The Audacious Reboot of America's Nuclear Energy Program (msn.com) 100
The United States is mounting an ambitious effort to reclaim nuclear energy leadership after falling dangerously behind China, which now has 31 reactors under construction and plans 40 more within a decade. America produces less nuclear power than it did a decade ago and abandoned uranium mining and enrichment capabilities, leaving Russia controlling roughly half the world's enriched uranium market.
This strategic vulnerability has triggered an unprecedented response: venture capitalists invested $2.5 billion in US next-generation nuclear technology since 2021, compared to near-zero in previous years, while the Trump administration issued executive orders to accelerate reactor deployment. The urgency stems from AI's city-sized power requirements and recognition that America cannot afford to lose what Interior Secretary Doug Burgum calls "the power race" with China.
Companies like Standard Nuclear in Oak Ridge, Tennessee are good examples of this push, developing advanced reactor fuel despite employees working months without pay.
This strategic vulnerability has triggered an unprecedented response: venture capitalists invested $2.5 billion in US next-generation nuclear technology since 2021, compared to near-zero in previous years, while the Trump administration issued executive orders to accelerate reactor deployment. The urgency stems from AI's city-sized power requirements and recognition that America cannot afford to lose what Interior Secretary Doug Burgum calls "the power race" with China.
Companies like Standard Nuclear in Oak Ridge, Tennessee are good examples of this push, developing advanced reactor fuel despite employees working months without pay.
There's nothing audacious about it (Score:1, Insightful)
And it isn't bold. They are just going to spin up a bunch of old plants long past there life cycles. That's the only way they can get the power they want at the cost they want. Otherwise it's just too expensive to build a nuclear reactor and you're just going to either burn coal or nat gas were you going to build
Re: There's nothing audacious about it (Score:5, Insightful)
You think all liberals are âoeelites living in gated communitiesâ you must live in deep red state. Most liberals live in cities and communities with all sorts of people around and they discover that brown people arenâ(TM)t scary.
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Seriously. In my experience it's the wealthy conservatives that live in gated communities.
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Even Greenpeace Founder admits we need nuclear (Score:5, Informative)
The people making these decisions aren't taking any risks ...
Given the existential world ending climate crisis would their not acting be a far greater risk? Even greeenpeace founders have admitted that nuclear energy is part of the the all of the above strategy we need to save the world from climate change.
"“Nuclear energy is the safest of all the electricity technologies we have.” This statement by Patrick Moore, former director of Greenpeace in a recent interview on NewsNation’s “Special Report,” is at odds with the position of the environmental organization he helped found. New EU taxonomy: Moore did the interview in the wake of the European Parliament’s controversial action to support the addition of nuclear energy and natural gas to the European Union’s taxonomy of environmentally sustainable, green technologies. In response to that action, Greenpeace announced that it would submit a formal request to the European Commission to review the move and, if necessary, mount a legal challenge to the action with the European Court of Justice. Accidents are the exception, not the rule: Moore expressed his strong disagreement with Greenpeace’s antinuclear position, emphasizing that there are more than 100 operational nuclear power plants in the United States and Canada—none of which have ever caused an injury or death from radiation or an accident. Even the well-known accidents at the Three Mile Island and Fukushima “did not harm anyone, never mind kill anyone from radiation.” The only nuclear accident that has resulted in human injury, he pointed out, was the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union, which he attributed to the Russians’ faulty reactor design, adding, “No other nuclear plant in the world has ever had that kind of nuclear accident.”"
https://www.ans.org/news/artic... [ans.org]
"The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident (, Fukushima Dai-ichi (pronunciation) genshiryoku hatsudensho jiko) was a series of equipment failures, nuclear meltdowns, and releases of radioactive materials at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the Thoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.[9][10] It was the largest nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986,[11] and the radiation released exceeded official safety guidelines. Despite this, there were no deaths caused by acute radiation syndrome. Given the uncertain health effects of low-dose radiation, cancer deaths cannot be ruled out.[12] However, studies by the World Health Organization and Tokyo University have shown that no discernible increase in the rate of cancer deaths is expected.[13] Predicted future cancer deaths due to accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima have ranged[14] in the academic literature from none[15] to hundreds.[12]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities.
The chances of experiencing adverse health effects from radiation are slim for both nuclear and coal-fired power plants—they're just somewhat higher for the coal ones. "You're talking about one chance in a billion for nuclear power plants," Christensen says. "And it's one in 10 million to one in a hundred million for coal plants."
Developing countries like India and China continue to unveil new coal-fired plants—at the rate of one every seven to 10 days in the latter nation. And the U.S. still draws around half of its electricity from coal. But coal plants have an additional strike against them: they emit harmful greenhouse gases."
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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Name one other type of power generation that, when it fails catastrophically, renders hundreds of square miles of territory uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
Just one.
Re:Even Greenpeace Founder admits we need nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hydro. Ever hear about a dam collapsing?
Bullshit. After the initial devestation, the territory could basically be rebuilded right away.
By the way nuclear can't leave an area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
Then you should have no problem moving with your family to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and offering your current home to one of the numerous families that have been permanently displaced over there.
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Re:Even Greenpeace Founder admits we need nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
But just for the record all of the highly radioactive isotopes near Chernobyl(like iodine 131) have already decayed.
False.
Yes, the Iodine-131 with it's half-life of 8 days has decayed and is gone. Well done.
No, the following list of dangerous isotopes have not observed the 7+ half-lives it takes to make them gone:
Strontium-90 (28.8 year half-life) which beta decays into Yttrium-90, which is a gamma emitter with a 64-hour half-life
Cesium-137 (30.17 year half-life) which beta decays into Barium-137m, which is a gamma emitter which decays into stable Barium-137
Plutonium-238 (86 year half-life) decays into Uranium-234, which then follows the Radium series of decay.
There's a damn good reason Ukraine is maintaining the exclusion zone, and some idiot Russian soldiers found out exactly why when they went into the Red Forest and started digging entrenchments in contaminated soil and got themselves some acute radiation sickness as a door prize [independent.co.uk].
So you feel free to head on over there, and when you've got cancer in 5 years don't claim you didn't know, because this is at least the second time in a week I've told you how wrong you are about this kind of thing.
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You know Chernobyl was a tourist area before the war right? And the plant produced energy for more than a decade after the accident? And Artur Korneyev visited the elephants foot multiples times(it didn't kill him). As long as you don't go digging next to the explosion site you will be fine. More than half of the cesium and strontium has decayed.
And for the record that type of accident is impossible for any western reactor. No one is suggesting we build any more RBMK reactors.
Soviet union fuckups
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Not sure if it renders land uninhabitable, but time and again it's been shown that polaric energy can kill an entire planet.
"Hey kid, you were right about one thing. I was lying. I don't eat children."
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polaric energy? From Star Trek?
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I can name two that do it when operating normally, but we pretend it don't, and nuclear directly replaces em.
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Then name them. And prove to me that if they were to be shut down right now, and area of a thousand miles around them would still be unfit for human habitation a hundred years from now.
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Name one other type of power generation that, when it fails catastrophically, renders hundreds of square miles of territory uninhabitable for hundreds of years.
Just one.
There is no such source, including nuclear.
Nuclear power is safe (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing about the last 20 years of my life is an American has given me the slightest reason to think our country is capable of that.
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The sad reality is that Humanity itself isn't capable of that, we're just not mature enough.
We may be smart enough certainly, but as a species we aren't capable of containing our greed and arrogance.
Honestly the French seemed to do it just fine (Score:2)
You would have to fundamentally break down and alter American culture completely destroying the puritanical pro corporate obsession that we have with worshiping capitalists, corporatists and members of the ruling class in order to have safe reactors.
I don't normally say that because it triggers all the libertarians here that are obsessed with nuclear power. And for some reason it
54 plants in USA. 31 research. 99 US Navy. (Score:2)
When it is properly deployed and maintained.
Nothing about the last 20 years of my life is an American has given me the slightest reason to think our country is capable of that.
Maybe the 54 nuclear power plants currently operating in the USA?
Maybe the 31 test and research reactors?
Maybe the US Navy's 99 reactors?
Want an example? San Onefre in California, this plant was on the pacific coast, in earth quake country. Unlike Fukushima they had a plan for loss of power. Portable backup generators were pre-positioned inland on US Marine Corps base Camp Pendleton. The Marines would use heavy lift helicopters to deliver those generators if needed.
Navy plants don't count (Score:2)
As for the 54 currently running yeah, I'm nervous about them. We have had just enough Democrat oversight to keep them from blowing up in our faces and to shut down the ones that actually hit end of life instead of running them until there's a disaster.
I don't think the Democratic
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Your favorite country happens to be whole hog for nuclear and is running prototypes of several different new reactor designs at its nuclear test site. Our nuclear test site (I've been there) is a museum of Cold War weapons designs. Its one commercial initiative, Yucca Mountain, was shut down by the Democrats. Now that Harry Reid is rotting in hell, that may change.
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Trump won in 2024 for the same reason 2016. Enough Democrats were disgusted with their own party and voted for him. To them, he was the lesser of two bad choices.
You opinions are nuclear oversight and elections seems, well, influenced more by party propaganda than reality.
Democrats can absolute win future elections, but they have to first realize that the policies embraced by the
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Spurring something to think and evolve ... (Score:2)
We should develop nuclear energy, but even if we don't the world will not ending due to climate crisis. Such catastrophising is not supported by science and this is exactly why nobody on the right takes this issue seriously.
There is a correlation between climate catastrophists and nuclear power catastrophists. If we should listen to the science for one shouldn't we listen to the science for the other? Pointing out the hypocrisy is instructive, it might spur someone to think, like the evolved GreenPeace founder.
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The truth is not shilling (Score:1)
I'm not really against nuclear energy per se, but it is a really expensive way to go.
A large part of that expense is litigation and the delays litigation results in.
On the other hand, Patrick Moore is a shill of industry. Greenpeace has disavowed him. Hell, he has appeared on Jordan Peterson's podcast. He really shouldn't be mentioned in any serious conversation.
The truth is the truth, and the truth coincidentally aligning with an industry does not make one a shill. The guilt by association fallacy proves nothing.
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On the other hand, Patrick Moore is a shill of industry.
A "shill of industry" is a person who is proposing commercially feasible solutions to problems. If we are going to achieve a clean energy baseload, we need a bunch more of them.
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George Monbiot is another former Green who has come over.
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This will be the nail in the coffin for coal plants, and probably a fair number of natural gas plants as well. Once this AI bubble bursts, coupled with the ability to process AI demands much more efficiently (on silicone designed specifically for this purpose, instead of using much less efficient GPUs and the like), there will be a huge surplus of power. The shiny new, and extremely expensive to build, nuclear power plants certainly won't be the things shutting down when there is too much energy.
The environ
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It is pretty hard to beat coal and oil in deaths. Air pollution alone takes 4.5 million lives per year, and heating by burning coal and wood takes another 3.5.
Even if every nuclear power plant in the planet went full chernobyl, it wouldn't be as lethal.
Fukushima you cited killed 2000 people (the radiation, the tsunami etc took around 13000).
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I do not understand why old nerds are so freaking obsessed with nuclear power.
Because its best clean-energy alternative, hydro, is fully exploited. To get any more, we would have to wait around a few million years for more orogeny.
And yes, there isn't a lot of potential in refurbishing old reactors. The future belongs to those who ago bold and develop a reactor design taht can be factory-built, like aircraft, rather than being laboriously site-built over years and years, like airports.
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hydro, is fully exploited
Just lolz.
No it is not. Just go to the next best river and count the flow water power plants you can see with a 2 hours walk. Not a single one. Make it a 2h bike ride: still not a single one. Make it a 2h car trip: do you see a single power plant?
Nope ... idiot.
Re: There's nothing audacious about it (Score:2)
You canâ(TM)t even spell âoetheirâ correctly
Dangerously Behind? (Score:4, Interesting)
reclaim nuclear energy leadership after falling dangerously behind China
How does the U.S. having less reactors than China create a danger? What danger?
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The US already has enough nuclear arsenal to end human civilization on the planet. Being able to end it three, four or even a hundred times over doesn't really make a difference.
Re: Dangerously Behind? (Score:2)
There's some claims of "facts" there that require some references...or are they just pure sinophobia?
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reclaim nuclear energy leadership after falling dangerously behind China
How does the U.S. having less reactors than China create a danger? What danger?
The "danger" is that you wouldn't stop to read the article! C'mon, you know better than to genuinely question the sensationalism of a modern media piece.
Re:Dangerously Behind? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nuclear reactor gap" sounds as scary as "missile gap." It's great. Much better than "science funding gap" or "universal healthcare gap."
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"Nuclear reactor gap" sounds as scary as "missile gap." It's great. Much better than "science funding gap" or "universal healthcare gap."
Don't forget we should not allow a mineshaft gap to develop. You know, to protect our precious bodily fluids?
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Do not expect logic from the MAGAs.
Re: Dangerously Behind? (Score:2)
It doesn't and there isn't. It's just sinophobic click bait, pure and simple.
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Number of reactors is not the issue.
Aging technical knowledge is.
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Also, $2.5 billion invested over 4 years is peanuts. Not even one new reactor's worth. Some money thrown at SMR startups that are going nowhere.
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It is right in the summary, mate!
The danger of "falling behind".
But I agree, I am not so sure what it means. Are they not already behind?
It is not just China we are behind (Score:4, Informative)
1 China
2 India
3 Russia -- Exporting to India, Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh
4 United Kingdom
5 Turkey
6 France -- Exporting to Switzerland
7 South Korea -- Exporting to UAE
8 United States -- Exporting to Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and Indonesia
9 Ukraine
10 Canada -- Exporting to Scotland
Clearly the U.S. has companies that are capable, yet we seem to be largely incapable as a nation.
It's social not technical (Score:5, Insightful)
America has a bad habit of cutting corners on maintenance when the parent corporation needs to do stock BuyBacks this quarter because of a dip in the market.
If you do that with a nat gas plant then you have extra emissions and a few more people have breathing problems and maybe cancer. Climate change gets a little bit worse. If you do it with a wind or solar farm then you just get a drop in capacity.
If you do it with a nuclear power plant you get Fukushima. Then your city gets evacuated for 10 years, everyone loses their homes and property and instead of the CEOs being held accountable the public plans the engineers
These aren't technical problems they are social problems. There was absolutely no technical reason for the Fukushima disaster to happen. The engineers repeatedly warned it was going to happen and they were repeatedly ignored.
And the exact same thing is going to happen in america. Because nobody is spinning up nuclear power because it's the best solution. The best solution especially with how much land we have is wind and solar farms.
The push for nuclear is because there's a bunch of decommissioned reactors that can be brought back online quickly to feed AI data centers.
So you are going to combine old reactors that were turned off for a reason with companies that want electricity now and right now and are also doing everything they can to cut costs because they are bleeding money from every orifice while trying to get ahead on the AI boom.
That is a recipe for disaster if there ever was one.
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Or you have a backup plan that doesn't put internal combustion in the basement in a tsunami zone, and your pumps keep running fine.
That costs money (Score:2)
I am not going to sit here and pretend that America is going to hold CEOs accountable. You shouldn't either.
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If you do it with a nuclear power plant you get Fukushima.
Fukushima was not a maintenance problem. The protective sea walls were simply not designed for the scale of that tsunami.
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And they also put their backup generation in a basement with the ability to be flooded by seawater. You know, instead of on the roof or just a concrete slab outside where the water can drain away and the generators can still function.
Wrong. (Score:2)
I don't know where you get your information but you should find better sources. You are being lied to.
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Everyone knew the sea walls were going to fail.
You folks are predicting tsunamis as well as climate now? LOL.
I don't know where you get your information
I can just imagine where you get yours.
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There was absolutely no technical reason for the Fukushima disaster to happen.
The technical reason is that the earth quake broke the cooling pipes. The fact that the emergency generators got flooded: is completely irrelevant.
The emergency cooling equipment which was brought in, failed. They pumped water into the cooling system from outside, and it just flooded the lower floors of the reactor building ...
This are serious construction/planning/engineering mistakes. Would have happened with any similar quake,
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10 Canada -- Exporting to Scotland
You're a little bit ahead of things here, considering that is not slated for completion until 2040.
https://www.nationalobserver.c... [nationalobserver.com]
The audacious plan to build a giant green powerline under the Atlantic
Vast volumes of green electricity could be flowing through a 4,000-kilometre underwater powerline between Canada and Europe by 2040, if three UK-based investment bankers’ vision for a major new transatlantic energy artery becomes reality.
Their $30 billion-plus project, the North Atlantic Transmission One Link (NATO-L), was sparked in 2022, when the sabotage of the giant Nordstream gas pipeline crossing under the Baltic Sea exposed the EU’s dangerous overdependence on Russian energy resources.
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It's hilarious that the UK is ranked number 4.
We have two new nuclear plants in the works, Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C. Hinkley was due to open around 2030, but has been delayed, so will be over 20 years from start of work to it generating power from the grid. Nobody wanted to build and operate it, they went around the world offering incredible subsidies. In the end EDF agreed, with Chinese investment (yes China owns a stake in our new nuclear plants), and a deal that guarantees extremely high prices for
I'm not sure we need more reactors (Score:1)
At least not "big ones." There's something to be said about having small power plants, be they nuclear or otherwise, within tens of miles of where the electricity will be used. Closer-to-use means less strain on the high-voltage long-distance transmission towers.
As far as power-sucking computing centers go, put them near where they can get lots of wind and sunshine or hydro if you can, but if you can't, then you may need to use other conventional fuels or nuclear to power the data center. Also, use indus
This is "non-virtue" signalling. (Score:3)
Nuclear is simply expensive, and I don't think its price will go down. And don't you come with "France! France! France!" chants: France's nuclear power plants never turned a profit. France's customers pay for the electricity with their taxes.
Good (Score:3)
Re: Good (Score:2)
Ok bot
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You are obviously a bot.
Actually a set of "operators", sharing the same account.
Otherwise the constant corrections you get would slowly make you realize: you are wrong.
But as a conglomerate of bot operators who do not know what other operators type and no one is reading the answers your account gets: you are repeating the same nonsense over and over. Just like a very bad chat bot.
Do you know a single person that is pro fossile fuels?
I do not know a single one. A few people I know acknowledge that they prefe
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Nuclear power cannot solve climate change without electric cars and heat pumps. I would blame the idiots who spew hate, fear, and uncertainty about those. Quite a few people in favor of those are in favor of nuclear power too.
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Yeah we will need electric cars and heat pumps. You do realize that electrification is how we decarbonize other sectors. Which is why it is so vital to reduce electricty emissions to zero.
Reminds me of the logical knots Germans were twisting themselves into when they were forcing nuclear power plants to close just as there was a shortage of natural gas. They tried to justify keeping the planned shutdowns on schedule because they claimed the natural gas was for heating, not electricity, so having the nuclear power plants close would not hurt in keeping people warm through the winter. It seems they forgot about all the heat pumps that Germans had been buying.
Removing hydrocarbons from transp
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What's wrong with getting hydrogen from water, the way plants (and other photosynthesisers have (mostly) been doing it for the last 2-5+ billion years?
To remind you of your kindergarten chemistry : 2 CO2 + 2 H2O -(through a chloroplast)-> 2[CH2]
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What's wrong with getting hydrogen from water, the way plants (and other photosynthesisers have (mostly) been doing it for the last 2-5+ billion years?
There is nothing wrong with getting hydrogen from water, it is merely that using electricity (or electricity only) is not very efficient. With a thermal process to produce hydrogen there's a lot of steps skipped in turning heat (from whichever energy source you prefer) to hydrogen, no steam turbines, no generators, no transformers, no rectifiers, those are all parts where energy is lost.
Getting hydrogen from sunlight means the process only runs during the daytime, needs a lot of land and raw materials to c
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Reminds me of the logical knots Germans were twisting themselves into when they were forcing nuclear power plants to close just as there was a shortage of natural gas.
Reminds me that you are an idiot
a) The nukes were not forced to shut down. One got its life time extended for 4months. Ooosp. To stupid to know that? ... 20 years before Fukushima
b) there was no shortage of gas. There was a "feared shortage", which did not happen
c) the decision to exit nuclear power was done 25years earlier
My answer to that is
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Yep, keep telling yourself that. You are so deep in delusion that there is no reaching you anymore.
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Germany.
Dumbass?
Oh, you wanted to say: "only solar and wind"?
Sorry my fault. A huge deal is energy conversation measures.
Better building codes, and so on.
Ooops ...
clickbait (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a clickbait article. The only thing that's happened is;
"Trump’s executive orders seek to slash some red tape and hasten deployment, including by allowing reactors on federal lands, which could result in largely bypassing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?
Some tech giant may try to build a reactor on federal land with loosened safety precautions but it takes at least a decade if recent experience is any guide. And the electricity will be vastly more expensive than any other source. OpenAI may be willing to pay the price to get that juice at any cost, but it will not result in a 'reboot' of nuclear energy in the USA.
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This is a clickbait article. The only thing that's happened is;
"Trumpâ(TM)s executive orders seek to slash some red tape and hasten deployment, including by allowing reactors on federal lands, which could result in largely bypassing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
Kicking the NRC in the shorts to get them to clean up their mess of a permitting process should have lasting effects. Sure, we can get rot to set in over time like has been the case at the NRC for decades but once the rot is cleared out it will take time to accumulate again. By that time we may have some very different processes for licensing nuclear power plants, such as the states issuing permits than the federal government.
The next administration could simply revoke that executive order and it all comes crashing down. Would you invest in a scenario like that?
Both the Democrats and Republicans have in their party platform documents that t
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Not interested in your whining about the NRC etc.
Any new nuke plants that would be built in the USA in the near future will be funded by the tech companies in order to power their AI data centers as I already explained. They have the money to do it and the financial justification, the nukes don't make economic sense otherwise . They would use all of the electricity they generate, no help for the grid there.
This certainly does not consist of an "Audacious Reboot of America's Nuclear Energy Program". It will
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They would use all of the electricity they generate, no help for the grid there.
That's doubtful. I'd expect anyone building a nuclear power plant to want to have more than one customer to spread the risk of that customer suddenly backing out over one thing or another. Besides, a typical nuclear power plant would produce something like 1.21 GW and how big are these data centers? A quick web search tells me that the largest data center in the world consumes 1000 MW, so I guess theoretically that could leave no extra capacity from a nuclear power plant to sell on the grid. That's an o
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Maybe a military power plant would be without some safety systems but that doesn't mean they'd compromise on containment, they'd be willing to take more risks of a meltdown, and maybe risks to the Navy sailors that would likely be running it. The US Navy has been running nuclear powered submarines for something like 70 years now, and had been doing so with a very high safety record.
The Nuclear Navy uses very different reactor designs than anything used in commercial power generation, because they have different requirements. They need to be able to ramp up and down very quickly, so naval reactors are basically a big box of highly enriched uranium - far more enrichment than what goes into commercial reactors. This means they need to refuel less frequently, and they can generate very large amounts of power for turning propeller shafts when they need to.
The problem is that the refuelin
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S/next administration/next revolution of Trump's braincell/
As if there's going to be another "US administration", this side of the 3rd or 4th American revolution (depending on your opinion of 1/6). Hilarious.
But not in Oklahoma (Score:2)
Good luck with that (Score:2)
All it will do is accelerate the decay of the US.
A datum of clickbait : (Score:3)
FTFS :
A quick Wiki (verb) (because I noticed a similar claim in a non-America story recently and thought "I should check that") gives me :
(There has got to be a better way of doing tables in Slash's crippled subset of HTML. But it's a rare-enough need.)
So, Kazahkstan (yes, it's a former SSR of the USSR ; but it hasn't been part of Russia for a generation now, and they'll be looking at Ukraine, reading the "Ukraine Lesson", and collaborating with whoever they can trust (DPRK, Iran, Pakistan?) to trade some of that lovely fissionable material for nuclear weapons technology) is by far the largest producer, with another former SSR on the list ahead of Russia (the Russian Federation). Haven't the Kazakh's changed from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script in recent years? Yes, I thought so. [wikipedia.org]
If I were in an anti-proliferation inspectorate, I'd look at those production rates for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with the proverbial fine-tooth gamma-ray spectrometer. The amount of happy-happy-joy-joy they could mutually share with Iran (or Pakistan) by trading some lies on the export paperwork for the tech to low-enrich some of their uranium (destined for Iran (or Pakistan)) to, say, reduce by half the amount of enrichment that both themselves and Iran (or Pakistan) has to do.
Does Israel have planes with the range to bomb the further reaches of the 9th largest country in the world? I bet that question gives them twitchy arseholes in Jerusalem. Along with the question of how to get other distant countries to allow their bomber and tanker planes silent overflight.
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This table you pointed to refers to mining not enrichment, which is what the article refers, the link below show a breakdown of enrichment by country and russia is about 40% with US being only 11%. I recall sometime back reading that 1/3 of the fuel the US uses in its plants today come from russia.
https://thundersaidenergy.com/... [thundersaidenergy.com]
My science teacher in the 70's (Score:1)