The good news is that nuclear power — safe, clean, affordable, and carbon-free — has been coming back in a big way here in the USA in recent months. The weird news is that it’s generally left-leaning tech firms and AI’s ravenous need for electricity leading the charge (SWIDT?) to build new nuclear power plants or spin shuttered ones back up.
The bad news is that the voters of this country were twice reckless enough to put people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton in charge — and now Russia is putting the kibosh on the uranium exports we need for nuclear power.
Bloomberg reported this week that “Russia is temporarily limiting exports of enriched uranium to the U.S., creating potential supply risks to utilities operating American reactors that generate almost a fifth of the nation’s electricity.
“Utilities tend to make purchases well in advance,” the report continued, “so any impact is unlikely to be immediate.” However, “To break the dependence on Russia and other state-owned enterprises, coordinated western responses are required,” Veronica Baker, spokeswoman for Canadian uranium mining company Cameco, said in a statement.
The only US-based commercial enrichment facility is located in New Mexico and is owned by Urenco Ltd, a British, Dutch, and German consortium. (Also: “Urenco,” really? Did nobody who speaks English bother to sound that out before they slapped the name on the company letterhead?) The Biden administration did what it always does and threw money at the problem with “a multibillion-dollar effort to restart the nation’s domestic uranium enrichment capabilities,” according to a Just the News staff report, but Urenco expects only a 15% increase by 2027.
Urenco supplies about one-third of America’s enriched uranium for reactors, but a 15% increase on one-third won’t make up for a potential 25% shortfall from Russian suppliers.
How’d we become so reliant on Russia?
John Solomon and Steven Richards reported for Just the News late Monday night that “It’s the latest fallout from a series of foreign policy decisions crafted by Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton that inexplicably strengthened Putin’s ability to wage economic warfare with energy supplies such as natural gas and uranium.”
“[The] United States used to produce its own nuclear materials for bombs and then for nuclear energy, and it was the Clinton administration they made this deal with the Russians way back in the 90s to purchase all of this down blended material from, you know, the decommission nuclear warheads from Russia,” Seamus Bruner, co-author of “Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties,” told Solomon on Monday
There’s much less call for domestic enrichment when the supplies come from overseas. Giving Russia control of our unprocessed uranium boosted Russian enrichment facilities at the expense of our own.
Bruner called it a “tough spot” that Obama, Biden, and Clinton put us in. “There’s no way,” Bruner said of our domestic producers, “they’re going to catch up.”
Democrats thought that increased economic interdependence with Russia would strengthen our relationship with Moscow but it just made us vulnerable. Or maybe vulnerability was the point all along.
The ’80s called and would like its foreign policy back.
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