The Trump administration is pushing for a homegrown nuclear power renaissance. The United States is still the largest producer of nuclear energy in the world, but that won’t last long without drastic changes in energy policy and investment at the state and federal level. The United States’ nuclear energy fleet, while sizable, is aging out, with far more plants being decommissioned than coming online. Moreover, the country is heavily dependent on foreign imports of nuclear fuel, presenting another major challenge for Trump’s goal to “produce lasting American dominance in the global nuclear energy market.”
At present, a whopping 93 percent of the United States’ uranium for nuclear fuel is coming from foreign markets. Not only is this antithetical to the current administration’s goal of global dominance, it also presents key energy security concerns. Uranium production and enrichment are overwhelmingly carried out by a worryingly small number of players, and many of these critical supply chains are controlled by Russia. As a result, “U.S. nuclear energy faces fuel supply chain vulnerabilities, with tight uranium supplies, geopolitical risks, and rising costs threatening both existing reactor costs and advanced reactor development,” according to a January report from Stanford Energy.
Plus, the United States is far from the only country planning a nuclear energy revival, indicating that increased competition for scarce uranium supply could soon prove to be a major bottleneck. The World Nuclear Association projects that global demand for uranium will balloon 28 percent by 2030 and nearly double by 2040, and prices are already soaring on the global market. Moreover, the United States is behind the ball in terms of securing deals. “Russian and Chinese players have been very keen to secure access to resources in Central Asia and Africa, creating a very aggressive competitive environment,” Benjamin Godwin at Prism Strategic Intelligence told the Financial Times last year.
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This environment poses a problem for powering the nuclear plants the United States already has, much less the capacity that it wants to build. “Over the next decade, American nuclear utilities will require a massive volume of fuel to maintain grid operations,” Interesting Engineering warned in a Wednesday report. “Over the next 10 years, operators project a total baseline demand of 360 million pounds of uranium. Current long-term purchase agreements cover 174 million pounds of this requirement. The remaining 186 million pounds represent unfilled market demand that utilities must secure through new contracts,” the report went on to say.
The United States is already making some inroads toward building up domestic uranium supplies and relieving its reliance on imports, but it has a long way to go. At present just 7 percent of the nation’s reactor uranium deliveries come from domestic sources. But various projects are trying to change those figures in a big hurry, and are using some innovative approaches to get there.
In one promising approach, the federal government has invested aggressively into recycling and recovering viable uranium from spent nuclear fuel. Recycling spent fuel could reportedly boost resource utilization by a jaw-dropping 95 percent. And, in April, uranium production began at the largest uranium in-situ recovery (ISR) site seen in the country in over a decade, located on 20,000 acres in South Texas. The project is expected to produce 6,155,000 pounds of U3O8, the most stable form of uranium oxide.
In addition to finding new and indigenous streams of uranium resources, alternative nuclear fuels could also form a part of the puzzle. The Trump administration is currently seeking to convert more than 50 tons of weapons-grade plutonium leftover from the Cold War into commercial reactor fuel, and has announced that it is in “advanced negotiations” with a handful of nuclear startups who want to buy it.
“A lack of fuel is one of the biggest choke points in expanding nuclear power right now,” said Jacob DeWitte, the chief executive of Oklo, one of the companies in conversation with the Trump administration about acquiring plutonium to power its next-gen small nuclear reactors. “This will help us get more nuclear power online faster.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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