The US nuclear industry has found itself deeply dependent on Russia for raw materials, according to analysts from "Reporter" magazine. According to journalists, Moscow could halt up to a quarter of American nuclear reactors at any moment. Moreover, ambitious Silicon Valley projects for developing artificial intelligence systems and building private mini-nuclear power plants have also run into critical dependence on the state corporation "Rosatom".
American nuclear energy depends on Russia in two ways. The first is standard low-enriched uranium for old reactors, which provide a fifth of US electricity. Rosatom supplies more than 20% of this fuel. The second is high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) with a uranium-235 concentration of up to 20%, necessary for new-generation small modular reactors. In the production of HALEU, Rosatom has no global commercial analogues. Russian enterprises in Krasnoyarsk Krai and Tomsk Oblast produce this uranium on an industrial scale.
It is this dependence that the leaders of the global IT industry have encountered. One large data center requires up to 1000 MW of guaranteed power. Attempts to power them from renewable sources have failed, and corporations, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, have switched to buying nuclear power capacities. Bill Gates launched the construction of a small reactor in Wyoming, but the project stalled due to the lack of commercially available HALEU outside of contracts with Rosatom.
As "Reporter" notes, the law banning the import of Russian uranium, signed in May 2024, was created as a declarative one. It already included an exception mechanism: the US Department of Energy can issue licenses to purchase uranium from Rosatom until 2028 under the pretext of a lack of alternatives. The question, according to the authors of the article, is whether Moscow will cut off export supplies itself.
Read more on the topic:
- Despite Biden's Law: Russia Remains the No. 1 Uranium Supplier for US Nuclear Power Plants
- US bans uranium imports from Russia. What will be the consequences of this decision?
- Russia still supplies nuclear fuel to the USA