The United States pays billions to the Russian nuclear agency. Here’s why.

In a cavernous, Pentagon-sized facility located in the Appalachian Valley, thousands and thousands of empty holes line the bare concrete floor.

Only 16 of them house the 30-foot tall centrifuges that enrich uranium into the main ingredient that fuels nuclear power plants. And now they are asleep.

But if every hole contained a working centrifuge, the facility could get the United States out of a bind with ramifications both for the war in Ukraine and for America’s transition away from burning fossil fuels. Today, American companies pay about $1 billion a year to Russia’s state-owned nuclear agency to buy the fuel that generates more than half of the emissions-free energy in the United States.

It is one of the most important remaining financial flows from the United States to Russia, and it continues despite strenuous efforts among US allies to sever economic ties with Moscow. Enriched uranium payments are made to subsidiaries of Rosatom, which in turn are closely linked to the Russian military apparatus.

The United States’ reliance on nuclear energy is set to grow as the country aims to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. But no US-owned company enriches uranium. The United States once dominated the market, until a swirl of historical factors, including an enriched uranium deal between Russia and the United States, designed to advance Russia’s post-Soviet peaceful nuclear program, enabled Russia to position half of the global market. . The United States has stopped enriching uranium completely.

The United States and Europe have largely stopped buying Russian fossil fuels as punishment for invading Ukraine. But building a new supply chain for enriched uranium will take years — and much more government funding than is currently allocated.

That the massive facility in Picketton, Ohio, remains virtually empty more than a year after Russia’s war in Ukraine is evidence of the difficulty.

Almost a third of the enriched uranium used in the United States is now imported from Russia, the cheapest producer in the world. Most of the rest is imported from Europe. A final, smaller part is being produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States. Nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium.

The company that operates the Ohio plant says it could take more than a decade to produce volumes to rival Rosatom. Russia’s nuclear agency, which produces low-enriched and weapons-grade fuel for Russia’s civil and military purposes, is also responsible in Ukraine for taking control of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, prompting fears a battle over it could cause leaks. radioactive material or even a larger collapse.

“We can’t be held hostage by states that don’t have our values, but that’s what happened,” said Sen. Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Energy Committee. Mr. Manchin is the sponsor’s Bill to rebuild US enrichment capacity That would boost federal subsidies for an industry that the United States privatized in the late 1990s.

Weak nuclear energy

The dependence also leaves current and future nuclear plants in the United States vulnerable to a Russian shutdown of sales of enriched uranium, which analysts say is a conceivable strategy for President Vladimir Putin, who often uses energy as a geopolitical tool.

But with the war entering its second year and no end in sight, the US government showed little enthusiasm in starting domestic enrichment. Billions of dollars in potential federal funding remain stuck in bureaucratic processes.

said James Krelenstein, director of GHS Climate, a recently issued clean energy advisory firm White paper about this subject. “We can eliminate almost all of America’s dependence on Russian enrichment by ending the centrifuge plant in Ohio.”

The US centrifuge plant in Ohio will also be key to producing another, more concentrated form of enriched uranium that is crucial to developing smaller, safer and more efficient next-generation reactors. This development in nuclear power, decades in the making, has received billions of dollars in federal development money. However, in the United States, next-generation reactors are still in the design phase.

One US company, TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, has had to delay the opening of what could be the first new nuclear plant in the US for at least two years because it pledged not to use enriched Russian uranium. .

The TerraPower facility will be built on the site of a coal-fired plant in remote Kemmerer, Wyo. , to be decommissioned in 2025. TerraPower promised jobs and retraining for all coal plant workers. But the delay left some doubts in Kemmerer.

All of this makes a link unlikely between Piketon and Kemmerer, towns of 2,400 people each located in American coal country, both of which hope the crisis facing the US government will translate into a boon for their economies. “Some of the biggest national security questions facing the country run through Piketon and Kemmerer,” said Jeff Navin, director of external relations for TerraPower.

Post-Soviet Deal

America’s reliance on enriched uranium abroad reflects its competitive disadvantage over microchips and critical metals used to make electric batteries — two essential components of the global energy transition.

But in the case of uranium enrichment, the United States once had an advantage and chose to give it up.

In the 1950s, as the nuclear age began in earnest, Piketon became the site of one of two massive enrichment facilities in the Ohio River Valley region, where a process called gaseous diffusion was used.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union has developed centrifuges in a secret programme, drawing on a team of German physicists and engineers captured at the end of World War II. Centrifuges have proven to be twenty times more energy efficient than diffusion gases. By the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia had roughly equal enrichment capabilities, but there were significant differences in the cost of production.

In 1993, Washington and Moscow signed an agreement, dubbed megawatts to megawatts, under which the US bought and imported much of Russia’s vast glut of weapons-grade uranium, which it then reduced for use in power plants. This provided the United States with cheap fuel and Moscow with money, and was seen as a de-escalation gesture.

But it also destroyed the profitability of the inefficient US enrichment facilities, which were eventually shut down. Then, instead of investing in centrifuges developed in the United States, successive administrations kept buying from Russia.

The Piketon centrifuge plant, operated by Centrus Energy, occupies a corner of the site of the old gas diffusion facility. According to Centrus, building it to its full potential will create thousands of jobs. It can produce the kinds of enriched uranium needed in both existing and new nuclear plants.

Lacking Piketon production, plants like TerraPower will have to look to foreign producers, such as France, who may be a more acceptable and politically reliable supplier than Russia, but will also be more expensive.

TerraPower considers itself integral to phasing out global warming fossil fuels in electricity. Its reactor will include a sodium-based battery that will allow the plant to ramp up electricity production on demand, offsetting fluctuations in wind or solar production elsewhere.

It’s part of the energy transition that coal-state senators like Mr. Manchin and John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, are keen to fix as they look to nuclear alternatives in exchange for lost coal jobs and revenue. While Mr. Manchin in particular has complicated the Biden administration’s efforts to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels, he has also opposed colleagues, most of them Democrats, who question nuclear power’s role in that transition, in part because of the radioactive waste it creates. .

“We have emissions targets that we’re trying to meet, and people who talk about getting nuclear out of the mix are, well, living in an unrealistic bubble,” Mr. Manchin said.

For its part, the Department of Energy estimates that achieving US emissions reduction pledges will require more than twice the nuclear power capacity.

Without U.S. competition in enrichment and next-generation reactors, officials at TerraPower and Centrus say the gap between Washington and its adversaries will only widen as Russia and China in particular advance to win long-term nuclear contracts with countries the United States also seeks. court.

“The administration is talking a really good game about using American technology to help advance its geopolitical objectives, and also about the speed with which it needs to move to solve climate change,” Mr. Naveen said. “But their inability to move this very basic process forward over such a long time frame is puzzling.”

This week, the department released a long-awaited letter Draft request for proposals To expand domestic enrichment, especially for plants like TerraPower’s. Kathryn Hoff, assistant secretary of state for nuclear energy, said the draft was an “important step” in stemming “American dependence on Russia.”

On Piketon and Kemmerer, the stakes are more personal.

Once 1,800 workers finish dismantling the old gassing facility outside of Piketon, said Billy Spencer, who served as the town’s mayor for 20 years and worked as a security guard at the plant, there will be fewer good-paying jobs and reasons to stay. for 38 years prior to that.

Mr. Spencer recently raised the city’s fixed monthly fee for water by $15 to help pay off a 40-year loan for a new water treatment plant. He even fears that this little bump will make people leave. “We’re not getting the kind of government assistance that we need,” he said.

In Kemerer, there is still hope that hundreds of coal workers who will lose their jobs when the local plant closes will find work, but delays are causing tension. Mayor Bill Thicke said he still hopes the city will grow enough to attract not just nuclear jobs but plumbers, for example, a service Kemmerer now lacks.

“All we can do is hope they find a way to work together on this problem,” Mr. Thicke said.

Sound produced Adrian Hirst.