President Biden signed a bill into law on Monday night banning the import of uranium enriched in Russia. Russia controls nearly half the world’s enrichment capacity, and American electric utilities have been spending around $1 billion per year on the fuel to run their reactors.
The bill had broad bipartisan support but stumbled on its way to becoming law, held up at various points over the past year as a bargaining chip in unrelated legislative disputes. Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, had blocked it in the Senate for months but dropped his opposition last month, clearing its way to unanimous approval.
The ban will take effect in mid-August. It provides waivers for utilities that would be forced to shut down nuclear reactors, allowing them to continue imports until 2028.
Russia’s government has threatened in the past to unilaterally halt exports to the United States if a ban were put into effect. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, did not reiterate the threat but called the bill “unfair.”
Securing increased supplies of enriched uranium is also key to the United States’ transition away from fossil fuel energy. President Biden’s climate agenda relies in part on the growth of nuclear power, which currently produces more than half of emissions-free electricity in the country. Without domestic uranium enrichment capacity, however, that power was pinned to Russian supplies.
The bill frees up $2.7 billion passed in previous legislation to build out a nascent domestic uranium processing industry. Roughly a third of enriched uranium used in the United States is now imported from Russia, which is also the world’s cheapest source of the fuel. Most of the rest is imported from Europe. A final, smaller portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States.
The United States once dominated the market, until a swirl of historical factors, including an enriched-uranium-buying deal between Russia and the United States designed to promote Russia’s peaceful nuclear program after the Soviet Union’s collapse, enabled Russia to corner half the global market. By 2013, the United States had ceased enriching uranium entirely.
As punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, The United States and Europe have largely stopped buying Russian fossil fuels. But building a new enriched uranium supply chain will take years.
Centrus Energy, the main U.S. private firm engaged in domestic enrichment, said it would compete for funding unlocked by the bill to expand its facility in southern Ohio and build “thousands of additional centrifuges to replace Russian imports with American production,” a company spokesman, Dan Leistikow, said in an email.
“Waivers are urgently needed in the short term, but ultimately, the only solution is to invest in new American capacity,” he said.
Centrus is also producing a more concentrated form of enriched uranium crucial to the development of smaller, safer and more efficient next-generation reactors. That evolution in nuclear power, decades in the making, has received billions of dollars in federal development funds. Nevertheless, in the United States, next-generation reactors remain in the design stage.
One American company, TerraPower, which was founded by Bill Gates, has had to delay the opening of what could be the United States’ first new-age nuclear plant in Wyoming by at least two years, in part because it has pledged to not use Russian enriched uranium.
