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After President Joe Biden signed a law banning imports of Russian uranium earlier this month, foreign-owned mining companies hoped the law would jump start the long-dormant uranium mining industry in the U.S. But as Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Rachael Hamby explains in a new Westwise blog post, the mining industry is conflating the need for uranium enrichment with uranium mining and hoping Westerners won't notice the difference.
Hamby explains that while America currently imports 20 percent of its enriched uranium from Russia, Russia is only the sixth-largest producer of uranium, behind countries like Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan, which mined an order of magnitude more uranium than Russia in 2022. Russia's outsize uranium refining capacity is a relic of the Cold War; in 1993 the U.S. agreed to purchase weapons-grade uranium from Russia and use it in power plants. That cheap source of enriched uranium made it uneconomical to invest in American enrichment infrastructure.
But replacing enriched uranium with uranium that is mined in America makes little economic sense, Hamby explains. American uranium deposits are lower quality and more expensive to mine than uranium found in American allies like Canada and Australia. The U.S. has no deposits in the highest-quality category (costing less than $40 per kilogram of uranium to extract) and over half falling into the lowest-quality category (costing up to $260 per kilogram of uranium to extract) according to “Uranium 2022: Resources, Production and Demand.”
That means that in a global market, domestic uranium mining is unlikely to ever be profitable without significant government intervention. And America still has no long-term plan for where to store uranium waste once it's been used to generate electricity. Waste storage sites have been proposed in Nevada and New Mexico, only to face opposition from communities that don't want to live next to a radioactive waste dump. Tribal communities on the Navajo Nation and elsewhere have made it clear they don't want the risk of radioactive waste being transported past their homes and schools, especially given the toxic legacy of uranium mining and milling in the Southwest.
Learn more about what's behind the new uranium rush on CWP's website and Medium.
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At the forum, some opponents called the [Dolores] monument proposal a ‘federal land grab’ and used ‘stop the steal’ language, which ignores that the fed government already owns and manages the land; that’s why it’s public. All citizens—not just local residents—should be able to have a say and stake in the public lands’ future.”
