Dive Brief:

• Uranium from 20,000 disarmed Russian nuclear warheads has been fueling approximately half of all U.S. nuclear power generation since the U.S. and Russian signed a "megatons-to-megawatts" deal in 1993.
• But soon, that will no longer be the case. Russia is ending the deal because it believes the U.S. is getting too sweet of a deal. The last shipment of uranium will leave Russia in November and reach the U.S. in December.
• The uranium accounted for a total of 10% of U.S. electricity over the last 15 years, Rose Gottemoeller, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control, recently told a UN committee. 

Dive Insight:

Under the agreement, weapons grade uranium is converted to a lower grade and is then "delivered to the United States, fabricated into nuclear fuel and used by nearly all U.S. nuclear power plants to generate half of the nuclear energy in the United States," according to Gottemoeller.

The U.S. paid around $8 billion total for the fuel, which was then resold by the United States Enrichment Company (USEC) to nuclear plants across the country. USEC has a new deal in place with Russian company Technsabexport, which helped Russia export the enriched uranium, for more fuel.