Ukraine Agrees to Hand Over Nuclear Material

Posted on Apr 12, 2010

Matti Paavonen (CC-BY-SA)

Score one for President Barack Obama’s nuclear summit. The White House announced Monday that Ukraine will give up its entire stockpile of highly enriched uranium by 2012 and convert its research reactors to stop producing the stuff.

No word yet on where Ukraine plans to send its nuclear material, but The Washington Post says the U.S. could be the lucky recipient.

Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union, but gave up its weapons during the 1990s.

Although Ukraine was the home of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the 1986 disaster that it spawned, Ukrainians are just wild about nuclear power. The country is home to Europe’s largest nuclear reactor and has plans to double its nuclear power production by 2030.  —PZS

Sources: Washington Post, BBC, Wikipedia, White House

More Below the Ad

New and Improved Comments

We are launching a major overhaul of our comments section.

In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread.

Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts.

Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with.

Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page.