We Need to Reform Our Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Get Mining Uranium Now!
Guest Post by Duggan Flanakin.
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, his nomination of Christopher Wright to serve as Secretary of Energy points to a major effort to revive domestic uranium mining. That’s especially good news, given the Biden Administration’s recent decision to discontinue importing uranium from Russia.
Further complicating the worldwide uranium supply chain, the military authorities in Niger, who now control that nation’s uranium mining operations, are putting the squeeze on French reliance on Niger’s uranium for its nuclear reactors. Niger, which produces about 5% of the world’s uranium, had been supplying 15% to 20% of France’s uranium imports.
Of the 192 million pounds of refined uranium oxide (yellowcake, U3O8) used worldwide in 2023, American reactor owners purchased 51.6 million pounds, and U.S. nuclear reactors loaded 43.9 million pounds in completed fuel assemblies. Russia today accounts for about 44% of world uranium conversion and enrichment capacity.
Until Biden signed H.R. 1042, the “Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act,” Russian-origin material (a big moneymaker for Putin’s military) accounted for 12% od U.S. uranium. The top supplier for U.S. reactors remains Canada (27%), followed by Australia and Kazakhstan (each at 22%). Another 10% comes from Uzbekistan, while only 5% was from domestic sources.
The ban on Russian uranium, however, could trigger Russia to block traditional routes of supply from both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through the Baltic Sea port at St. Petersburg. The only two alternate routes are by land through China (from Kazakhstan) and across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, through Georgia to Turkey and across the Black Sea. Both routes add cost, and time, to the yellowcake delivery stream.
Moreover, while the Biden Administration did allocate $2.7 billion toward building U.S. conversion and enrichment capacity, not a dime was approved to support the U.S. uranium mining industry.
Worse from a supply standpoint, President Biden in July, 2023, established the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, closing off the nation’s highest grade uranium resources from mining operations.
According to Energy Fuel Resources, which operates Arizona’s sole active uranium mine, “The uranium deposits of Northern Arizona are geologically unique … very high-grade, close to the surface, and require very little land area to mine. As a result, they are among the lowest-cost and lowest-impact sources of uranium in the United States., making them clean energy assets.”
In a final blow to the domestic nuclear energy industry, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) denied a request by electric power utility Talen Energy to increase the amount of power one of its nuclear plants in Pennsylvania supplies to a nearby data center operated by Amazon, sending shockwaves throughout the advanced reactor industry.
Perhaps the best uranium news during the Biden Administration was the 2021 acquisition by Texas-based Uranium Energy Corporation of uranium assets previously transferred to Russia’s Uranium One Investments Inc. The deal returned to American hands about 100,000 acres in Wyoming’s uranium-producing Powder River and Great Divide Basins.
Former U.S. Energy Secretary (under G.W. Bush) Spencer Abraham, UEC’s board chairman, boasted at the time that, “We believe this achievement will accelerate and strengthen the development of domestic uranium production that can supply U.S.-origin uranium for a full range of America’s uranium requirements.”
According to UEC CEO Amir Adnani, the deal included U1A’s Irigaray plant, which has a licensed annual capacity of 2.5 million pounds of uranium oxide, as well as the Christensen Ranch in situ recovery (ISR) project with four fully installed wellfields and six other permitted or development-stage satellite ISR projects.
Six months later, UEC disclosed mineral resources totaling over 69 million pounds of uranium oxide for its Wyoming hub-and-spoke uranium properties, far more than the combined historic resource of 41.9 million pounds identified at the time it purchased the U1A assets.
President Trump has been much more consistently supportive of nuclear energy.
In July 2019, he established the U.S. Nuclear Fuel Working Group with a charge to examine the state of domestic nuclear-fuel production and “reinvigorate the entire nuclear-fuel supply chain.” He saw that the nation’s uranium industry was facing “significant challenges in production uranium domestically” and called that “an issue of national security.”
In 2020, Trump proposed a $1.5 billion, 10-year campaign to create a national stockpile of U.S.-mined uranium. His rationale was that, even if imported uranium was cheaper, ensuring a domestic supply (just as with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) was (again) “a matter of national security.” And in his final week in office, he issued an executive order promoting small modular reactors for national defense and space exploration.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised to support nuclear energy production by modernizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, working to keep existing nuclear powerplants open, and investing in innovative small modular reactors. He cited the enormous electricity demands of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies as potential users of these SMRs.
Trump’s pick of Oklo Inc. director (and CEO of oilfield services company Liberty Energy Inc.) Christopher Wright as Energy Secretary signals his recommitment to the concept of a national uranium stockpile and increased domestic uranium production. Oklo recently submitted the first advanced fission custom combined application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its developing advanced nuclear fuel recycling technologies.
Wright is quite familiar with the desires of energy-hungry giants like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon to utilize nuclear power to fuel their data centers and artificial intelligence ambitions. Oklo’s vision is to market its Aurora microreactor, housed in an A-frame building, to military installations, isolated and remote countries, remote mining and other energy-using operations, and research outposts.
UEC executive vice president Scott Melbye, who is also CEO of Uranium Royalty Corp., says that nuclear generation and uranium demand are on track to double over the next 20 years. He welcomes an administration willing to work to expand domestic uranium production, noting that “the fundamentals behind the supply and demand of uranium have never been more bullish.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, long seen by many as the enemy of the domestic uranium industry, will need two new commissioners in the coming months. The NRC choices Trump makes may signal the depth of his commitment to revitalizing domestic uranium production for the nation’s fast-growing energy market.
This post was originally published at Real Clear Energy.
Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
#Nuclear #Mining #Electricity #Uranium #NRC #NuclearRegulatoryCommission #FERC
When Hillary brokered the deal with Rusatom to sell access to our domestic uranium, the market was in a slump. Additionally we had committed to recycling weapons grade plutonium from Russia into MOX which would be blended into fuel. Now that is all forgotten, since the sudden increase in nuclear power popularity. Small Modular Reactors are equally vulnerable to cyber and terrorist attack as are standard base load reactors. Monitoring for leaks of radioactivity is just as rigorous. Licensing is just as Byzantine. That is what keeps private companies from setting up their own SMR.
I note that the “high grade” mine in Arizona runs 0.88% U3O8, while Saskatchewan’s Key Lake Mine runs 2% and Cigar Lake over 13%. Canada has a comparative advantage in Uranium. We could be the OPEC of uranium, if we didn’t have a government that thinks shutting down the country’s biggest industry is its main job.