Part 1 of 3 Parts
Ambitious companies with the support of Amazon, Google and other technology titans are working on safer and cheaper nuclear reactors. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to facilitate an industry comeback, and the Trump administration has made nuclear development a priority. However, America’s limited capacity to supply its own nuclear fuel has dampened some of the exuberance out of Washington, DC.
Representative Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn) is the chair of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee. He said, “We are in the game, but we’ve got to get better at the game if we are ever going to be able to power our new nuclear fleet.”
The Department of Energy (DoE) has started to draw startup nuclear companies into the uranium enrichment business. Recently, San Francisco-based General Matter said it would build a one and a half billion-dollar uranium enrichment facility in Paducah, Kentucky, the site of a former U.S. government enrichment plant.
The company is led by former SpaceX engineer Scott Nolan who said it can produce at a lower cost the type of enriched uranium desired by developers of advanced nuclear reactors.
However, the United States’ decision to ban Russian uranium imports in order to break Moscow’s dominance over global supply and as a response to the war in Ukraine has ratcheted up the pressure to generate an American supply of nuclear fuel.
That is exacerbated by the limited success that U.S. companies in the nuclear fuel business have had since the Cold War. The single U.S. commercial uranium enrichment facility, located in New Mexico, has seen uranium production go down, not up, since 2018.
In 1985, the U.S. was the nuclear fuel leader of the world. U.S.-operated enrichment plants processed more than six times the uranium the nation enriches today and nearly four times what American reactors consumed. These facilities are legacy operations of the Atomic Energy Commission and later the Department of Energy. They served national security, utility needs and international markets alike.
However, the Cold War’s end triggered massive changes. The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the U.S. government’s calculus on domestic nuclear fuel production, and it led to supply agreements with Russian suppliers. China wasn’t the strategic nuclear competitor that it is today, and on the energy front, U.S. utilities had stopped building new reactors.
Kurt Terrani is a nuclear engineer and the CEO of Oak Ridge, Tennessee-based Standard Nuclear. He said, “So it made a lot of sense to be like, ‘Why are we doing this as a government? Let’s get out of that business.’”
With the assumption that the U.S. would always have access to foreign enrichment supplies, the U.S. Enrichment Corp. was spun off from the Energy Department in 1992 and fully privatized in 1998.
Katy Huff is a former DOE official and now a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She said, “The privatization of the United States Enrichment Corporation was potentially a good idea at the time,” said “But frankly, in light of our global economic system and the state-backed enterprises that it competes with, the enrichment market in the United States being privatized puts U.S. producers at a disadvantage compared to the remainder of the market.”
U.S. Enrichment’s last large-scale nuclear enrichment operations closed in 2013, and the company was renamed Centrus Energy. It had locked up nuclear fuel contracts in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
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