There's a ten percent chance the electricity powering your computer as your read this blog is coming from one of these. (image: blog.kievukraine.info)

Megatons to Megawatts—that’s the informal name for a program that turns Russian warheads into electricity. It’s the high-tech version of beating swords into plowshares.

As the New York Times reported Tuesday, for years the US has been quietly burning fuel from decommissioned nuclear weapons—mostly Russian, but including some of our own—in its reactors. Forty-five percent of the fuel in US civilian reactors, providing 10 percent of the nation’s electricity, has come from decommissioned Russian atomic weapons; another 5 percent comes from scrapped US warheads.

The program has been kept quiet out of fear of bad publicity; would people object to having the weaponry of the apocalypse powering their big-screen TVs and videogames? However, the program, if anything, seems like an almost perfect demonstration of a win-win situation:

• Nuclear bombs are thoroughly destroyed, reducing the risk of proliferation as well as reducing the staggering amount of planetary overkill that exists in US and Russian nuclear arsenals

• The public gets cheaper electricity, since it’s less costly to dilute weapons-grade fissile material (bomb-grade uranium is enriched to 95 percent U-235) to civilian grade (5 percent U-235) than to enrich raw uranium to usable levels

Getting rid of nuclear weapons while saving money—if that’s not something every peace-loving capitalist could get behind, what is?

The nuclear industry is worried, because the current program is set to expire in 2013. However, negotiations are underway for a follow-on program to be put in place that would be able to take advantage of an additional round of arms reductions. More warheads could become available if the US and Russia agree to new cuts during negotiations to renew the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty.

Hopefully both sets of negotiations will bear fruit, and we’ll be able to keep turning city-killing bombs into planet-saving fuel for our plug-in hybrid cars.