With Russian Nuclear Fuel Ban, U.S. Also Tries To Fix A (Self-Inflicted) Problem

By Mike Eckel, Fletcher alum and Senior News Correspondent

It was one of the marquee U.S. disarmament programs of the post-Soviet era: Get Russia to downgrade tons of highly enriched uranium, turn it into power-plant fuel, sell it to the United States, keep weapons-grade uranium off the black market — and potentially out of terrorists’ hands.

Megatons to Megawatts was lauded as a success; enough uranium to arm around 20,000 Russian warheads was turned into fuel that has helped power American homes and businesses, even to this day.

The program had collateral damage, though: The U.S. enrichment industry ended up gutted, unable to compete with cheap Russian uranium. Today, 80 percent of all nuclear fuel used the United States — which has more operating atomic plants than any other country — is foreign; Russia is responsible for almost one-third of that.

Fast-forward 30 years: the U.S. government is trying to undo some of the self-inflicted damage, while also trying to cut off massive funding for the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.

Last week, President Joe Biden signed into a law a ban on imports of Russian-enriched uranium, legislation that had strong bipartisan support despite congressional foot-dragging.

“This new law reestablishes America’s leadership in the nuclear sector,” Jake Sullivan, the White House national-security adviser, said on May 13. “It will help secure our energy sector for generations to come.”

U.S. lawmakers are now teeing up additional legislation that broadens previous sanctions on the Russian state nuclear company, Rosatom.

But the knotty failure of U.S. uranium enrichment is a less well-known side note to the success of Megatons to Megawatts — a failure that complicated efforts to choke off an important source of funding for the Kremlin.

“It was a national failure on both the government and industry’s parts to allow this critical national supply chain to wither,” said Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S. think tank. “We are in the mess we are now with Rosatom exactly because of these decades of mismanagement.”

“I think there are causes beyond Megatons to Megawatts, but that certainly allowed the deeper pathologies to fester while the supply of enriched uranium continued,” said Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who writes a widely read blog about nuclear policy.

‘They’re Very Good At What They Do’

After the Soviet collapse, fears of nuclear materials going missing, and ending up on the black market, were rampant. U.S. administrations made securing “loose nukes” a priority.

In the early 1990s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Thomas Neff conceived a plan to induce Russia to dilute its weapons-grade uranium into fuel for electricity plants: Ultimately, 500 metric tons — enough for 20,000 warheads— was converted and purchased by the United States.

Cheap fuel for U.S. reactors; more cash for a broke Moscow; less material for catastrophically destructive weapons.

“We destroyed 70 percent of the Soviet arsenal. I don’t know if that could be considered a flaw,” Neff told RFE/RL. “To my mind, that was far more consequential than any other issue.”

But cheap Russian fuel hollowed out the U.S. enrichment industry, removing domestic pressures, critics said, for the U.S. to build its own enrichment capacity. In 2013, the last U.S.-owned plant closed. Another U.S.-based plant, owned by Anglo-Dutch-German corporation Urenco, started up operations the previous year, and now stands to gain substantially from the Russian ban.

“It would have been good to plan ahead, and maybe some in the Department of Energy did, but Congress no longer has much nuclear expertise, and, in any case, they never had done any long-term planning around nuclear, so why start now?” Rofer said with sarcasm.

In Russia, consolidation and reforms resulted in the creation in 2007 of Rosatom, which took over enrichment for civilian purposes, along with weapons design for the military, as well as marketing and building out power plants around the world.

Of the 33 nuclear-generating countries, there are about 440 reactors that import nuclear fuel from Rosatom, according to industry figures, and the company is the world leader in uranium enrichment. Nuclear-generating countries bought $2.7 billion in enriched uranium and related services from Russia in 2023, according to an estimate by the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank.

“They’re very good at what they do,” Neff said. “They build plants, reactors, fast, like the French. The U.S. has such a drawn-out regulatory process that the financing kills the nuclear industry in the U.S. The U.S. has also lost out in selling reactors to other countries.”

Rosatom, which said it had $27.3 billion in revenues last year, did not answer a question about what percentage of its revenues ended up in government coffers.

But a statement from the company called the U.S. ban “discriminatory and non-market-oriented,” saying it would harm global markets for nuclear fuel and services.

For the United States, Russia is the single-largest foreign supplier of nuclear fuel. By one estimate, $1 billion is paid annually by American customers to Rosatom.

Experts say the collateral damage to U.S. enrichment was just part of a wider policy error by the U.S. government — most notably failing to develop its own technology.

The U.S. company at the center of the Megatons to Megawatts, now called Centrus Energy, filed for bankruptcy in 2013. After reorganization, it moved to build a new type of technology for enrichment, with the endorsement of the Department of Energy.

“The company we trusted to carry out the Megatons deal was also supposed to develop new technology,” Neff said. “Instead, it was more interested in profits from marking up Russian supply to sell to utilities than developing a successful new enrichment technology, which it failed to do.”

“The failure to do so was not the fault of the Megatons deal,” he said. “Rather it was a failure of domestic policy. The U.S. still does not have a viable enrichment program.”

Lindsey Geisler, a Centrus spokesperson, did not respond to a question about the company’s past policies but argued that the new ban, plus nearly $3 billion in federal investment, will help “restore America’s domestic nuclear fuel supply chain, and Centrus is well-positioned to lead that effort.”

The U.S. Energy Department did not respond in time for publication.

The ban takes effect in August and provides a four-year grace period for American utilities to phase out their Russian imports, an effort to avoid destabilizing the U.S. power market.

Overall, the ban is limited in its scope, said Stricker, who also advised U.S. lawmakers on parallel legislation that would broaden secondary sanctions against Rosatom and its executives. But she said it was a step in the right direction.

“It is unamusing that U.S. utilities have continued to import Russian uranium mainly for economic reasons, since there are available alternative suppliers,” Stricker said.

(This post is republished from RFERL.)