Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
    The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) supports the proposals of the NFWG. They say that the creation of federal stockpile of uranium is important for the development of the next generation of nuclear technologies as well as advanced nuclear fuels.
     There are important benefits that would result from the development of a domestic nuclear stockpile such as the improvement of the U.S. uranium industry which produces a fuel that is critically important to the U.S. energy supply.
     In 2017, the U.S. uranium industry produced only two million four hundred thousand pounds of uranium concentrate known as U308. At the height of the U.S. uranium industry, forty-four million pounds were produced by domestic producers in 1980. Domestic U.S. nuclear power plants bought just seven percent of their uranium last year from domestic producers. This is a strong indication of the sad state of current U.S. uranium production. The U.S. has ninety-eight operational nuclear power reactors that generate over eight hundred terawatts per year. This is about twenty percent of the total electricity generated in the U.S. annually.
     One of the reasons for the poor state of the U.S. uranium industry is that fact that although the U.S. does have a lot of domestic deposits of uranium ore, those deposits are not as rich and accessible as those is some other countries such as Canada and Australia. Richer deposits mean lower production costs and prices. U.S. uranium mines have difficulty making profit even when the global price of uranium is high. The U.S. uranium industry has largely depended on help from the federal government to survive.
    The period from 1955 to 1980 is often considered to be the “golden age” of U.S. domestic uranium production. The U.S. gave out big uranium bonuses in order to expand its uranium stockpile during the Cold War. These bonuses included ten-year price guarantees for certain kinds of ore as well as ten thousand dollars discovery and production bonuses which amount to about a hundred thousand dollars in today’s dollars. These incentives and the high demand set off a “gold rush” in the western U.S. as miners rushed to find and exploit new uranium deposits. The incentive program was a great success and U.S. stockpiles exploded to the point where the bonuses were halted in the 1960s. Suddenly, an industry that had come to be very dependent on government incentives found itself without this source of income.
     By 1975, the U.S. government opened our domestic uranium market to a growing percentage of overseas suppliers. This opened the U.S. market to foreign suppliers such as Canada and Australia who could supply uranium at a lower price. By 1987, the uranium market in the U.S. had been turned upside down. The U.S. imported almost fifteen million pounds of uranium while domestic production was only about thirteen million pounds.
     Growing competition impacted domestic production. The long-term nuclear love affair of the U.S. public based on claims that nuclear power would be very cheap or even free crashed as economic reality set in. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in 1979 shocked the nation and turned much of the public against nuclear power. U.S. utilities grew tired of the time and cost required to design, license, build, operate and maintain nuclear power reactors and the demand for new builds fell. The result was that U.S. domestic uranium production fell to a thirty-five year low by the time the last big wave of reactors came online in 1990.
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