The original proposal for this program was made by Thomas Neff, a physicist at MIT, in an October 24, 1991 Op-Ed in The New York Times.
The program was credited for being one of the most successful disarmament programs in history, but its low set price for nuclear fuel caused Western companies to not invest in uranium refining capacity, resulting by 2022 in Russia's government-owned Rosatom becoming the supplier of about 50% of the world's enriched uranium, and 25% of the nuclear fuel used in the US.
[4] The DOE appointed the newly privatized United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) as the commercial agent, its executive program contractor.
In March 1999, Minatom and the US Department of Energy signed the Agreement Concerning the Transfer of Source Material to the Russian Federation (the Transfer Agreement), and at the same time TENEX signed a Contract with a Group of Western Companies (Cameco, Canada; Cogema, France; Nukem, Germany/US) regarding the purchase of the LEU Feed.
[5] During the 20-year Megatons to Megawatts program, as much as 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using LEU from Russian HEU.
[6] During this period, on a comparatively modest basis, the US government has also been converting some of its excess nuclear warhead HEU into power plant fuel.
[8] In addition, Bill Gates's nuclear power venture TerraPower's proposed new type of reactors require fuel that today can only be supplied by Rosatom.
[8] Uranium refining companies like Urenco are hoping that Western governments will see the importance of domestic supply chains and create legislation to boost their development.