The news arouses disbelief.
16 months after Russia invaded Ukraine, after the Biden administration led the West in imposing an arsenal of sanctions and attempted to label Vladimir Putin as isolated, America itself continues to buy enriched uranium from Moscow for its own nuclear power plants.
More specifically, the US companies that operate nuclear reactors to generate electricity pay $1 billion a year to Rosatom, the Russian state-owned company that supplies uranium and has close ties to Putin’s military apparatus. The most recent source corroborating this data is a lengthy and detailed investigation by The New York Times. But if you read it carefully, you understand that it is an open secret, an extreme contradiction visible to all in the light of the sun.
Still, US dependence on Russia in this area is worrying.
Nuclear power now generates more than half of the electricity in the US from renewable sources. Its importance will only increase in the future if the American economy is to be decarbonized, given the technical limitations of other renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Wind and sun are intermittent, nuclear power produces electricity on a continuous cycle.
Experts agree that civil nuclear power has entered a period of renaissance. Also on the horizon are the advent of magnetic fusion and clean (zero waste) nuclear power. The latter will not require uranium. But we’re not there yet.
In the meantime, enriched uranium will continue to be essential to power the current generation of reactors. And without supplies from Russia, many of those reactors would shut down. Specifically, a third of all enriched uranium used in America comes from subsidiaries of the Russian company Rosatom; The largest part is imported from Europe; only a small remainder is produced by an Anglo-German-Dutch consortium that operates plants in the USA.
The dependence of American power plants on Rosatom has geopolitical origins in an era that seems distant to us today. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the American and Russian governments got along very well for years. The United States wanted to facilitate the revival of the Russian economy. They also wanted to help Moscow manage its nuclear industry and arsenals and promote a smooth transition from military to civilian use of its enriched uranium production capabilities.
So it was that America, after long having been the main producer of enriched uranium, practically dismantled its industry to depend on supplies from Moscow.
Today, no truly American companies are active in this supply chain. There is a project to restore national autonomy in enriched uranium, but it will take a long time to get there. Both nations are now prisoners of this paradox.
America remains strategically dependent on a nation it considers a dangerous adversary and is trying to isolate economically. The Russian contradiction is no less striking. Putin could hit the US economy with a hefty counter-sanction if he just ordered Rosatom’s various subsidiaries to stop all supplies of enriched uranium to Uncle Sam’s empire.
Why doesn’t he? What are you waiting for? Will he ever do it? Or has he decided it doesn’t suit him?
On closer inspection, today’s world is littered with these contradictions. Because it was built from 1989 to 1991 on the basis of a very different scenario, namely interdependence, trade growth and complementarity between nations. Disassembling everything, taking a step backwards, building a world based on different principles and prioritizing the reasons of safety over economic expediency is really complicated. We are only at the beginning of this new path.