is an internationally recogniz.ed<br />
measure', which Quantifies the scparaliv\.: work involved<br />
in producing a given amount of enriched<br />
uranium for any given assay (en~ichillent level) of the<br />
uranium feed, product, and waste (tails). This rcport<br />
ii, _.< describes the requirements of each Soviet reactor<br />
type in terms of metric tons of material at various<br />
, CEMA-Council for Mutual Economic A"iqancc: Council<br />
members which have or arc scheduled to h.,< Soviet ;>ower reactoCl<br />
arc 1'
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