Funding for the Department of Energy’s effort to rebuild a commercial U.S. uranium refining industry is hung up in a debate over a supplemental spending bill between House Republicans and the White House.
In remarks to reporters this week before and after a meeting at the White House, Speaker of the House Rep. Michael Johnson (R-La.) said Republicans in the House of Representatives would not vote for the Senate’s supplemental spending bill, which mostly funds President Joe Biden’s (D) high-profile foreign policy issues such as war aid to Israel and Ukraine, unless the bill includes substantial U.S. immigration reforms.
“We have to secure our own border before we talk about anything else,” Johnson said Wednesday in a Capitol Hill press conference, suggesting that his conference would accept no solution other than H.R. 2, a Republican-authored immigration reform bill that passed the chamber last year.
Senate Democrats and the White House have balked at that, but Senate Republicans have stood by their House counterparts and refused to let the Biden administration’s requested aid package through the upper chamber.
That bill, as Kathryn Huff, the Department of Energy’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy pointed out in a hearing Thursday, also includes some $2.7 billion for DOE to “at least two competitive awards for the acquisition and distribution of low-enriched uranium (LEU) and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).”
“That would really go a long way to expanding the conversion and enrichment facilities that we need in the United States domestically to ensure our fleet, being the largest nuclear fleet in the world, is also the hungriest,” Huff said in a hearing of a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee.
DOE is banking on that funding to pay for a pair of domestic uranium contracts, one of which the agency put out for bids last week. Most U.S. plants rely on imported Russian uranium fuel.
