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Stabilizing Employment for Nuclear Personnel
Impact of Other Programs on Nuclear Personnel
Status
![[ click here for larger photo ]](/web/20100527131732im_/http://www.nti.org/images/cnwmphoto_other1_sm.jpg) Work on the HEU deal at sites such as this one employs thousands of Russian nuclear workers. |
The range of programs funded by the United States and other donor governments that have not specifically focused on job creation are nonetheless employing substantial numbers of former nuclear weapons experts and workers, and the effect of these programs needs to be considered as well. In addition, there is one program – the European Nuclear Cities Initiative (ENCI) – that is focused on employing personnel from Russia’s nuclear weapons complex, but is only in the earliest stages of implementation. These programs will be discussed in rough order of the number of Russian nuclear experts or workers they now employ (though as discussed below, specific, hard data on the numbers employed by these efforts can be difficult to obtain). The U.S.-Russian HEU Purchase Agreement. Several thousand Russian nuclear experts and workers are directly employed on the various steps of fulfilling this contract – and are therefore not included among those for whom other U.S., Russian, or international programs have to provide new jobs. |
The total number of jobs specifically for nuclear experts and workers created by this means is probably larger than the combined total from all the programs specifically focused on job creation. Moreover, MINATOM officials have indicated that the funding for MINATOM’s own roughly $50 million per year conversion program in its nuclear weapons complex comes primarily from the HEU purchase – as does funding for dealing with nuclear waste from dismantled submarines, and for cleanup in MINATOM’s nuclear complex.[1] MINATOM estimated that from 1998 through 2001, this conversion program had created over 8,000 jobs in Russia’s nuclear complex.[2] This substantially reduces the number of jobs that need to be created by other U.S. or internationally funded programs.
Other Commercial Deals. A substantial fraction of the workers that MINATOM plans to retain are funded not by the Russian government budget, but by funds from a variety of commercial contracts. In addition to reactor exports to Iran, India, and China, several Russian nuclear sites have commercial contracts providing enrichment, reprocessing, fuel fabrication, or isotope production services to foreign customers, which provide larger income streams than foreign assistance programs generally do, sustaining thousands of jobs in Russia’s nuclear industry. Few attempts have been made, however, to tie any of these contracts or agreements to conversion efforts or nuclear security improvements.
Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A). Many hundreds of Russian nuclear experts are at work implementing improved security and accounting measures for nuclear material as part of cooperative work under the MPC&A program. The program has not collected specific information on the number of jobs it has created in Russia, so the specific impact is difficult to judge, but it is clearly significant. If regulations, procedures, and other approaches are put in place that result in Russia maintaining a substantial level of effort in these areas after U.S.-funded programs phase out, some of these jobs will be sustainable ones.
Transparency technology development and other threat reduction programs. Cooperative programs to develop technologies and procedures for warhead dismantlement transparency are also deploying a significant number of senior Russian nuclear weapon designers (whose expertise is required for these efforts). More broadly, there are Russian nuclear experts working on a broad range of threat reduction efforts, from the Mayak fissile material storage facility to efforts to shut down plutonium production in Russia, from management of retired nuclear submarines to purely scientific lab-to-lab cooperation. No one collects figures on the total number employed in such endeavors, but it is certainly in the hundreds.
Plutonium disposition. To date, the number of people employed on disposition of excess Russian plutonium is quite modest, as the program is just beginning to move toward actual design, construction, and operation of large facilities. Once that is underway, however, preparation of weapons plutonium for fabrication into fuel, and the actual fabrication of that fuel, will become major new activities for some Russian nuclear sites, potentially employing hundreds or even thousands of former nuclear weapons workers.
ENCI. ENCI is intended as a complement to the U.S.-funded Nuclear Cities Initiative. As currently envisioned, ENCI will be more focused on projects in areas such as energy and environment, and less on immediate production of commercial products and services; will focus primarily on weapons scientists, rather than the larger number of workers and technicians; and will likely channel its funds through the International Science and Technology Centers. Multilateral contributions from the European Commission and contributions from individual European states are expected.[3] No actual projects have yet been funded under ENCI, however.[4]
Key Issues and Recommendations
Tracking and Managing to Maximize Beneficial Effects. Currently these other programs, not focused on job creation, make little effort to track how many jobs for Russian nuclear experts and workers they are creating, and how many of these are likely to be permanent. Similarly, there is little effort to maximize these beneficial side-effects – for example by working to reach agreement with Russia to locate plutonium disposition facilities or other major new facilities at sites most in need of jobs for nuclear workers.
- Recommendation: The U.S. government and other donor governments should seek to collect data on how many, of what kinds, of jobs for Russian nuclear weapons experts and workers their programs are creating. For example, a private firm could be hired to survey participants in these programs to develop an initial estimate.
- Recommendation: The U.S. government and other donor governments should seek to manage these efforts to maximize the side benefit of creating jobs for nuclear experts where they are most needed, whenever this can be done without significantly compromising the main purpose of these programs.
| FOOTNOTES | |
| [1] | See, for example, remarks by then-First Deputy Minister of Atomic Energy Lev Ryabev, quoted and discussed in Bukharin, von Hippel, and Weiner, Conversion and Job Creation in Russia’s Closed Nuclear Cities, op. cit. |
| [2] | See Ministry of Atomic Energy, Major Results of Conversion in Defense Complex Enterprises of MINATOM, Russia in 1998-2001 (Moscow: MINATOM, Summer 2002, translated from the original Russian). This represented somewhat more than half the planned figure. |
| [3] | For useful summaries, see final report from, and the various papers presented at, the Second International Working Group for European Nuclear Cities Initiatives, Brussels, February 25-26, 2002. |
| [4] | Personal communication from J. Raphael della Ratta, coordinator of the Closed City Consortium, Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, February 10, 2003. |
Written by Matthew Bunn. Last updated by Matthew Bunn on February 10, 2003.
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.