Despite 95 percent dependence on imports, including from Russia, uranium doesn’t meet new ‘criticality’ standards
President Joe Biden is guiding United States energy policy in directions designed to meet his stated goals of a “100-percent ‘clean electricity grid’” by 2035 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, a baseload bias that radiates across the entire federal regulatory and rule-making circuitry.
Yet, despite carbon-free nuclear power providing nearly 20 percent of the electricity produced in the United States and having the capacity to produce much more, the administration continues to downplay nuclear power as a key component in achieving its 2035 and 2050 aims.
Nuclear power generates half the carbon-free electricity in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), but the Biden administration’s proposed Fiscal Year 2024 budget request cuts nuclear power development by more than $210 million, or 12 percent, from this year’s $1.77 billion budget, and nearly $100 million from two years ago.
The most recent confirmation that carbon-free nuclear power is not the carbon-free energy the administration supports is the exclusion of uranium by the Department of the Interior (DOI) from the United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) updated “critical minerals list.”
The listing is considered pivotal to reviving the nation’s uranium mining and enrichment industries, which have atrophied since the Russians flooded the global market with predatorily priced ore and processed fuels beginning three decades ago.
In 1980, domestic American operators produced and processed 90 percent of the uranium used by 251 nuclear power plants that generated 11 percent of the country’s electricity.
In 2021, only 5 percent of the uranium used by the 55 nuclear power plants operating in the United States—which now generate nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity—was produced domestically.
Russia, even after invading Ukraine, still produces more than 50 percent of the fuel used for nuclear power across the world. It supplies 14 percent of the ore and nearly 25 percent of the processed uranium American nuclear plants use.
By John Haughey
