Russia controls around 44 percent of the world's uranium enrichment capacity—meaning America should shore up its own nuclear fuel supply.
In a bold move against Russia last spring, the U.S. government announced it would ban the import of a key ingredient for American energy: enriched uranium. Without an adequate supply of this potent nuclear fuel, the U.S. cannot realize its vision of a grid built on clean energy. That's because the future lies in a new generation of reactors scattered across the country at the community level. Known as small modular reactors (SMRs), each of these facilities will produce enough clean energy to power about 650 homes even in the most remote settings. But since these tiny nuclear reactors rely on a type of fuel that is far stronger than what's used in today's reactors—called high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)—the U.S. has no choice but to reimagine how it acquires and processes uranium. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that HALEU demands could be as high as 50 metric tons per year from 2035 onward. At the moment, Russia controls around 44 percent of the world's uranium enrichment capacity, according to the U.S Department of Energy. While there are not yet any reactors using HALEU for fuel, there are demonstration-stage SMRs in development that will be critical in proving out the technology. While the future political climate between the U.S. and Russia is uncertain, history suggests America should shore up its own domestic nuclear fuel supply regardless. In fact, limits on American imports of enriched uranium from Russia date back to the 1990s, according to Ken Petersen, former president of the American Nuclear Society, a for-profit organization based in Illinois that promotes the nuclear engineering field. "Up until 2013, the Russians eliminated their spent warheads and downblended them into commercial-grade reactor fuel for U.S. reactors," he explains. "In the late 1990s, a restriction was put on Russia where [it] could only supply 20 percent of the U.S. fuel requirements, and after the war in Ukraine, this became a permanent ban except for a…