Russia shut down a weapons-grade plutonium reactor Thursday as part of a non-proliferation agreement with the United States to reduce the risk of their nuclear bomb building sites, reported dpa.
The Soviet-Era reactor, secretly built in Siberia in the 1960s, is the second to be turned off this year, four decades on from the height of the Soviet Union's atomic weapons programme.
"The industrial reactor ADE-5 was terminally stopped. That is the final closure of the reactor," a spokesman for the Siberian Chemical Combine, in the closed city of Seversk, formerly known as Tomsk-7 was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying Thursday.
Russia's only other remaining plutonium-producing plant in the hidden city of Zheleznogorsk, formerly known as Krasnoyarsk-26, is slated to be shut by 2010.
Plutonium became superfluous to Russia's nuclear weapons programme after the end of the Cold War, but the plants kept functioning as the only energy source during the severe winters for the 600,000 living in the cities eastern cities Tomsk and Sversk.
In 2003, Russia halted all purchases of plutonium leading to unwanted stores unwanted at its three active plants that environmental groups say are enough for hundreds of nuclear bombs.
But closing such facilities was politically contentious because of the loss of jobs and power to local communities until new facilities could be built.
After years of negotiations the United States came to an agreement with Russia in March 2003 to work jointly to close Russia's last three plutonium reactors of the 14 operated by the Soviet Union.
The United States has committed over 398 billion dollars toward building replacement energy facilities in the area of the plants, the non-profit Environmental Foundation Bellona reported.
Russian towns hosting weapons-grade reactors were Soviet state secrets, referred to only by code names and invisible on the map until President Boris Yeltsin decreed in 1992 that such cities could use their historical names.