Americas — 2026-05-08

US Completes Removal of All Enriched Uranium from Venezuela Research Reactor

DOE/NNSA announced May 8 it removed 13.5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Venezuela's RV-1 research reactor, working with the IAEA, UK Nuclear Transport Solutions, and Venezuelan officials. Teams packaged the material in a spent fuel cask, moved it 100 miles overland to a port, and loaded it onto a UK-supplied carrier that delivered it to the United States in early May. DOE's Office of Environmental Management received the shipment at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina for processing at the H-Canyon facility. NNSA stated the operation concluded less than six weeks after an initial site visit, which itself followed Secretary Wright's February visit to Venezuela.

Analysis
The Venezuelan clearance closes one discrete nonproliferation vulnerability but does not establish a regional HEU-free baseline, corroborated by DOE/NNSA and IAEA, both official sources with no independent verification. The six-week site-visit-to-delivery timeline reads as capstone to Secretary Wright's February Caracas engagement, not a standalone technical achievement. Available evidence is silent on Brazil's IEA-R1 at IPEN and Argentine holdings; confidence in aggregate regional impact is low. Whether any Latin American nation will still hold research-reactor-grade HEU by end of 2026 cannot be assessed. Caracas may have extracted the more durable gain: diplomatic reward advancing US engagement with Venezuela beyond the proliferation calculus of a lightly-resourced Soviet-era facility.

3 sources

NNSA Removes Highly Enriched Uranium from Venezuela, Reducing Risk to South America and the U.S. Homeland - US Department of Energy
US removes all enriched uranium from Venezuela reactor, ships materials to SC in major nuclear security op - Fox News
IAEA Helps Transport High Enriched Nuclear Fuel from Venezuela to the US - International Atomic Energy Agency