In March, US senators called for an import ban on Russian uranium. What happened is the opposite: In the first half of the year, the USA bought 416 tons of uranium from Russia, more than twice as much as in the previous year. 32% of all uranium imports now come from Russia. It raised $695.5 million, the highest since 2002.
The New York Times also recently had to concede: “Currently, American companies pay about $1 billion a year to the Russian state nuclear agency to buy the fuel that generates more than half of the zero-emission energy in the United States.” Payments for enriched uranium were made “to Rosatom’s subsidiaries, which in turn are closely linked to the Russian military apparatus.”
That doesn’t really fit in with recent US demands for a complete ban on Russian uranium imports.
US Senator: Every dollar supports Putin’s brutal war
On March 9, 2023, seven US Senators introduced bipartisan legislation banning imports of Russian uranium. Republican John Anthony Barrasso, 71, a senior member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources (ENR), argued, “Every dollar we give to Russia supports Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine.” This makes it necessary to ban imports of Russian uranium and focus on local energy resources. The domestic nuclear industry is also ready for this.
But instead of reducing imports, the US has increased them, even setting a new record since 2005. The Russian news agency Sputnik insisted on calculating this using data from the US federal agency. Accordingly, in the first half of 2023, the United States bought 416 tons of uranium from Russia. “That’s 2.2 times more than in the same period last year and the largest amount since 2005,” reports Sputnik triumphantly. 188 tons of uranium had been bought by the US in the first six months of 2022.
$696.6 million to Russia
The cash flow to Russia also increased in the first half of the year. “The cost of imported Russian uranium was $696.5 million, the highest since 2002, the year the U.S. began disaggregating data by month.” Year-on-year, shipping costs increased by that 2.5 times.
Result: Russia’s share of uranium imports from the USA has also increased significantly, by an impressive 13 percentage points to 32 percent.
The senators’ announcement was just as successful as Energy Minister Leonore Gewessler’s promise to phase out gas completely. Contrary to the statements made by the Green Party politician, Austria still imports 80 percent of its natural gas from Russia. A complete exit would cost taxpayers 25 billion euros.
USA dependent on foreign uranium suppliers
What Senator John Anthony Barrasso and his colleagues may not have given enough thought to: although the USA was once the world market leader in uranium, it has long since stopped enriching it – and that will not change anytime soon. At the same time, America’s dependence on nuclear energy is likely to increase, the New York Times predicts, which is also related to climate policy. The country wants to rely less on fossil fuels.
Since not a single US company is still enriching uranium, the result is not really surprising: “About a third of the enriched uranium used in the United States is now imported from Russia, the cheapest producer in the world,” writes the “New York Times”.
Imports from Europe have also increased
Most of the rest comes from Europe. Here, too, the United States increased its uranium purchases. In 2023, 383.1 million dollars went to the United Kingdom, which accounted for almost 18% of all imports. A particularly strong one was the increase in French exports. In 2023 they accounted for 319 million US dollars or 15% of total imports. Last year it was $1.9 million.
Source: Exxpress.at
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