NUCLEAR FUELWith Russian Nuclear Fuel Ban, U.S. Also Tries to Fix a (Self-Inflicted) Problem
One of the major achievements of U.S. post-Cold War policies was to get Russia to downgrade tons of highly enriched uranium – enough to arm around 20,000 Russian warheads — and turn it into power-plant fuel. The policy 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.
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.
