House and Senate panels this week approved bans on importing Russian uranium, with Senators calling for a quicker end to the practice than their House colleagues.
It was uncertain this week what prospects the differing bills had for reconciliation, or whether President Joe Biden (D), whose secretary of energy has cautioned that the U.S. cannot realistically cut the cord on Russian imports any time soon, would sign the bill.
However, the unanimous support for such a ban in a Senate committee, and even the single crossover vote a GOP-authored ban got in a House subcommittee this week, demonstrate an increased urgency among lawmakers to include civilian nuclear power in the conversation about domestic energy security following Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war there.
On Wednesday, in an amendment to S. 452, the Nuclear Fuel Security Act of 2023, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved banning U.S. imports of Russian uranium within 90 days of the bill’s signing.
The amendment and the bill, each sponsored by committee chair Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Jim Risch (R-Ida.) both cleared the committee on a unanimous voice vote.
On Tuesday in the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate and grid security subcommittee, it was a different story.
Lawmakers there, on an 18-12 vote that included only a single Democratic vote, approved a more nuanced ban that would let the Department of Energy to grant waivers permitting imports of some Russian uranium until January 1, 2028.
The Republicans who wrote H.R. 1042, the “Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act,” argued this week that cutting off Russian imports quickly is the right way to motivate U.S. industry and government to rebuild a domestic uranium fuel supply chain.
Prior to Tuesday’s votes in the subcommittee, Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio) said that recreating the U.S. uranium industry depended on “the certainty that Russian fuel will not be available to the United States for a long time.”
Democrats on the subcommittee argued that the federal government should provide more funding for a domestic uranium industry before prohibiting Russian imports.
In testimony to the subcommittee last week, Granholm pegged the administration’s desired investment at just over $2 billion, plus a revolving fund. That would be on top of the $700 million or so provided for U.S. uranium development in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2022.
A near-term ban on Russian uranium could significantly alter business as usual for U.S. nuclear power plants, and for businesses that broker uranium fuel to them, including Centrus Corp., of Bethesda, Md. The company makes most of its money selling uranium fuel, much of it from Russia, to U.S. utilities.
“There is currently not enough non-Russian enrichment to fuel the world’s reactors,” a Centrus spokesperson wrote in a statement on Thursday. “Any sanctions need to be paired with a robust U.S. investment in new enrichment capacity and allow for the six to seven years it will take to bring new U.S. capacity online to avoid disrupting the industry and hurting ratepayers. With sufficient investment, Centrus could meet commercial and national security requirements for domestic enrichment, while creating thousands of American jobs up and down a manufacturing supply chain that is 100% domestic.”
Centrus is also a big part of the government’s push to rejuvenate a U.S. refining industry.
In 2022, the Department of Energy finalized a contract for Centrus to operate a relatively small 16-machine enrichment cascade at the agency’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio. Centrus says the cascade could produce around 1,000 kilograms annually of high assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU.
Some proposed advanced reactor designs require HALEU, though Centrus has said its machines at Portsmouth could also produce the low-enriched uranium required by the current U.S. reactor fleet.
