Not exactly breaking news (article is from June 14, 2023), but as it’s not known or discussed widely, I thought its ok to post.
I’m also adding a short commentary (that can be used as a summary) from Urs P. Gasche, published on the independent news site infosperber.ch. (Translated with GPT, left-out parts reference the nyt-article)
In the USA, electricity is consumed and wasted as if Russia were not waging war against Ukraine. Every year, American energy corporations transfer around a billion dollars to the Russian Rosatom corporation for cheap enriched uranium. […]
Rosatom belongs to the Russian state and produces low-enriched uranium for nuclear power plants and highly enriched uranium for military purposes. The USA imports about a third of the enriched uranium needed for nuclear power plants from Russia. It is cheapest there. “The US payments go to a subsidiary of Rosatom, which in turn is closely intertwined with the Russian military apparatus,” […]
In order to halve the US’s CO2 emissions, the capacity of nuclear power plants would need to be doubled, estimates the US Department of Energy. The company TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, plans to enrich uranium one day in a decommissioned coal mine in the US state of Wyoming. A centrifuge factory is also planned in Ohio. “But years will pass and more state subsidies are needed,” […]
In the meantime, the USA could reduce their power consumption with savings programs, calls to the economy and households, and financial duties, in order not to finance the Russian war machinery as much as possible. However, such a savings policy, which is useful anyway, is not popular in the USA. As a result, Democrat Joe Manchin III, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, had to resign resignedly:
“We cannot make ourselves hostages to nations that do not share our values, but that is exactly what has happened.”
Europe, on the other hand, has taken action: most countries voluntarily forego a lot of cheap Russian oil and even completely on Russian natural gas, so that Russia receives as little foreign currency as possible. In doing so, the countries of Europe accept high prices and inflation with all its consequences.
And we’re just ignoring the whole weapons proliferation side of things?
Is that actually a realistic concern? I don’t know much about it, but I don’t see how reprocessing is any more dangerous than importation.
It is. Any time you have the facilities to pull nuclear waste apart pulling plutonium out becomes a risk.
Yeah isn’t weapons grade plutonium a byproduct of recycling nuclear fuel?
No, not directly. You’d have to divert it and only irradiate it for short periods of time (30 days rather than the 18 to 24 month cycles that current plants have).
Proliferation isn’t a significant concern for reprocessing within the US. It’s primarily a concern for other non nuclear weapons countries that start it because they can then create nuclear weapons.
The US has no need to do that. They have more plutonium than they need for current weapons and it has a half life in the hundreds of thousands of years so it will last forever.
Storage of easily enriched material to prevent theft is a concern, especially given the number of incidents with jokers photographing themselves inside nuclear facilities and the results of FBI testing of nuclear site security protocols.
Additionally, given the ridiculously long half life of the products, you get into conversations about what happens on the thousands of years time scale in which it’s not reasonable to think that any given state remains politically stable.
No, but the technology and equipment required for the reprocessing can be converted to plutonium creation with little effort.