Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
   The U.S. nuclear industry got a boost in 1990 when the U.S. Department of Commerce put restrictions on the import of uranium from the Soviet Union which was dumping cheap uranium on the U.S. market.
    Unfortunately, the boost from the import restrictions ended a year later when the U.S. and Russia made a deal for the U.S. to buy five hundred tons of weapons-grade Russian uranium from the dismantling of old Soviet nuclear warheads. The Russians converted the highly enriched uranium to low enriched uranium suitable for burning in nuclear power plants. This Russian uranium supplied about one third of the U.S. nuclear industry for twenty years under the Megatons to Megawatts program. By the year 2000, U.S. uranium production dropped to its lowest level in fifty years.
    Around the year 2000, the former Soviet state of Kazakhstan ramped up uranium mining and quickly rose to the top of the global suppliers of uranium. They became the second biggest supplier of uranium to the U.S. Kazakhstan has very lax regulations which allow miners to use in situ leaching, a cheap method of extraction which has severe environmental consequences and helped boost Kazakhstan’s share of the uranium market.
     In the early 2000s, falling global stockpiles and booming economies in both China and India drove new uranium demands as these countries invested heavily in nuclear power. Unfortunately, the financial crisis of 2008 caused a crash in uranium demand. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 set of a new round of reactor closures and caused Germany to turn away from nuclear power completely. They plan to have closed all their reactors by 2022.
     The third surge in the uranium market had a very shaky start. The global strategic uranium reserves are in no danger of running out in the near future. In 2016, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that their survey showed that the current global fleet of power reactors has sufficient stockpiles to operate for a hundred and thirty years. The global uranium market has the ability to quickly respond to any temporary shortfalls in the supply of uranium.
     The IAEA report said, “Regardless of the role that nuclear energy ultimately plays in meeting future electricity demand and moving towards global climate objectives, the uranium resource base … is more than adequate. In the wake of recent significant reductions in uranium production, the coming challenges are likely to be those associated with constrained investment capabilities …”
     More significant is the fact that an attempt to open up new mining permission in the western U.S. will definitely meet stiff resistance and widespread public backlash. For all of its problems and setbacks over the decades, nuclear power is still popular in the U.S. The turning point for that interest and support came in 2016 when the major of the U.S. citizenry turned against it. The last major poll taken in 2019 showed that the U.S. public is split in its attitude towards nuclear power. Forty nine percent of U.S. adults either strongly favor or somewhat favor nuclear power while forty nine percent either strongly oppose or somewhat oppose nuclear power.
    A 2020 Colorado College Conservation in the West poll discovered that seventy one percent of the voters in the Mountain West and seventy seven percent of the Arizona voters oppose the development of new uranium mines on public lands next to the Grand Canyon.