The U.S. Inches Closer To Breaking Russia's Monopoly On This Rare And Necessary Fuel

[Bryan Knolle]

At the dawn of the atomic age, the United States mined, enriched and split
its own uranium in what ultimately became the world’s largest and most
self-reliant fleet of nuclear reactors. As fission fell out of favor in
the 1980s, the country began importing more fuel for its reactors. When
Washington made a deal with Russia in the 1990s to buy uranium harvested
from disassembling the Soviet bombs once aimed at Americans, the domestic
industry couldn’t compete, and collapsed.

Three decades later, the U.S. and its allies are scrambling to revive
their declining nuclear sectors in a bid to replace planet-heating fossil
fuels and, in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, cut back on imports of
Russian natural gas and oil. A new generation of atomic startups are
seeking to commercialize types of reactors never before brought to market,
and lawmakers from both parties in Congress say they’re ready to help
speed up the effort.

If reversing nuclear decline and wooing skeptics in the public who still
fear improbable accidents like Fukushima more than the certain but slow-
rolling catastrophe of climate change isn’t hard enough, those companies
are running into a major problem. There’s only one vendor in the whole
world that sells the concentrated form of uranium fuel many of these so-
called “advanced” reactors need.

And it’s an arm of the Russian government.

But the U.S. is inching closer to breaking the Kremlin’s monopoly.

On Monday, the Ohio-based Centrus Energy announced a deal to supply the
California-based reactor startup Oklo Inc. with a fuel known as high-assay
low-enriched uranium, or HALEU.

Pronounced HAY-loo, the fuel compares to traditional reactor fuel the way
a heady Belgian ale might stack up to a Miller Lite. The old-school,
large-scale reactors that comprise the entire U.S. fleet can’t stomach
HALEU, which is enriched to the point where as much as 20% of the uranium
atoms can be split, as opposed to the typical stuff that maxes out at 5%.
But the sleek new reactor technologies companies like Oklo, Bill Gates-
backed TerraPower and the Maryland-based X-energy hope to bring to market
in the coming years run on that stronger stuff.

An array of centrifuges, known as a "cascade," is shown at Centrus
Energy's Ohio facility.

As it is, the U.S. produces just 5% of its own traditional reactor fuel
from a New Mexico facility owned by Urenco, a consortium jointly owned by
the British, German and Dutch governments. It’s been difficult enough to
get more domestic production up and running for that fuel, much less
convince private investors to spend billions of dollars on facilities to
manufacture fuel for reactors that don’t even exist yet.

This has created a “chicken-and-egg problem,” said Dan Leistikow, the vice
president of communications at Centrus.

“It’s very difficult to sell reactors without a domestic fuel supply,” he
said in an interview Sunday. “But it’s very difficult to put the
investment together to build the fuel supply until there’s a base of
customers.”

Making matters tougher, the energy-intensive “gaseous diffusion”
technology once used to enrich uranium went out of fashion. Countries like
France and Russia built what are called centrifuges, cylindrical machines
that spin gasified uranium at extremely high speeds to turn the metal from
its natural form into the unstable radioactive isotope that can be easily
split in a fission reaction. But the U.S. simply lets its old enrichment
industry shut down without investing in anything new.

Centrus - which was born out of the Manhattan Project and split from the
federal government to become a private company in 1992 - has been slowly
working to change that, building a pilot facility in Piketon, Ohio, that
in June got the first stamp of approval from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. But the company has yet to receive enough investment to expand
to full capacity.

Once that demand lines up, things could move quickly, Leistikow said. It
would take 3 1/2 years to get enough centrifuges up and running to produce
6 metric tons of HALEU per year. But the company said it could roughly
double its capacity every six months after that with the right amount of
money flowing to it.

Democrats earmarked roughly $700 million in President Joe Biden’s landmark
Inflation Reduction Act climate law for producing HALEU at home. But
Leistikow said that amounts to a down payment.

View from offshore Pacific Gas and Electric's Diablo Canyon Power Plant,
the only operating nuclear powered plant in California. The plant had been
scheduled to be the next traditional nuclear station shut down in the
U.S., but was saved as part of a frantic effort by U.S. officials to
prevent more atomic plant closures, which have led to an increase in
fossil fuel use and blackouts virtually everywhere.

While Centrus has declined to say the exact dollar figure, chief executive
Dan Poneman, who served in the Obama administration as a deputy secretary
of energy, said on a recent podcast interview that the figure is in the
multi-billion-dollar range.

Congress appears to be responding to that need, with bills from Democrats
and Republicans in the Senate and House funneling billions toward domestic
fuel enrichment.

In the meantime, Centrus last month made a deal to sell HALEU to
TerraPower, which is working to debut its reactors by converting a coal
power plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, before the end of the decade. As part of
its latest agreement with Oklo, Centrus said it would help manufacture
some of the components for the power stations from which the California-
based company plans to operate its reactors and buy electricity from a
planned Oklo plant in Piketon for the enrichment facility.

In a statement, Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte cast the “wide-ranging landmark
partnership” as a turning point for nuclear energy in the U.S., and a sign
that the private market is warming to a technology that many banks still
refuse to fund. The announcement comes a month after Oklo said it would go
public on the stock market as part of a merger with an investment firm
owned by Sam Altman, the famed technology investor and chief executive of
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

“This partnership will represent an important step in lowering the cost of
energy by establishing a critical domestic fuel supply infrastructure,”
Altman said in a statement.

Oklo declined to provide a dollar figure for the deal.

While much depends on how much money the federal government ultimately
decides to put up, Leistikow said the latest deals are a key piece of the
puzzle falling into place.

“Every enrichment plant everywhere in the world has been built with
government financing and government ownership,” he said. “What we’re
looking to see here is a public-private partnership that combines federal
investment, private investment and commercial offtake agreements. That
would level the playing field that’s currently dominated by foreign state-
owned corporations.”

https://news.yahoo.com/u-inches-closer-breaking-russia-103000080.html