The President of Russia signed a federal law that formally ended Russia's participation in the US-Russian Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement (PMDA). The law denounces the agreement, signed on 29 August 2000 in Moscow and on 1 September 2000 in Washington, and the protocols to the agreement, signed on 15 September 2006 and on 13 April 2010.

The agreement, as amended by a protocol in 2010, committed the United States and Russia each to eliminate 34 tonnes of plutonium "designated as no longer required for defense purposes."

Russia suspended the implementation of the agreement in October 2016, citing "unfriendly actions of the United States." To a large extent the suspension was a result of a dispute about the United States unilaterally changing its plutonium disposition method (see also earlier IPFM analysis as well as this article).

It is worth noting that while Russia ratified PMDA in 2011, the agreement has never been in force. The Federal Law No. 108-FZ on the ratification of PMDA was signed by the then-President Medvedev on 3 June 2011. The law would have entered into force ten days after its official publication on the pravo.gov.ru portal. However, it has never been officially published and therefore the agreement has never entered into force. For this reason, the current law denounces the agreement and its protocols directly rather than denouncing the 2011 law that ratified it.

In 2016, Russia's participation in the PMDA was suspended by a presidential decree (which also did not mention the fact of ratification in 2011). In it, President Putin decreed:

To establish that plutonium covered by the [PMDA] Agreement [...] shall not be used for the purposes of manufacturing nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, for research, development, design, or testing related to such devices, or for any other military purposes.

The legal status of this obligation is not clear but it appears to remain in force unless a subsequent presidential decree revokes it. The Federal Law No. 381-FZ from 31 October 2016, which was passed to codify the suspension, does not contain this clause. The law on the denunciation of PMDA does not revoke or even mention the 2016 decree, so it appears that the obligation not to use the PMDA material for military purposes continues to apply.

The uranium enrichment plant in Rokkasho, operated by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd, has received a shipment of natural uranium from Cameco, a Canadian company. The shipment included "up to 625 tons of uranium contained in 50 cylinders" (50 48Y cylinders).

This is the first shipment of uranium to Rokkasho since July 2014. As shown in the chart, reproduced from the JNFL site, the plant has shipped virtually no enriched uranium after 2012.

It is not clear if the plant has been producing enriched uranium during this period. According to an industry report, the plant suspended operations in 2017, but resumed them in August 2023.

It was estimated that in 2019, the plant had the capacity of 75 tSWU/year. The current capacity of the plant is reported to be 112.5 tSWU/year. The same report says that JNFL aims to expand capacity to 450 tons SWU/year by FY2028. This plan appears to include the upgrade of the No. 2 cascade facility with the capacity of 150 tSWU/year.

The JNFL plans to eventually bring the capacity of the plant to 1,500 tSWU/year.

US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded a contract, currently valued at $1.5 billion, to BWXT Enrichment Operations, LLC "for the licensing, manufacturing development, facility construction, and operations of a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant."

The plant is part of the effort to establish the supply of unobligated enriched uranium that can be used for defense purposes: LEU for tritium production and HEU for naval nuclear propulsion.

In 2024, NNSA asked Nuclear Fuel Services, a subsidiary of BWXT, to conduct a study of domestic enrichment options.

According to Orano, the 9th shipment of MOX fuel from France to Japan has left France on 6 September 2025 and is expected to arrive in Japan in November 2025. The ships that transfer the fuel are "Pacific Heron and Pacific Egret, the specialized ships belonging to British company PNTL."

The 8th shipment was completed in September 2022.

UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has been allocated £154 million in government funding to begin preparatory work for the plutonium disposal program.

The decision to immobilize UK-owned separated plutonium was announced in January 2025.

US Department of Energy added three companies to the list of enterprises that received a conditional commitment to receive HALEU from DoE sources. These are listed as

• Antares Nuclear, Inc., for use in their advanced microreactor design that is looking to go critical by July 4, 2026, under the Department's Reactor Pilot Program.
• Standard Nuclear, Inc., to establish TRISO fuel lines to support the Reactor Pilot Program and other TRISO-fueled reactors.
• Abilene Christian University/Natura Resources LLC, for use in a new molten salt research reactor that is under construction in Texas.

These companies join the five recipients identified in April 2025:

• TRISO-X, LLC.
• Kairos Power, LLC.
• Radiant Industries, Inc.
• Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC
• TerraPower, LLC.

These commitments are part of the HALEU Allocation Process, which seeks to provide US companies with uranium enriched to up to 20% uranium-235. The document, dated 28 August 2025, refers to the previous commitments made by the US government.

The National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2024 (Section 3131(h)) directed DoE to "seek to make available" HALEU in the following quantities: 3 MT by September 30, 2024, an additional 8 MT by December 31, 2025, and an additional 10 MT by June 30, 2026.

The "Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies" Executive Order, issued in May 2025 further directed DoE "to release at least 20 metric tons of high-assay low-enriched uranium into a readily available fuel bank." This material, however, would have to be allocated "for private sector projects operating nuclear reactors ... at DOE sites."

The 2024 annual report of Russia's Federal Nuclear and Radiological Security Program contains data on spent fuel reprocessing at the RT-1 plant at Mayak.

The "irradiated standard uranium blocks" are fuel elements that were used in plutonium production reactors. BOR, SM, and MIR are research reactors.

The nominal capacity of the RT-1 plant is 400 tonnes of fuel a year. Historically, it has been reprocessing about 110-130 tonnes of fuel a year.

The document also shows that the cumulative total amount of reprocessed fuel in 2016-2024 was 993 tonnes.

In its 2024-2025 Annual Report, the UK's National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority gave the program "to site and construct a permanent geological disposal facility" for "higher activity radioactive waste" a RED rating (row 32 in this sheet). This rating means that as currently structured, the project is deemed unachievable. The report also estimates that the project could cost up to £54b.

In a letter to the acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Deputy Secretary of Energy raised concerns about the status of the program "to reestablish the capability to produce plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Savannah River Site (SRS)."

The letter directs the Office of Enterprise Assessments "to conduct a special study of NNSA's leadership and management of the plutonium pit production mission and its associated projects at LANL and SRS."

The current goal of the program is to achieve the capability to produce 80 pits annually by 2030. Los Alamos is expected to be able to produce 30 pits a year. See details of the program in earlier posts: 2019 and 2020.

The DOE letter was published by the Los Alamos Study Group.

The Indian government informed the parliament that the commissioning of the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor will be delayed due to "first of a kind technological issues."

The PFBR project has been delayed for more than twenty years. In its March 2023 statement, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) said that the commissioning was expected in 2024. In March 2024, DAE began loading fuel in the reactor's core.

In July 2024, India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) granted permission for the "First Approach to Criticality". However, in December 2024, the government pushed the commissioning date back to the end of 2025. And in April 2025, Department of Atomic Energy officials told the parliamentary standing committee on science and technology that the first criticality of the PFBR was expected to be achieved in March 2026 and the plant would be completed by September 2026.