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Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     These proposals from Perry were killed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as well as top White House national security officials. In June, Perry was forced to admit that there was no federal authority that would permit the federal government to force regional utilities to purchase energy from a particular source or of a particular type. Having failed to get the help they wanted from the federal government, the nuclear industry has turned to individual state governments to lobby for support. Recently, Ohio voted to provide a nuclear power supplier with one hundred and fifty million dollars of support.
     Ken Cook is the President of the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The EWG is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization. The EWG seeks to drive consumer choice and civic action by research, advocacy and education about healthier environmental options. He said, “The Trump administration is once again looking to prop up the dying and dangerous nuclear energy industry and squandering taxpayer dollars to do it. Nuclear power is a relic of the last century, too risky, too expensive and completely rejected by Wall Street investors. Instead of backing another energy loser, the administration should push to make America’s wind and solar power great again, by helping U.S. makers of turbines and solar panels recover from years of standing by while foreign competitors dominate.”
     The Energy Information Administration has collected data which shows that solar power capacity has grown by a factor of eighty-nine and wind power capacity has grown by six times. Unfortunately, solar panels and wind turbines manufacture is dominated by Chinese and European companies.
      Reuters has reported that the working group created by the White House is scheduled to make recommendations to bail out domestic uranium mining in particular and the nuclear industry in general by October 10th of this year.
     A great deal of the known deposits of uranium in the U.S. are located in the Southwest. There are deposits along the rim of the Grand Canyon. In 2012, the Secretary of the Interior created a twenty-year moratorium on uranium mining on over one million acres of land along the rim of the Grand Canyon. However, in November of 2017, the Trump administration announced that it was developing plans to reconsider the Grand Canyon mining ban. In March of 2018, the U.S. uranium mining lobby sent a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court requesting that they lift the mining ban created during the Obama administration.
    A wild card in the production of uranium has recently been developed. Researchers have found ways to use cheap acrylic materials that can be recycled to extract uranium from sea water. This year, one of the research groups is starting tests of their extraction process. They claim that if their system works as expected, they can be competitive with current uranium production from mining operations. If this proves to be true, then uranium mining will decline, and existing deposits of uranium ore will fall in value. There is enough uranium in the ocean to power all the reactors in existence and being planned for thousands of years. And, uranium from the ocean does not have the dire environmental consequences of uranium mining.