As Washington and the commentariat wring their hands about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sword rattling, the United States and the European Union (EU) continue to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars to Rosatom — a Russian nuclear firm that maintains Moscow’s nuclear weapons complex and just filched a $60-billion Ukrainian nuclear plant.
Why would Washington and Brussels back such a nuclear villain? Do we really want to support Russian organizations that are critical to Putin building the nuclear bombs he is now threatening us with? No one will say yes, but the nuclear industry in Europe and the United States insist we can’t afford not to.
Besides being in charge of all of Russia’s nuclear weapons production and development, Rosatom supplies nuclear fuel to nuclear plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. Any European Union (EU) decision to cut off fuel to these plants would immediately harm these states economically. So, when Poland, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany recently recommended that the EU ban Russian nuclear imports to avoid funding Russia’s military efforts, the Hungarians and French howled and Brussels blinked.
What’s Paris’s brief? Russia buys two-thirds of France’s electrical steam generators. Also, French nuclear fuel fabricator Framatome just struck a major nuclear fuel development cooperation agreement with Rosatom.
Thankfully, not all Russian nuclear-importing EU states are quite so cynical. Finland operates two large Russian VVER reactors, yet it just cancelled plans to build another and is open to embargoing all Rosatom imports (albeit gradually). Meanwhile, Sweden’s giant energy firm, Vattenfall, cut off Russian uranium imports, substituting them with Canadian and Australian ore. Yet, besides these proud actors (and those that have called for an EU nuclear embargo), Europe has played a weak hand.
The EU, of course, must act by consensus. But what of the United States? There are no Russian-designed reactors in America. Nor is the United States without alternative uranium suppliers in Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan or practical, near-term uranium enrichment options. Yet, Washington pretty much followed the EU’s play book.
Russia provides roughly 15 percent of America’s raw uranium and 28 percent of its enriched uranium. Combined with Russian nuclear sales to the EU, these uranium imports from Russia fatten Rosatom’s coffers by as much as $1 billion a year — easily more than Rosatom spends to maintain Russia’s nuclear weapons complex.
You’d think that this last point would be politically fatal to further imports. Think again. Only days after Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the Nuclear Energy Institute and Duke power lobbied President Biden to keep Russian uranium imports coming. Failing to do so, they claimed, would risk increasing the cost of “zero-carbon” nuclear-supplied electricity. Worse, they insisted, it would jeopardize the future of advanced small modular reactors, most of which favor using special enriched uranium. Soon after they made this plea, the White House concurred: Biden announced a U.S. embargo on all forms of Russian energy – oil, natural gas, and coal – but not on uranium.
It was a bad call. Fears of short-term uranium supply disruptions certainly are unwarranted: 75 percent of the fuel nuclear U.S. electric utilities buy is on long-term contracts, which have already been secured. As for a ban on Russian uranium driving up the cost of nuclear electricity, that too is a stretch. The cheapest part of nuclear power operation is its fueling: Even assuming an abrupt cut off of Russian uranium imports, experts estimate that nuclear power costs would be no more than 2 percent, i.e., a fraction of the current inflation rate. They also note that the United States has several practical, Russian-free options to secure affordable ore and enriched uranium.
But the nuclear industry isn’t interested. It’s gunning not just for continued cheap Russian uranium imports but for congressional appropriations and subsidies to build new uranium enrichment plants and small “advanced” reactors that would burn the fuel these plants would produce. Their demand gives greediness a bad name. On one hand, industry is demanding that U.S. taxpayers foot the bill to ensure their nuclear fuel independence. On the other hand, they are pleading that our government continue to buy cheap Russian uranium even though it funds a criminal Russian nuclear enterprise.
Fortunately, some of the Hill’s most prominent nuclear power proponents, who wholeheartedly back the nuclear commercialization projects that industry champions, understand this. Unlike industry and the White House, they’re opposed to relying on Rosatom, even in the short-term.
In March, Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) proposed legislation that would immediately ban all Russian uranium imports. Buying Russia’s uranium funds Putin’s war machine, which, they argue, makes no sense. They’ve got a point. The only question now is why the White House hasn’t yet preempted them.
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, served as deputy for nonproliferation in the Defense Department and is author of “Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future” (2019).