In a Pentagon-sized cavernous facility nestled in an Appalachian valley, thousands upon thousands of empty holes line the bare concrete floor.
Only 16 of them house the spindly, 30-foot-tall centrifuges that enrich uranium and convert it into the key ingredient that fuels nuclear power plants. And for now they are asleep.
But if every hole held a working centrifuge, the facility could lift the United States out of a predicament that has implications for both the war in Ukraine and America’s transition from burning fossil fuels. Today, American companies pay about $1 billion a year to Russia’s state nuclear energy agency to buy the fuel that generates more than half of the United States’ zero-emission energy.
It is one of the main residual flows of money from the United States to Russia, and it continues despite strenuous efforts by US allies to cut economic ties with Moscow. Payments for enriched uranium are made to subsidiaries of Rosatom, which in turn is closely linked to the Russian military.
The United States’ reliance on nuclear energy will grow as the country strives to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. But no American company enriches uranium. At one time, the United States dominated the market, until a swirl of historical factors, including an enriched uranium purchase agreement between Russia and the United States, intended to promote Russia’s peaceful nuclear program after the collapse of the Soviet Union, enabled Russia to get half of the world market . The United States completely stopped enriching uranium.
The United States and Europe have largely stopped buying Russian fossil fuels as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine. But building a new enriched uranium supply chain will take years – and significantly more government funding than currently allocated.
That the huge facility in Piketon, Ohio, stands almost empty more than a year after the Russian war in Ukraine is a testament to the difficulty.
About a third of the enriched uranium used in the United States is now imported from Russia, the cheapest producer in the world. Most of the rest comes from Europe. A final, smaller portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium active in the United States. Nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium.
The company that operates the Ohio plant says it could be more than a decade before it can produce quantities comparable to Rosatom’s. Russia’s nuclear agency, which produces both low-enriched and weapon-grade fuel for Russia’s civil and military purposes, is also responsible in Ukraine for requisitioning the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, raising fears that a battle could break out. over it could lead to the leakage of radioactive material or even a larger meltdown.
“We can’t be held hostage by nations that don’t have our values, but that’s what happened,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat who heads the Senate energy committee. Mr. Manchin is the sponsor of a bill to rebuild US enrichment capacity that would promote federal subsidies for an industry the United States privatized in the late 1990s.
Vulnerability of nuclear energy
The dependency also makes current and future nuclear plants in the United States vulnerable to a Russian halt to sales of enriched uranium, which analysts say is a conceivable strategy for President Vladimir V. Putin, who often uses energy as a geopolitical tool.
But with the war well into its second year and no end in sight, the US government has shown little enthusiasm in initiating domestic enrichment. Billions of dollars in potential federal funding are tied up in bureaucratic processes.
“It is inexplicable that more than a year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration appears to have no plan to end this dependency,” said James Krellenstein, the director of GHS Climate, a clean energy consultancy. energy which recently issued a white paper on the subject. “We could eliminate almost all American dependence on Russian enrichment by completing the Ohio centrifuge plant.”
The US centrifuge plant in Ohio will also be key to producing another, more concentrated form of enriched uranium, critical to the development of smaller, safer and more efficient next-generation reactors. That evolution in nuclear power, decades in the making, has generated billions of dollars in federal development funds. Nevertheless, next-generation reactors in the United States are still in the design stage.
An American company, TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates, has had to delay the opening of what could become the United States’ first new-age nuclear power plant by at least two years, in part because it pledged not to use Russian enriched uranium.
TerraPower’s facility will be built on the site of a coal-fired power plant in remote Kemmerer, Wyo., to be decommissioned in 2025. TerraPower has promised jobs and retraining for all coal plant employees. But the delays have left some in Kemmerer skeptical.
All this makes for an unlikely pairing of Piketon and Kemmerer, towns of 2,400 each nestled in America’s coal country, both hoping the crisis facing the US government will translate into a boon for their economies. “Some of the biggest national security issues facing the country run through Piketon and Kemmerer,” said Jeff Navin, TerraPower’s director of external relations.
A post-Soviet deal
America’s reliance on foreign-enriched uranium reflects competitive disadvantages on microchips and the critical minerals used to make electric batteries — two vital components of the global energy transition.
But in the case of uranium enrichment, the United States once had an advantage and chose to give it up.
In the 1950s, when the nuclear age really began, Piketon became the site of one of two massive enrichment facilities in the Ohio River Valley region, using a process called gaseous diffusion.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union developed centrifuges in a secret program, relying on a team of German physicists and engineers captured towards the end of World War II. The centrifuges proved to be 20 times more energy efficient than gaseous diffusion. By the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia had roughly equal enrichment capabilities, but large differences in production costs.
In 1993, Washington and Moscow signed an agreement, called Megatons to Megawatts, in which the United States bought and imported much of Russia’s vast abundance of weapons-grade uranium, which it then downgraded for use in power plants. This provided the US with cheap fuel and Moscow with cash, and was seen as a de-escalating gesture.
But it also destroyed the profitability of America’s inefficient enrichment facilities, which eventually closed. Instead of investing in improved centrifuges in the United States, successive governments continued to buy in Russia.
The centrifuge plant in Piketon, operated by Centrus Energy, is located on a corner of the site of the old gaseous diffusion plant. Its full use would create thousands of jobs, according to Centrus. And it could produce the kinds of enriched uranium needed in both current and new nuclear power plants.
Without Piketon production, plants like TerraPower’s would have to look to foreign producers, such as France, which may be a more politically acceptable and reliable supplier than Russia, but would also be more expensive.
TerraPower sees itself as an integral part of phasing out climate-warming fossil fuels in electricity. The reactor would contain a sodium-based battery that would allow the plant to ramp up electricity production on demand and compensate for fluctuations in wind or solar production elsewhere.
It’s part of the energy transition that coal-country senators like Mr. Manchin and John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, are eager to solve as they look to nuclear replacements for lost coal jobs and revenue. While Mr. Manchin in particular has hampered the Biden administration’s efforts to accelerate the fossil fuel transition, he also opposed colleagues, mostly Democrats, who are skeptical of the role of nuclear power in that transition, in part because of the resulting radioactive waste. .
“We have emissions targets that we’re trying to meet,” Manchin said, “and the people who talk about taking nuclear power out of the mix, well, they’re living in an unrealistic bubble.”
For its part, the Department of Energy estimates that achieving US commitments to reduce emissions will require more than doubling nuclear power capacity.
Without US competition in next-generation enrichment and reactors, TerraPower and Centrus officials say the gap between Washington and its rivals will only widen as Russia and China in particular race ahead and win long-term nuclear contracts with countries which the United States is also trying to close court.
“The administration talks very well about using US technology to help achieve its geopolitical goals, as well as the speed with which it needs to take action to solve climate change,” said Mr. Navin. “But their inability to advance this very basic process in such a long time is mind-boggling.”
This week, the department released a long-awaited draft request for proposals to scale up domestic enrichment, particularly for plants like TerraPower’s. Kathryn Huff, the department’s assistant secretary for nuclear energy, said the draft was an “important step” in ending America’s “dependence on Russia.”
A lifeline in coal country
With Piketon and Kemmerer, the stakes are more personal.
Once the 1,800 workers finish dismantling the old gaseous diffusion facility outside Piketon, there will be even fewer well-paying jobs and reasons to stay, said Billy Spencer, who has been the town’s mayor for 20 years and worked as a security guard at the plant. for 38 years before that.
Mr. Spencer recently increased the city’s fixed monthly water costs by $15 to pay off a 40-year loan for a new water treatment plant. Even that little bump will make people leave, he fears. “We’re not getting the kind of government support we need,” he said.
In Kemmerer, there is still hope that the hundreds of coal workers who will lose their jobs if the local factory closes will find work, but the delays are causing jitters. Bill Thek, the mayor, said he still hoped the city could grow enough to attract not only nuclear jobs but, say, a plumber, a service Kemmerer now lacks.
“All we can do is hope they find a way to come together to fix this,” Mr Thek said.
Audio produced by Adrianne Hurst.