Are the civilian nuclear industries in the U.S. and Europe subsidizing Russia’s nuclear weapons program? In an opinion piece in The Hill this week (Nov. 13), a Washington nuclear nonproliferation expert argues that case.
Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, writes, “As Washington and the commentariat wring their hands about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sword rattling, the United States and the European Union (EU) continue to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars to Rosatom — a Russian nuclear firm that maintains Moscow’s nuclear weapons complex and just filched a $60-billion Ukrainian nuclear plant.”
Sokolski (a frequent opinion contributor to The Quad Report) asks why Washington and Brussels would back “such a nuclear villain?” The answer he offers is that Rosatom is a major supplier of civilian nuclear power plant fuel. “Rosatom,” he writes, “supplies nuclear fuel to nuclear plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. Any European Union (EU) decision to cut off fuel to these plants would immediately harm these states economically.” There are many former Soviet-designed and supplied nuclear power plants in EU members.
What about the U.S.? There are no Russian plants in the U.S., and plenty of alternative nuclear fuel suppliers located in Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan, and U.S.-sited enrichment capacity. Yet, Sokolski notes, “Russia provides roughly 15 percent of America’s raw uranium and 28 percent of its enriched uranium. Combined with Russian nuclear sales to the EU, these uranium imports from Russia fatten Rosatom’s coffers by as much as $1 billion a year — easily more than Rosatom spends to maintain Russia’s nuclear weapons complex.”
Nor has Russia’s March theft of Ukraine’s six-unit Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe, appear to have caused second thoughts in the U.S. nuclear industry about dealing with Rosatom. In March, Reuters reported that the Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. industries’ lobby, along with Duke Energy and Exelon, asked the White House to exempt Rosatom from sanctions on Russian energy imports.
In August, an NEI blog posting advocated advancing development of domestic capacity, while “weaning the United States’ fuel supply off Russian uranium services.” The NEI added in the same paragraph, “We also must look forward to securing a high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) supply to fuel the next generation of reactors.” HALEU fuel is uranium enriched to from 5% to 19.5% U-235, versus enrichment below 5% for conventional light water reactors. The higher enrichment is needed for smaller advanced reactors to get more power per unit of fuel. Rosatom is currently the only supplier of HALEU. Enrichment to 19.5% is just short of 20%, defined as “weapons grade.”
Sokolski noted that shortly after NEI’s entreaty, “Biden announced a U.S. embargo on all forms of Russian energy – oil, natural gas, and coal – but not on uranium.”
In a somewhat related development, Reuters reports, “Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple and Google’s online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian,” based in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. According to Reuters, “The U.S. Army said it had removed an app containing Pushwoosh code in March” and the app “was used by soldiers at one of the country’s main combat training bases.”