Sputnik News
The stark warning follows a report last week which pointed out that China controls nearly 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth minerals, and could starve the US military-industrial complex of its ability to produce new weapons by stopping the resources’ exports.
A Russian decision to halt the supply of enriched uranium to US power companies would take many of America’s nuclear reactors offline within a year, leading to a spike in electricity prices beyond the current price inflation, and potentially leaving some areas of the country unable to meet demand, an analysis in The Hill of “Russia’s nuclear power dominance” has warned.
The report, penned by former Department of Energy Under Secretary Paul Dabbar and Columbia University energy researcher Matt Bowen, pointed out that nuclear power accounts for more than 20 percent of US electricity generation capacity. Nearly half of the uranium used by the country’s 56 operational nuclear power plants is imported from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.
Dabbar and Bowen noted that although Russia only mines six percent of the world’s uranium, it controls some 40 percent of the global uranium conversion market, and 46 percent of total uranium enrichment capacity.
Other countries are even more dependent on Russia for their nuclear power generation needs, the authors wrote, with Finland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, and Turkey reliant on Russian state nuclear giant Rosatom for everything from uranium mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, and fuel fabrication to the construction and servicing of state-of-the-art reactors.
Dabbar and Bowen urged Western leaders to “immediately consider their exposure to Russian nuclear exports and to take steps to reduce it or face another energy shock at the hands of Putin”, and urged the US federal government to provide assistance and incentives for US-based uranium conversion and enrichment facilities to rebuild the country’s dilapidated nuclear fuel supply chain.
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