Under terms of the accords, the United States will spend an estimated $500 million on two new fossil-fuel power plants to replace the reactors, which provide heat and electricity to Seversk and Zheleznogorsk. The Siberian cities once were secret, "closed" locations of the Soviet military establishment.

The agreements "set the stage for another important advancement in our cooperative nonproliferation efforts," U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. The signing "demonstrated to the entire world that Russia and America are friends and partners," said his Russian counterpart, Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev.

They signed the documents at Vienna's Hofburg Congress Hall, on the sidelines of a three-day global conference, co-sponsored by their governments, on another nonproliferation concern, the potential for development of terrorist "dirty bombs" - conventional, non-nuclear bombs packed with radioactive materials.

A U.S.-Russian deal under which Washington was to help phase out the plutonium reactors was first signed in 1997, and was celebrated as a historic event in the costly U.S. campaign to ensure that Moscow safeguarded and reduced its vast nuclear stockpile.

The United States halted its own weapons production of plutonium in the late 1980s, as a result of a series of U.S.-Soviet arms control treaties.

The Russians, who have shut down 10 other plutonium-producing plants, continued operating the two at Seversk and one at Zheleznogorsk because they were vital to the power supplies of the cities, formerly known as Tomsk-7 and Krasnoyarsk-26. They continued reprocessing the spent uranium fuel from the power plants into plutonium not to make bombs, but because indefinite storage of the spent fuel would have been prohibitively expensive.

The 1997 deal foundered, however, because its original goal of modifying the reactors proved impractical, and because of Russian financing problems and disputes over American audits on use of U.S. funds.

The Russians also have been slow to move because the plan would dislocate thousands of people employed by the combined reactor-reprocessing operations.

The original plan envisioned conversion by 2001. Now, under Wednesday's agreements, the Seversk shutdown is to take place by 2008, and the shutdown at Zheleznogorsk by 2011.

The governments hope displaced staff will be re-employed under the "Nuclear Cities" program, a U.S.-financed effort to develop jobs elsewhere in Russia for workers from the former "closed cities."

The three plants are the source of 3,300 pounds of plutonium a year,
roughly enough to make one nuclear bomb per day.

See also:

YABLOKO Against Nuclear Waste Imports into Russia

Associated Press, March 12, 2003