WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have signed a $3 billion deal to dispose of 34 metric tons of plutonium by burning it in nuclear reactors.
Lavrov said Russia would spend about $2.5 billion on the program, with the United States contributing some $400 million to help permanently destroy the material.
"Together that is enough material for nearly 17,000 nuclear weapons, and we will put in place the framework and infrastructure needed to dispose of even more plutonium from defense programs in the future," Clinton said Tuesday at the signing ceremony, held on the sidelines of a global nuclear security summit convened by U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington.
Plutonium can be recycled by blending it with other materials to make a nuclear fuel for civilian reactors known as MOX. France, Britain, Russia, India and Japan are among the countries that make MOX fuel, with France's Areva a top supplier and a likely beneficiary of the new U.S.-Russian deal.
Environmental activists and other critics dislike MOX fuel production because it relies on the transportation of spent nuclear fuel and highly toxic plutonium, leaving the nuclear material vulnerable to loss or theft.
Obama won pledges from world leaders at the unprecedented 47-nation nuclear security summit to take joint action to prevent terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons, steps that he said will make the United States and the rest of the world safer.
Obama, in a separate statement, hailed Russia's decision to shut down its final plutonium reactor, which had been producing weapons-grade plutonium for nearly 52 years.
"This important step forward continues to demonstrate Russia's leadership on nuclear security issues and will add momentum to our shared global effort," he said.
President Dmitry Medvedev announced the imminent shutdown of the ADE-2 reactor in the city of Zheleznogorsk, in the Krasnoyarsk region, at the nuclear summit, the White House said.
The U.S.-Russian agreement implements a deal reached in 2000 but not yet put in force because of delays on both sides.
Lavrov said it would be transparent and would mark a step toward the goal set forth in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of general disarmament under strict and effective international control.
"When this mechanism starts working, we expect its positive influence on the process of nonproliferation, including making the process of nuclear disarmament multilateral at some point, hopefully not very far from today," Lavrov said.
Neither side said how long the destruction would take, nor did they give a percentage figure for the amount of their total plutonium stocks covered by the deal.
Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard University, said some U.S. critics question the deal because reactors used for the Russian plutonium could potentially be remodified to produce new weapons-grade plutonium.
But he said the move to destroy the existing plutonium stock was important in itself.
"The answer is basically that you're taking weapons-grade plutonium that's in separated form, ready to be put right into a weapon … and putting it into a form that's in spent fuel," Bunn said. "Yes, 30, 40, 50 years down the road, they might reprocess that spent fuel and get some plutonium out of it, but you're putting it in a much more secure form for decades to come."
Also at the conference, Georgia said it had foiled the attempted sale of bomb-grade uranium on the black market in March, the latest in what it said was a series of such cases over the past 10 years.
The Georgian delegation said in a statement that there was clear evidence of criminal groups attempting to use Georgian territory for the illegal trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials.
"The Georgian Ministry of Interior has foiled eight attempts of illicit trafficking [in] enriched uranium during the last 10 years, including several cases of weapons-grade enrichment," the statement said.
The Georgian authorities had detained a number of suspects in connection with the cases, it said.
The delegation said the most recent incident took place in March. It did not say exactly how much highly enriched uranium had been offered for sale.
Georgia said it had asked for assistance from the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in verifying that radioactive waste in its rebel regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was being properly contained.
The IAEA has raised concerns in the past about the security of nuclear material at a waste storage facility in Abkhazia amid reports that some had gone missing or was unaccounted for. Georgia said the IAEA last inspected the facility in 2005.
The IAEA has documented 18 cases of weapons-grade nuclear material being stolen or going missing around the world since the early 1990s.