The U.S. nuclear energy sector’s dependence on Russian uranium created during a failed Obama-era reset with Moscow is coming back to bite Americans as the Kremlin moves to block future exports of the vital fuel.
Vladimir Putin’s new restrictions on uranium exports to the U.S., announced last week, come as the country’s war in Ukraine continues to heighten tensions with the United States and the West. His announcement created an immediate impact, as uranium prices soared and worries grew that American utilities might have trouble meeting electric demand next year.
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.
“Everything the Democrats have done has emboldened Russia and their ability to actually leverage their dirty gas production,” Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Monday night. Tenney’s House district is home to New York’s remaining nuclear power reactors.
Enriched uranium is a vital component of nuclear power plants in the United States, which account for a fifth of electricity production across the nation. The United States is also almost entirely dependent on imports to acquire enriched uranium. Last year, the United States imported more than a quarter of its enriched fuel from Russia even as relations have deteriorated during the Ukraine war.
But the current dependence on Russia was a long time in the making, cemented by several deals signed by the Clinton and Obama administrations that hooked the United States on Moscow’s uranium supply, according to the 2020 book “Fallout: Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies, and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties.”
“[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 the book, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday. “That got us addicted to Russia’s supply,” he said, explaining that it led to a cratering of domestic supply.
Two deals, which took place during Obama’s vaunted “Russian Reset” that began in 2009, cemented the United States’ dependence on Russia nuclear fuel, Bruner said.
“[The] Obama administration certainly wasn’t friendly. They made the famous deals with Russia, the [123 Agreement]; everybody remembers the uranium one deal, which was about nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons,” Bruner said.
“And so now we’re in this tough spot. Now we do have domestic producers, who are, you know, producing uranium for our energy needs, but there are no way, there’s no way they’re going to catch up.”
As part of the flurry of diplomacy between the former Cold War rivals, the Obama administration penned the new 123 Agreement with the Kremlin, which was designed to increase cooperation on civil nuclear energy and further commercial opportunities between the two economies. The administration also signed new arms control and technology cooperation agreements as part of the diplomatic push.
The deal led to billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. utilities to buy Russian uranium to power their nuclear reactors.
Around the same time the agreements were taking shape, however, Putin’s state-controlled nuclear company, Rosatom, was making moves to corner the global supply.
The Russian company’s efforts to acquire a Canadian company, Uranium One, became a scandal for the Obama administration because it saw the virtual elimination of U.S. domestic production of uranium and raised corruption concerns about some of its chief officials.
“The the Uranium One deal was about shuttering our domestic mines, we had all of these uranium mines across…the Rocky Mountains…and closer towards the west, Midwest, that shut down the domestic production there, which was a boon to Putin, who had purchased, in addition to the mines in the United States, a bunch of mines in Kazakhstan,” Bruner said.
“And those are where he’s able to pull out a ton of uranium and enrich it for civilian purposes, ostensibly, and and then sell it back to us at a premium.”
Before the Russian takeover, Uranium One was a Canadian company that mined Uranium around the world, with assets in Eurasia, Africa, and North America. Its facilities in Wyoming, Utah, and other states accounted for approximately 20% of U.S. uranium capacity at the time, necessitating a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to approve an acquisition by the Russia state-backed company.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on that committee and had a prominent role in shaping the administration’s foreign policy. The acquisition became a scandal that plagued her 2016 presidential campaign after investigative author Peter Schweizer and his Government Accountability Institute found nine Uranium One shareholders funneled $145 million into the Clinton Foundation before the deal was set to be considered.
The acquisition was subsequently approved, though Clinton’s team has repeatedly denied that the secretary had a major role in approving the sale.
Both Congress and President Biden, who had a front row seat to the reset, at least appeared to recognize the danger caused by the past missteps, but could do little to wean the U.S. off Russia’s supply before now.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Congress passed and Biden signed the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act ostensibly to free the U.S. nuclear industry from dependence on Russia. Yet, the law only requires an end to U.S. imports of nuclear fuel from Russia completely by 2028, providing a waiver system in the intervening years.
“It was a terrible decision to make us dependent on on imports of uranium from Russia,” former Trump National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz told the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Fleitz said the waiver system established by the law revealed how underdeveloped the United States’ domestic uranium production is, something Putin eagerly exploited last week.
“But utilities could ask for waivers, with the understanding it will take a long time for us to establish domestic sources of your reactor grade uranium,” Fleitz said. “The Russians knew that, and they’re going to cut this off, and our reactors will have no where to go to get uranium.”
“A real bind”
Experts warn that the restrictions come at a time when the U.S. nuclear industry is completely unprepared.
“We don’t have enough enriched uranium here,” Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst for BloombergNEF told Bloomberg News. “They should have been stockpiling enriched uranium in anticipation of this happening.”
Fleitz gave a starker warning, saying the fuel shortage could lead to brownouts by next summer in states with a higher reliance on nuclear power.
“[It] puts us in a real bind, because there are I just talked to a nuclear expert just before our call to get the specifics on this, and he told me that this decision will lead to brown outs in the summer, because there simply won’t be enough nuclear fuel for certain states to run their reactors to generate electricity,” Fleitz said.
“So this is going to be a pretty vital issue for President Trump to deal with, and I wonder whether Putin did this to get some leverage in peace talks on Ukraine,” he added.
Even after the war in Ukraine further soured relations with Russia, the U.S. remained one of the largest importers of Russian uranium fuel in 2023, giving the Kremlin a useful lever in any peace negotiations.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts to reverse the imports of Russian nuclear fuel, American nuclear plants still remain heavily dependent on supplies from abroad, leaving the administration vulnerable to Putin’s tactics.
Reprinted with permission from Just The News By John Solomon and Steven Richards.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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