Not exactly breaking news (article is from June 14, 2023), but as it’s not known or discussed widely, I thought its ok to post.
I’m also adding a short commentary (that can be used as a summary) from Urs P. Gasche, published on the independent news site infosperber.ch. (Translated with GPT, left-out parts reference the nyt-article)
In the USA, electricity is consumed and wasted as if Russia were not waging war against Ukraine. Every year, American energy corporations transfer around a billion dollars to the Russian Rosatom corporation for cheap enriched uranium. […]
Rosatom belongs to the Russian state and produces low-enriched uranium for nuclear power plants and highly enriched uranium for military purposes. The USA imports about a third of the enriched uranium needed for nuclear power plants from Russia. It is cheapest there. “The US payments go to a subsidiary of Rosatom, which in turn is closely intertwined with the Russian military apparatus,” […]
In order to halve the US’s CO2 emissions, the capacity of nuclear power plants would need to be doubled, estimates the US Department of Energy. The company TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, plans to enrich uranium one day in a decommissioned coal mine in the US state of Wyoming. A centrifuge factory is also planned in Ohio. “But years will pass and more state subsidies are needed,” […]
In the meantime, the USA could reduce their power consumption with savings programs, calls to the economy and households, and financial duties, in order not to finance the Russian war machinery as much as possible. However, such a savings policy, which is useful anyway, is not popular in the USA. As a result, Democrat Joe Manchin III, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, had to resign resignedly:
“We cannot make ourselves hostages to nations that do not share our values, but that is exactly what has happened.”
Europe, on the other hand, has taken action: most countries voluntarily forego a lot of cheap Russian oil and even completely on Russian natural gas, so that Russia receives as little foreign currency as possible. In doing so, the countries of Europe accept high prices and inflation with all its consequences.
The US could instead build a reactor to reprocess “spent nuclear fuel” and use it again for about the same price.
Sauce me Daddy, that sounds HOT.
Google thorium reactors. Apparently as a bonus, the half life is in the hundreds of years as opposed to thousands. The latest skeptics guide to the universe just did a bit in it.
isnt china already working on building one,
or am i mixing something upCooled by liquid salt, too, so you don’t have to put the consumer water supply at risk.
India (unless China joined in). Because coincidentally they have a buttload of thorium deposits but not much uranium.
The thorium is left over from mining rare earth elements.
The U.S. made that practice illegal and they are scrambling to get rare earth metals.
Which practice?
Mining rare earth minerals laced with thorium. In China, you can store the thorium in a pile on site after the minerals are extracted.
Breeder reactors can live on spent fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Naturally they called it something horny sounding
That’s just flat out wrong. Reprocessing is significantly more expensive at current uranium prices.
And so many states would throw up tons of roadblocks for reactors shipping their used fuel offsite to a central reprocessing facility.
Canada has an abundance of raw material.
The us could also use other energy sources…
If only stupidity generated power then perhaps we’d have endless energy.
You could probably crowd source the R&D for a project like that.
I’m pretty sure the USA buys the uranium in part due to nuclear proliferation reasons.
They could just not buy uranium at all…
Then who buys the uranium?
I’m saying that the USA buys the uranium to keep others from buying it.
And we’re just ignoring the whole weapons proliferation side of things?
Is that actually a realistic concern? I don’t know much about it, but I don’t see how reprocessing is any more dangerous than importation.
It is. Any time you have the facilities to pull nuclear waste apart pulling plutonium out becomes a risk.
Yeah isn’t weapons grade plutonium a byproduct of recycling nuclear fuel?
No, not directly. You’d have to divert it and only irradiate it for short periods of time (30 days rather than the 18 to 24 month cycles that current plants have).
Proliferation isn’t a significant concern for reprocessing within the US. It’s primarily a concern for other non nuclear weapons countries that start it because they can then create nuclear weapons.
The US has no need to do that. They have more plutonium than they need for current weapons and it has a half life in the hundreds of thousands of years so it will last forever.
Storage of easily enriched material to prevent theft is a concern, especially given the number of incidents with jokers photographing themselves inside nuclear facilities and the results of FBI testing of nuclear site security protocols.
Additionally, given the ridiculously long half life of the products, you get into conversations about what happens on the thousands of years time scale in which it’s not reasonable to think that any given state remains politically stable.
No, but the technology and equipment required for the reprocessing can be converted to plutonium creation with little effort.
Yes, Russia is the biggest exporter of nuclear fuel.
It’s honestly kind of hilarious how people are continually shocked to discover that a globalised market doesn’t just mean everyone wears Levi’s.
I thought that was Kazakhstan?
Maybe uranium ore but it needs to be enriched and processed to be ready for use in nuclear reactors.
Great post. I appreciate hearing about things like this, even if it’s a little late. Also, a lot of things are only ‘current’ news because they’re purposely kept in the news cycle. If this one has slipped off the radar but it’s still happening, then it remains current news even if the press isn’t interested in picking it up.
The company TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, plans to enrich uranium one day in a decommissioned coal mine in the US state of Wyoming. A centrifuge factory is also planned in Ohio. “But years will pass and more state subsidies are needed,” […]
Almost like the free market is incompatible with tackling climate change and taking ‘moral’ positions. It’s as if the war in Ukraine is a great excuse for the US state to underwrite the projects of US billionaires.
Europe, on the other hand, has taken action: most countries voluntarily forego a lot of cheap Russian oil and even completely on Russian natural gas,
I’m not sure if I’d call it voluntary. The ruling class might have volunteered to sacrifice their populations at the alter of US hegemony. But I wouldn’t believe that this was voluntary until I saw a very specific referendum at the very least. Fairly sure if you’d have asked the working class, they’d have said no to both war and energy price increases.
Not to mention that Germany not using Nord Stream 2 can hardly be called voluntary. They were threatened not to do it, they did it, and it was blown up.
so that Russia receives as little foreign currency as possible.
While Europe has increased imports of US LNG, Russian exports to Europe and the income therefrom hasn’t dropped as much as might be expected. It’s just filtered through third states, who (a) add a markup and (b) pay Russia in currencies other than the dollar.
In doing so, the countries of Europe accept high prices and inflation with all its consequences.
I’d want to hear from a significant section of the European public before I accepted this claim. It seems to me that waves of strike action over the cost of energy, etc, materially contradict it.
The problem is that hypocrisy doesn’t come into it. The ruling class has no interest in moral consistency. Only of maximizing profits even if it means telling us one thing while they do another.
One broader motif of narratives like this is to prime the citizens of liberal democracies for three ideas: (i) greening the economy is going to be expensive; (ii) it’s natural for the state to pay for and hand over control of domestic energy security to billionaire leeches; and (iii) standards of living have to drop if you want to live at all. That’s not explicit in the story, but it’s the message that will seep in to consciousness without people realising.
I appreciate your comment and agree with you on all the points, except with
greening the economy is going to be expensive;
standards of living have to drop if you want to live at all.
I think that those thoughts should even more be hammered into the brains of all citizens.
The problem is the wrong focus. We always hear about “energy crisis” but seldomly about a “producing too much shit that is designed to fall apart after a few months crisis”, also barely any talks about the forever ongoing “producing too many one-time use items with materials that take a million years to decompose crisis”.
So the focus should not be on the question if greening the economy will be expensive (because it will be), but on expensive for who - the billionaires or the working class?
To illustrate: I need to buy a new fruit mixer every 2 years. If it were illegal to produce fruit mixers which are designed to break in such a short time, my standards of living would not drop; they would increase.
And a remark regarding the commentary by Urs P. Gasche; dont take it too literal, he might even agree with you, who knows. It’s kinda how the Swiss tend to complain; mixing passive-aggressive sarcastic hyperbole and cover it in friendliness and overall agreement. Infosperber is one of the few (german-language) sites that dares to critically question stuff surrounding the conflict with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO. They are not pro-Russia, but they regularly demonstrate serious efforts to understand and explain what’s actually going on, and provide different perspectives. Link to the articles.
I agree with you.
I think I can see what you mean about ‘mixing passive-aggressive sarcastic hyperbole and cover[ing] it in friendliness and overall agreement’. Part of my response was attacking the general ideas rather than the author as these ideas are everywhere, although I had assumed that Gasche was repeating these ideas because they believed them.
I could have been clearer in my final paragraph. On the one hand, I meant that these ideas are wrong. For example, my living standards would increase if I only ever had to buy one washing machine, fridge, computer, phone, etc, with infrequent repairs, and had access to high speed rail and regular buses.
On the other hand, you’re absolutely right to insist on a class analysis, which means these ideas are still correct in the way that you point out: greening the economy is going to be so expensive that it will cost billionaires everything – because there can no longer be any billionaires (as a class) if we hope to save the planet.
Remember that time we bought titanium from them during the Cold War?
I love U 235
