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National Security
Uranyl nitrate (R) and uranium ore. After topping out at 43.7 million pounds in 1980, domestic uranium production in the United States had fallen to just 170,000 pounds by 2019.
PHOTO BY RHJPHTOTOS/SHUTTERSTOCK
NATIONAL SECURITY
DANGEROUS RELIANCE ON RUSSIAN URANIUM
US national security is threatened by overreliance on Russian nuclear materials
s the russia–ukraine war continues, the United States’ and the wider world’s dependence on uranium from Russia and its allies is raising serious questions, all the more so because of rising worldwide interest in nuclear power.
According to the Energy Information Administration, 47 percent of the uranium used by civilian reactors originates in Russia or two countries with close ties to Russia: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Kazakhstan is by far the top global uranium producer, according to statistics from the World Nuclear Association (WNA). It relies heavily on Russia’s Black Sea ports to export those resources.
Yet, Australia and Canada are also top uranium producers internationally and major sources of U.S. uranium in their own right. The U.S. allies may be poised to expand their uranium production.
Australia’s Boss Energy is working to restart its Honeymoon uranium mine, citing the ongoing conflict as a partial justification for the move.
“Since the invasion of Ukraine, there has been more activity, on- and off-market, as utilities try to diversify away from Russian-influenced supply. This has created an opportunity for existing and new producers in politically stable and uranium friendly jurisdictions,” Boss Energy wrote in its March 2022 quarterly report.
Concern about climate change among many policymakers has led to renewed attention to nuclear power, which combines low carbon emissions with higher productivity and a smaller physical footprint than either solar or wind.
In one notable sign of shifting priorities, the European Union released an act in February that placed natural gas and nuclear power in the EU Taxonomy, which identifies whether certain investments can be considered environmentally sustainable by the bloc.
Meanwhile, in the United States, domestic uranium mining has dwindled to a tiny percentage of what it was in past decades.
After topping out at 43.7 million pounds in 1980, production had fallen to just 170,000 pounds by 2019.
Russia also leads in uranium enrichment—it’s the source of roughly 35 percent of the planet’s enriched uranium, and its total enrichment capacity places it first in the world, ahead of China.
WNA statistics show the United States’ enrichment capacity has consistently fallen short of Russia, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, then, the high-assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU) that the United States uses in its most advanced reactors comes primarily from Russia.
Drew Horn, founder, GreenMet
“Unless U.S. policymakers take bold steps to establish domestic production capacity sufficient to replace Russia as the main supplier of HALEU fuel, U.S. reactor developers will struggle to find an immediate market for their products and services,” the Breakthrough Institute (BI), an ecomodernist nonprofit, warned in a March report.
Mike Conley, a writer on nuclear power who belongs to the pro-nuclear Thorium Energy Alliance, told Insight that Russia dominates the area because “there’s a bunch of hippies who are afraid of nuclear energy over here.”
Russia’s strength in enrichment even extends to highly enriched uranium, which can be used to make weapons.
“Russia currently operates more highly enriched uranium facilities than the rest of the world combined, creating substantial nuclear security risks,” B. Rose Kelly wrote in a summary of a 2017 report on Russia’s uranium enrichment activities from the International Panel on Fissile Materials.
The same analysis concluded that Russia’s highly enriched uranium stockpile is the biggest on the planet.
“We have an incredible overreliance on nuclear materials—uranium, thorium, etc.—from Russia and Eastern and Central Europe in a way that is a major national security and economic threat,” Drew Horn, founder of the energy supply chain company GreenMet, said in an interview with Insight.
Before he founded GreenMet, Horn worked on energy during the Trump administration, including in a role with then-Vice President Mike Pence.
“When I worked for the vice president, I was a representative on the nuclear fuels working group where we tried to address a lot of this. The reality is, we didn’t really have as much time as we might have wanted to actually see some of the policy initiatives translate into productive results that would actually enable the industry,” he told Insight.
One recent focus has been the establishment of a strategic uranium reserve, much like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that already exists.
During his presidency, Donald Trump sought to establish such a reserve, in a move that was met with opposition from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and other environmental groups.
While the Trump administration included uranium on its critical mineral list, the Biden administration has removed it from that document, citing the fact that it’s a “fuel mineral” and thus was excluded from the definition of “critical mineral” in the 2020 Energy Act.
“I think it’s important that we incorporate nuclear fuel elements of the periodic table into the overall game plan,” Horn said.
“If we want reduced emissions, if we want increased clean energy, we need to look at nuclear as an option to augment the other forms, be it solar, wind, and more traditional fossils, and we need to have our own feedstock.”
47%
OF THE URANIUM USED BY U.S.
civilian reactors originated in Russia or two countries with close ties to Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in 2020.
Horn says the United States needs strategic reserves of not just uranium, but also thorium, cobalt, rare earths, and other key elements and minerals needed for electric vehicles, solar panels, and a range of other advanced technologies.
Last month, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and other Republican senators from western states introduced a bill that would allow the Department of Energy to establish a uranium reserve.
The legislation was proposed soon after the same groups of senators introduced a bill that would ban uranium imports from Russia, a move also supported by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), as reported by Cowboy State Daily.
Matthew Bunn, a professor of the practice of energy, national security, and foreign policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Insight that a ban on Russian uranium would be a symbolic gesture of little concrete importance.
“In terms of actually affecting Russia’s policy on the Ukraine war one way or another, this, I would argue, is a minor issue. The amount of money that goes to Russia for enrichment services and uranium in a typical year is tiny by comparison to the amount of money that goes to Russia for oil and gas,” said Bunn, who served as an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Clinton administration.
In a similar vein, sanctions on Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy firm, have also been floated.
An unnamed Biden official said the administration was considering the punitive move, according to reporting from Reuters in March.
Horn voiced concern about the potential downstream effects of such policies.
“It’s not, in my opinion, a smart idea to have sanctions applied that don’t think through the consequences of what that might do to U.S. industry—where those alternative sources might come from,” Horn said.
Proliferation a Potential Concern
As Russia detaches from the West and aligns more closely with China, its uranium production and enrichment capabilities may also give rise to worries over proliferation.
On its webpage summarizing global uranium enrichment, the WNA explains the risk presented by such facilities.
“The relatively small increment of effort needed to achieve the increase from normal levels is the reason why enrichment plants are considered a sensitive technology in relation to preventing weapons proliferation, and are very tightly supervised under international agreements. Where this safeguards supervision is compromised or obstructed, as in Iran, concerns arise.”
Horn told Insight that “there’s always a risk” of proliferation, particularly with a “knee-jerk reaction” such as sanctions.
“I don’t think this is a proliferation issue,” said Bunn.
“The much bigger proliferation issue has nothing to do with nuclear fuel supply—it has to do with the fact that a country that received security assurances in return for giving up the nuclear weapons on its soil is now being dismembered by one of the countries that provided the security assurances.”
“That is potentially going to make a lot of countries rethink, ‘Is this really a good idea, to rely for our security on such assurances?’” Bunn added.
In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to become a non-nuclear-weapon state after Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom offered it security assurances.
Other commentators have argued that theUnitedStatesprovokedRussiathrough its expansion of NATO since the 1990s, drawing attention to newly declassified documents from George Washington University’s National Security Archive that show then-President Bill Clinton promising Boris Yeltsin that NATO would be built in “partnership” with Russia.
In a 2018 paper, “Nuclear Security in Russia: Can Progress be Sustained?” Bunn pointed out that Russia’s nuclear policies include “aggressive exports to countries with questionable nuclear
security—although these export contracts typically include support for developing nuclear-security infrastructure in the recipient country.”
At the time, he predicted that Russia’s nuclear security would likely remain static or slowly erode over the next five to 10 years.
He told Insight he feels more optimistic about Russia’s nuclear security arrangements now than he did then.
“One of my close Russian colleagues, really as an expert on their nuclear security arrangement, likes to say that Russia is now a normal country with respect to nuclear security, meaning that like every other country, there are some problems—every other country including the United States.”
Some experts who spoke with Insight traced the rise of Russian and Russian-influenced uranium production to U.S. policy failures.
Jim Kennedy, a mining entrepreneur who leads the firm Three Consulting and The northern Russian port city of Murmansk on May 18, 2018. Russia is the source of roughly 35 percent of the world’s enriched uranium, and its total enrichment capacity places it first in the world.
A radioactive warning sign at the Anfield’s Shootaring Canyon Uranium Mill outside Ticaboo, Utah, on Oct. 27, 2017.
who has worked with Horn, cited Rosatom’scontroversialacquisitionofUranium One during the Obama administration.
He also noted the Megatons to Megawatts Program, which saw the United States purchase low-enriched uranium from Russia that had been converted from highly enriched uranium.
“Our generous deal with Russia to pull all of that fissile material out of a weapons platform and into an energy consumption platform was probably the right decision, but it decimated the uranium mining industry,” he said.
“We sacrificed the entire mining industry.
“Another indirect factor was the privatization of the uranium enrichment facilities. Who cares who mines the stuff if you cannot enrich it—like rare earths, the mined material has no direct application value. All value comes from downstream value adding,” Kennedy told Insight in an email.
Bunn has a different perspective.
“Our uranium mining industry was not competitive with various other sources of supply, and so, private companies made rational economic decisions, and we ended up with much less uranium mining in the United States than we used to have,” he said.
While the United States initiated antidumping investigations on uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet republics during the 1990s, those investigations were soon suspended.
Bunn also noted that uranium mining was cheaper in Canada, Australia, and other countries than in the United States.
Kennedy also cited the Obama administration’s secret transfer of thorium molten salt reactor technology to China, after the United States did little with the technology for decades.
“The most concerning part, to me, is we realize[d] this years ago, but our Department of Energy gave this technology to China,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said while questioning Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of the U.S. Africa Command, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
While the United States isn’t a leader in uranium mining, some see potential in sea power—more specifically, in the extraction of uranium from seawater, a concept outlined at length by scientist James Conca in Forbes.
“That just renders all this garbage moot about Russia or whoever,” Conley said.
One of Conley’s Thorium Energy Alliance colleagues, John Kutsch, was more equivocal.
“I think it is technically possible to do it, especially if we start sucking billions of gallons of seawater out of the oceans to desalinate it and turned it into hydrogen for a hydrogen economy, we may as well grab the uranium while we’re at it,” he told Insight.
Bunn and Conley offered cautious support to the Biden administration’s $6 billion plan to fund nuclear plants that are at risk of being shuttered.
“There are public policy reasons to do that. These reactors provide the largest source of low carbon power that exists in the United States, and they provide firm power,” Bunn said.
“On the other hand, these are old reactors,” he added.
“I have a feeling he [Biden] will be mildly approving of nuclear,” Conley told Insight.
For his part, he believes the continued opposition to nuclear power among many environmental groups is driven by “Boomers, who were influenced by the anti-war movement and the equating of nuclear weapons and war.”
Representatives of the Department of Energy didn’t respond by press time to a request by Insight for comment.
