Venezuela removes last HEU from shut-down RV-1 reactor for US processing

That matters because RV-1 was not some abstract legacy asset. The State Department described it as Venezuela’s first and only nuclear reactor, built for peaceful scientific research and later repurposed for gamma-ray sterilization of medical supplies, food, and other materials. The reactor had been shut down since the early 1990s, but the remaining enriched uranium still carried a real security burden until the fuel was physically removed. The State Department said the mission finished more than two years ahead of the original schedule, and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration said it wrapped up all remaining enriched uranium from the legacy reactor in a matter of months.

The operation only worked because several governments and the IAEA were all pulling in the same direction. The United States, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, and the International Atomic Energy Agency coordinated the transport, while the IAEA provided safety and security guidance, training, technical expertise, and safeguards oversight throughout the move. The State Department called it an accelerated mission, and the speed is the point: once the political and technical groundwork is in place, a sensitive fuel removal can move fast.

There is a wider nonproliferation lesson here as well. The IAEA’s Research Reactor Database tracks more than 800 research reactors in 71 countries, and the agency says roughly 3,500 kilograms of HEU have been removed from research reactor sites worldwide over the last few decades as countries convert from HEU to LEU fuel. RV-1 fits that pattern exactly. A reactor that long ago stopped operating still needed an active international cleanout before the fuel could stop being a liability.