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Securing Nuclear Warheads and Materials
Mayak Fissile Materials Storage Facility
Status
![[ click here for larger photo ]](/web/20100527121142im_/http://www.nti.org/images/mayak_fmsf_interior_sm.jpg) Inside the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility. |
The Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility (FMSF) is a huge secure storage facility for plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons, built with funding from the Department of Defense's Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program.[1] The facility was formally commissioned in December, 2003, but sat empty for almost three years before Russia began loading it in July 2006, out of a combination of disagreements over what transparency rights U.S. monitors will have in return for the funds provided, Russia’s failure to train appropriate personnel to operate and guard the facility, and apparently limited Russian funding for converting plutonium into the forms Russia prefers to store there.[2] |
It is expected to take several years to fully load the facility. Moreover, as of mid-2007, negotiations of a transparency agreement for the facility had not been completed,[3] so no transparency measures were being implemented. The "Mayak" name often used for the facility is the name of the huge Russian nuclear facility where the storage building is located, in the closed city of Ozersk (formerly Chelyabinsk-65). In addition to providing assistance for the construction of the facility itself, CTR provided 26,450 storage containers.[4]
The Mayak FMSF originally had a design capacity of 50 tons of plutonium and 200 tons of HEU.[5]Russia may or may not, however, choose to store HEU in this facility, depending on whether there is additional HEU from dismantled weapons requiring storage above and beyond the HEU being blended and delivered to the United States each year under the Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement. Moreover, in a letter to the United States dated July 1, 2003, Minister of Atomic Energy Alexander Rumiantsev confirmed that under current plans, Russia would only store 25 tons of plutonium in Mayak, not 50 tons—because Mayak is intended only for excess weapons plutonium that will never again be used in nuclear weapons, Russia is only committed to put 34 tons of weapons plutonium in that category under the U.S.-Russian plutonium disposition agreement, and 9 tons of that 34 tons is plutonium oxide produced in Russia's plutonium production reactors since their plutonium stopped being used for weapons, which is in storage at those reactor sites (Zheleznogorsk and Seversk).[6] As roughly 4 kilograms of plutonium is to be stored in each canister, storing 25 tons of plutonium would use only 6,250 canisters, one-quarter of the Mayak facility's capacity.
The number of canisters of plutonium that can be stored in the facility is limited primarily by the heat output of plutonium, and the total heat output the facility's cooling arrangements can safely handle. In a study completed in November, 2002, U.S. and Russian experts concluded that, contrary to previous expectations, every canister space in the entire facility could be filled with plutonium without exceeding the facility's heat capacity, meaning a total capacity of 100 tons of plutonium.[7] In order to be able store more than the 25 tons of plutonium from dismantled weapons that Russia currently considers excess to its military needs, the U.S. government is now considering partitioning the facility, so that material stored in part of it would be committed never again to be used in weapons, but material stored in other parts might be material that Russia still considers as part of its military program.[8] DOD has not released any information on how discussions of this concept are proceeding. For now, it appears that the Mayak FMSF will remain three-quarters empty even after loading is completed.
Unclassified figures suggest that despite the HEU Purchase Agreement, Russia has large quantities of potentially vulnerable plutonium and HEU outside of weapons that could be stored in the Mayak facility if the United States and Russia agreed to do so. The Department of Energy has publicly estimated, for example, that there are some 600 metric tons of separated plutonium and HEU outside of weapons in Russia.[9] This includes both weapon-grade plutonium and HEU and material that is not technically "weapon-grade" but is still weapons-usable. Currently DOD considers only weapon-grade plutonium (defined as plutonium with at least ten times as much of the Pu-239 isotope as the Pu-240 isotope) and weapon-grade uranium (defined as uranium enriched to at least 90% U-235) to be eligible for storage in the Mayak facility, but this policy could change if the threats posed by materials that did not meet these criteria were judged sufficient to put them in secure storage at Mayak.
The Mayak FMSF is an immense concrete fortress, designed to withstand even artillery fire and armor-piercing bombs dropped from aircraft. The walls are 7 meters (23 feet) thick, and the roof is 8 meters (26 feet) thick. [10]
| Inside, the facility will be highly automated, with all of the material canisters under continuous electronic watch. Once nuclear material has been loaded into the facility, it will be some of the most secure material in all of Russia. But the project has had a long and difficult history, including substantial delays. The FMSF project had its origins in the early 1990s, when Russian officials warned that dismantlement of nuclear weapons would soon have to come to a halt because secure storage space for their plutonium and HEU components was running out.[11] |
![[ click here for larger photo ]](/web/20100527121142im_/http://www.nti.org/images/cnwmphoto_mayak2_sm.jpg) Fissile material storage container for Mayak. |
They requested assistance in building a secure, modern facility for storing these materials, and the United States agreed. Initially, the United States and Russia were each to pay half the cost, but ultimately Russia was unable to provide most of its share, and the United States paid nearly the entire design and construction cost (see budget). Years of delays resulted from disagreements over (and changes in) the facility design, who would bear which shares of the costs, and the like; the 2003 commissioning was fully a decade after the U.S.-Russian implementing agreement that launched the effort (signed in September, 1993). As Russian nuclear weapons dismantlement appears to have continued in the meantime, it appears that available storage space for weapons components was not as much of a constraint as it was once said to be—either because existing spaces were converted to store these materials, or because Russia built other spaces with its own resources in the meantime.
Originally, the facility was planned to have two modules, for a total of 50,000 containers, and indeed, a second facility of equal size was to have been built at another site, to accommodate all the excess fissile material from dismantled Russian weapons. Currently, however, there are no plans to proceed beyond the first 25,000-container wing. Indeed, as noted above, unless current policies requiring that the facility only store material from weapons which will not be returned to weapons are changed, or Russia agrees to commit that additional material will not be used in weapons, three-quarters of the first wing may end up standing empty.
After the experiences of investing substantial sums in facilities for eliminating liquid rocket fuel and solid rocket motors that were never used, in early 2002 the Department of Defense (DOD) decided to seek a written agreement that Russia would use the Mayak facility to store a specified amount of fissile material. In discussions in August, 2002, Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy (MINATOM) seemed willing to agree to store 34 tons of plutonium in the facility, and DOD formally proposed an amendment to the Mayak FMSF implementing agreement that would contain such a commitment in December, 2002. This proposal was discussed at a meeting in January, 2003, where MINATOM officials argued that there was no need for such an amendment to the implementing agreement, since the facility was already 90% complete, and warned that an amended agreement would require concurrence throughout the Russian government, with accompanying delays. In a letter on April 10, 2003, DOD asked MINATOM to accept such an amendment by April 25, 2003. MINATOM's chief of international cooperation replied in a letter on April 14, 2003, indicating that Russia only planned to store 25 tons of plutonium in the FMSF, and that HEU was being processed under the HEU purchase agreement. On June 19, 2003, in the absence of a formal Russian response to the U.S. proposal for an amended implementing agreement, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote to Minister Rumiantsev and warned that DOD would consider suspending assistance if agreement on an amended implementing agreement could not be reached by the end of June. Rumiantsev replied on July 1, arguing that "the very title" of the implementing agreement, which describes the agreement as being on construction of a facility for storage of fissile material from dismantled weapons, "reflects our responsibilities with respect to the use of the FMSF."[12] By the end of 2003, no amended agreement had been reached, and the facility had been commissioned. Subsequent Cooperative Threat Reduction reports have not mentioned any further agreement on this point.
Similarly, as mentioned earlier, no final agreement providing provisions for the United States to have rights to transparency measures at the facility has yet been reached—though Minister Rumiantsev, in a January 2004 letter to Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, reiterated MINATOM’s commitment to reaching such an agreement.[13]
If these issues could be resolved in a way that allowed the Mayak FMSF to be used to its full capacity, and Russia continues not to store HEU in the facility, this first wing of Mayak might be sufficient to provide secure storage for the plutonium from as many as 25,000 dismantled warheads, significantly more than are thought to have been permanently dismantled since the late 1980s. [14]Indeed, it appears likely that additional capacity will be available in Mayak beyond the plutonium from dismantled weapons: if current policies limiting the facility to hold only weapon-grade material were modified in the future, the Mayak facility could be used as a secure place to consolidate vulnerable stockpiles of non-weapon-grade (but weapons-usable) material fissile material from other facilities in Russia (or Russian-supplied material from other countries, being returned to Russia).
The original concept was that the material stored in Mayak would be in the form of metal plutonium and HEU components from dismantled weapons. In 1996, however, when Russian President Yeltsin offered to make the facility available for verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy (MINATOM) decided to convert all the material to metal slugs no longer identifiable as weapons components before placing them in the facility (even though the United States, Russia, and the IAEA are working to develop means to carry out monitoring of containers holding weapons components without revealing classified information (see Trilateral Initiative). For some time thereafter, the United States and MINATOM discussed the possibility of substantial U.S. assistance for reshaping the plutonium components (or "pits"), packaging the resulting shapes, and shipping them to the Mayak storage facility. But the two sides never managed to reach agreement on the transparency measures the United States insisted would be needed to confirm that its assistance in this area was being used appropriately, and the talks were dropped. Transparency measures for the Mayak storage facility have been a controversial topic since shortly after the two sides signed the 1993 implementing agreement, with the United States demanding more than Russia was willing to accept. U.S.-Russian understandings have been reached on most of the transparency measures the United States has been seeking, but no final agreement has been reached, after many years of discussions (see Mayak Transparency).
Budget
See
budget table
When Russia and the United States were expecting to split the cost of the Mayak FMSF, the U.S. share of a 2-wing, 50,000 container facility was expected to be $275 million. Ultimately, however, with economic circumstances preventing Russia from bearing its originally agreed share of the cost, the estimated U.S. share rose to over $400 million, for the first 25,000 container wing. [15] But in the end, the contractor was able to beat this cost estimate by a substantial margin; DOD allocated a total of just under $347 million for the facility. [16] In addition, DOD allocated $73.5 million for storage containers, and the Department of Energy contributed $1 million for design in the effort’s early stages, leading to a total cost in the range of $421 million. [17]
Key Issues and Recommendations
Loading, operating, and securing the facility. If the Mayak fissile material storage facility is to fulfill its goals, it must not only be built but loaded with potential nuclear weapons material, and operated securely and safely for many years. It is not yet clear whether Russia will choose to store enough material in the facility to make use of its full capacity. Nor is it clear whether Russia has assigned appropriate funds to convert the weapons components to unclassified forms, package them in the containers, ship the containers to the facility, load them in the facility, operate the facility, and provide an effective security force for the facility.
- Recommendation: The Department of Defense should continue to seek Russian commitments—whether in formal agreements or otherwise—to use all or nearly all of the capacity of the Mayak FMSF for storage of HEU or separated plutonium.
- Recommendation: The United States and Russia should reach new agreements making it possible to use a portion of the Mayak FMSF to store material from Russia's weapons program that is not committed never to be returned to weapons, and to provide secure storage for other potentially vulnerable separated plutonium or HEU that may not be directly associated with Russia's weapons program (including HEU and plutonium that do not meet the current weapon-grade eligibility criteria).
- Recommendation: The Department of Defense should work with Russia to ensure that adequate resources are provided to convert weapons components to the forms planned for storage in the Mayak FMSF, to load the facility in a timely way, and to provide an effective security force to guard the facility.
Implementing transparency. It is not yet clear whether and when U.S.-Russian transparency measures will be implemented, and there is now little prospect of moving forward with broader international inspections under the Trilateral Initiative. (See discussions and recommendations in Mayak Transparency and Trilateral Initiative.)
Consolidating insecure nuclear material. Unless current policies are modified as recommended above, the Mayak FMSF can store only materials that meet the weapon-grade eligibility criteria and that are committed never again to be used in nuclear weapons, leaving large quantities of other potentially vulnerable nuclear material that cannot be stored there.
- Recommendation: The United States should work with Russia to ensure that adequate centralized, secure storage capacity is available for consolidating vulnerable nuclear material from sites throughout Russia (and from abroad, in those cases where nuclear material is returned to Russia), whether at the Mayak FMSF or elsewhere. The MPC&A Program is already working with Russia to provide centralized storage facilities for storage of material at some of Russia's large defense nuclear sites. There may be options for providing a facility that could be used for consolidation of material from many sites at much lower cost than a second wing of Mayak. For example, in the secure underground facility at Krasnoyarsk-26, there were large concrete rooms already built, but never used, which could potentially be converted for consolidated storage of nuclear materials from other sites. Such possibilities should be explored, and pursued if the benefits are judged to be worth the cost.
Links
| Key Resources | |
 |
Igor Kudrik, Charles Digges, Alexander Nikitin, Nils Bohmer, Vladimir Kuznetzov, and Vladislav Larin, The Russian Nuclear Industry: The Need for Reform (Oslo: Bellona, 2004) Download 2.85M PDF This report provides a detailed description of the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility. |
|
U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, Cooperative Threat Reduction Construction Projects, D-2004-039 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, December 18, 2003). Download 413K PDF This report provides key data on U.S.-Russian discussions over how much fissile material Mayak will store, how much has been spent on the facility, and like. The Inspector General recommends increased attention to securing Russian commitments on what material will be stored in the facility, and on transparency. |
|
Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute for International Studies, Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility Description and Developments This page includes a description of the history of the facility, and a brief list of developments over the years. |
|
Monterey Institute for International Studies, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, "Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility Description and Developments," NTI Research Library: NIS Nuclear Profiles Database. |
| This page includes a description of the history of the facility, and a brief list of developments over the years. | |
|
U.S.
General Accounting Office, Weapons of Mass Destruction:
Effort to Reduce Russian Arsenals May Cost More,
Achieve
Less Than Planned, NSIAD-99-76 (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office,
April 1999) Download 321K PDF |
| This 1999 report assesses a number of projects, including the Mayak storage facility. It provides detailed cost data on the facility up to that time, along with a description of some of the key disputes over it between the United States and Russia, including the dispute over transparency for the site. | |
|
Charles Digges, "U.S. Official Says Mayak Warhead Storage Facility to Open in November," Bellona, June 19, 2002; Charles Digges, "Mayak's Plutonium Storage Expected to be Completed By Year's End," Bellona, May 26, 2003. |
| As the first article relates, U.S. officials believed the Mayak storage facility would open a year earlier than it actually did. The article provides a useful behind-the scenes summary of the issues delaying progress as of mid-2002. The second article makes the point that completion does not mean that the facility is yet loaded with nuclear material. | |
|
Matthew
Bunn, "Mayak Storage Facility," in The
Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control Warheads
and Fissile
Material (Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and
Harvard Project on Managing the Atom, April 2000),
pp. 36-37. Download 330K PDF |
| Excerpt from 2000 report outlining the status of the Mayak storage facility and the issues surrounding it at that time. | |
| FOOTNOTES | |
| [1] | For a description of this facility, see, for example, Igor Kudrik, Charles Digges, Alexander Nikitin, Nils Bohmer, Vladimir Kuznetzov, and Vladislav Larin, The Russian Nuclear Industry: The Need for Reform (Oslo: Bellona, 2004), pp. 55-56, 101-102. An earlier description of this facility and the issues surrounding it, see U.S. Congress, General Accounting Office, Weapons of Mass Destruction: Effort to Reduce Russian Arsenals May Cost More, Achieve Less Than Planned, GAO/NSIAD-99-76 (Washington, D.C.: April 1999). |
| [2] | For the commissioning, see, for example, "Fissile Material Storage Facility at Mayak Commissioned," Nuclear.ru, 17-23 December 2003. The document formally commissioning the facility was signed on 10 December 2003. |
| [3] | Russian officials told Senator Richard Lugar in August 2007 that they hoped to complete the agreement by the end of the year. See David Hoffman, "Americans Given Rare Access to Russian Nuclear Warehouse," Washington Post, 1 September 2007, p. A18. See also U.S. Department of Defense, Cooperative Threat Reduction Annual Report to Congress: Fiscal Year 2008 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 2007). For earlier descriptions of the transparency discussions, see U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, Cooperative Threat Reduction Construction Projects, D-2004-039 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, December 18, 2003), p. 12, and GAO, Effort to Reduce Russian Arsenals May Cost More, Achieve Less Than Planned, pp. 8-11. |
| [4] | See Kudrik et al., The Russian Nuclear Industry: The Need for Reform, p. 55. |
| [5] | GAO, Effort to Reduce Russian Arsenals May Cost More, Achieve Less Than Planned, p. 6 |
| [6] | DOD IG, Cooperative Threat Reduction Construction Projects, op. cit., p. 11. This had been foreshadowed in a letter from Vladimir Koutchinov, director of the Ministry of Atomic Energy's Department of International and External Economic Cooperation, on 14 April 2003. Ibid, pp. 6-7. |
| [7] | DOD IG, Cooperative Threat Reduction Construction Projects, op. cit., p. 6. |
| [8] | DOD IG, Cooperative Threat Reduction Construction Projects, op. cit., p. 7. |
| [9] | See U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), FY 2004 Detailed Budget Justifications — Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation (Washington, D.C.: DOE, February 2003), p. 542. |
| [10] | "Fissile Material Storage Facility at Mayak Commissioned," Nuclear.ru, 17-23 December 2003. For more detail on the specifics of the walls’ construction, see Kudrik et al., The Russian Nuclear Industry: The Need for Reform, p. 55. |
| [11] | For an account of storage of fissile material from dismantled weapons at Tomsk-7 calling attention to remarkable security deficiencies there, see Alexander Bolsunovsky and Valery Meshchikov, "Nuclear Security is Inadequate and Outdated," Moscow News, No. 49 (9-15 December 1994). |
| [12] | The history in this paragraph is taken from DOD IG, Cooperative Threat Reduction Construction Projects, op. cit., pp. 6-7, and pp. 10-12. |
| [13] | Personal communication with Department of Defense official, January 2004. |
| [14] | Some unclassified estimates suggest that modern warheads each contain some 3-4 kilograms of plutonium. See David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities, and Policies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1997). p. 51 and p. 114. Lev Ryabev, while serving as First Deputy Minister of Atomic Energy, said publicly that Russian warheads contained somewhat more nuclear material than U.S. warheads. See Oleg Bukharin, notes on Pugwash delegation discussion with Ryabev, 10 July 2002. If the average were 4 kilograms per warhead, 25,000 warheads would contain 100 tons of plutonium. |
| [15] | GAO, Weapons of Mass Destruction, op. cit., p. 7. |
| [16] | Anthony Wier, "Interactive Budget Database," in Nuclear Threat Initiative Research Library: Securing the Bomb (Cambridge, Mass., and Washington, D.C.: Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, and Nuclear Threat Initiative, 2007). |
| [17] | Wier, "Interactive Budget Database." |
Written by Matthew Bunn. Last updated by Matthew Bunn on September 8, 2007.
The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.