“The expansion of conversion capacity in the U.S. will increase...

“The expansion of conversion capacity in the U.S. will increase demand for production of U-308. There’s a bottleneck in the U.S. when it comes to the ability of the downstream fuel cycle industry to absorb uranium output from global uranium mining,”
My take on it "It aint necessarily so"
Eric Loewin had the answer.

There could be another reason why the US is spending heaps on conversion and de-conversion whilst not spending on mining capacity.
And it is connected to a disruptive technology I reckon the US has the answer to getting Uranium locally and it isn't mining, this is all in my own opinion though.


https://denvergazette.com/news/uran...cle_678c0042-63ed-11ef-891e-7fb571b32501.html
U.S. ban on Russian uranium threatens nuclear power renaissance, Colorado company poised to help

The U.S. bans Russian uranium imports, investing $2.7 billion to expand domestic processing capacity

Emerging problems with the supply of uranium needed to fuel the world’s reactors threaten to stifle the renaissance of the nuclear power industry, in which a Colorado company plays a crucial role.

Those problems include geopolitical tensions, transportation realignments, and limitations on processing refined uranium into usable fuel.
The issues are not insurmountable, but they're complicated and navigating the regulatory structures is time-consuming, experts said. Still, they argued that boosting America's local supply chain is crucial to the country's energy future, but that the industry needs a lot of support, particularly from America's governments.
Industry representatives also said now is the time to hunker down, particularly in order to try and inoculate America, as much as possible, from tensions elsewhere in the world.
With the onset of the Ukraine–Russia war, the geopolitical situation regarding uranium fuel supplies has become much more complex. Sanctions imposed by the United States and other nations have made access to Russia’s extensive uranium processing capabilities difficult.
“The United States imports something like 15 or 20% of our enriched uranium directly from Russia, about another 50 or 60% of the uranium used in nuclear power plants in the United States comes from or through Russia,” said Curtis Moore, vice president of marketing and corporate development for Lakewood-based Energy Fuels Inc. “And so, of course, the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine is causing utilities in the West, particularly in North America and Europe, to shift away from that Russian supply. They don't want to be a part of funding a war effort.
Energy Fuels operates a uranium mine near the Grand Canyon, and its product offers all kinds of implications for Americans — jobs, energy, the environment, the economy, national security.
Uranium fuels nuclear power, which, to many supporters, is the only real path to a sustainable, efficient, plentiful and practically carbon-free energy. To critics, its risks, including vulnerable plants and radioactive waste, far outweigh the benefits. Uranium mining is also caught in the crossfire between environmentalists and their allies in government seeking to transition away from "fossil" energy, and the oil and gas industry and its supporters, who argue that a balanced energy portfolio is the more practicable and reasonable path.
At present, Russia accounts for about 44% of the world's uranium conversion and enrichment capacity, comprising about $2.7 billion in global imports, according to a 2024 report from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
“Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Rosatom and its subsidiaries have continued to do business with customers around the world, including the sale of enriched uranium to Europe, the US and globally," the said the RUSI report said, referring to the Russian state-owned nuclear energy corporation.
"Rosatom’s 2022 annual report noted a 14.9% increase from the previous year (2021) in revenue for the company’s fuel division, which includes enrichment services (but also encompasses conversion services and production of nuclear fuel for reactors),” the RUSI report added.
Dependence on Russian uranium processing is an issue of strategic economic and military concern, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
And the Biden administration has hunkered down to wean the country off that supply.
Notably, in May, President Biden signed H.R. 1042, called the "The Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act," which bans the import of Russian uranium.
“Our nation’s clean energy future will not rely on Russian imports,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said in a news release. “We are making investments to build out a secure nuclear fuel supply chain here in the United States. That means American jobs supporting the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to a clean, safe, and secure energy economy.”
John Carmack, the deputy assistant secretary for nuclear fuel cycles at the Department of Energy, told The Denver Gazette that, over the last few years, that import has grown to about 20% of America's needed uranium for the country's current fleet of nuclear reactors.
"And so, we have approximately three years to wean ourselves off of that supply and build new production capacity to replace it here in the United States,” Carmack said.
The response from the Biden administration to the sanctions that block Russian uranium processing has been to pour more than $2.7 billion into building domestic conversion and enrichment capacity.
While processing capacity is a priority for the Biden administration, no money has been allocated to support the U.S. uranium mining industry, but an increase in processing capacity here will improve the outlook for uranium mining worldwide, according to an industry spokesperson.
“The expansion of conversion capacity in the U.S. will increase demand for production of U-308. There’s a bottleneck in the U.S. when it comes to the ability of the downstream fuel cycle industry to absorb uranium output from global uranium mining,” said Moore of Energy Fuels.
Conversion is the process of taking refined uranium ore concentrate, called yellowcake, and using chemical processes to turn it into uranium hexafluoride, a gas that can be processed to increase the concentration of the fissile isotope of uranium, U-235, from its natural concentration of 0.7% to the 3% to 20% enrichment needed for nuclear reactor fuel.
The next step, enrichment, spins the gas in high-speed centrifuges that separate the U-235 from the non-fissile U-238. The slightly heavier U-238 is forced towards the centrifuge wall, while the lighter U-235 stay closer to the center. The U-235 gas is siphoned out and passed to another centrifuge. This process is repeated thousands of times, with each stage progressively increasing the U-235 concentration.
Another concern to commercial uranium importers is the potential blockage of the traditional routes of supply from the major uranium producing areas of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that go through Russia to its port on the Baltic Sea at St. Petersburg.
“I know of two alternative routes,” Carmack from the Energy Department said. “One of them is a route from Kazakhstan out across the mountains to the east to China, but I understand that that route is by truck, maybe some rail, and is definitely difficult in some parts of the winter.”

The other route goes across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, through Georgia to Turkey and across to the Black Sea, Carmack said.
“It's been exercised twice that I know of in the last year and a half, both by Cameco, a Canadian mining concern and large nuclear company centered out of Canada,” said Carmack. “They've been able to transport U308 — yellow cake — from Kazakhstan out the Caspian route without crossing into Russia.”
Both alternative routes are more expensive than the St. Petersburg route, as they require transshipping from vessels to railroads and back again.
“I think geopolitical tensions just continue to escalate and people are finding that we overdid globalization,” said Mark Chalmers, president and CEO of Energy Fuels. “So, the further disruptions of more Russian influence in Niger, brewing tensions with China, start asking the question: Where does the world want to be on security (of) supply with these different countries?”
The common thread for all nuclear energy production is the availability of uranium to fuel reactors.
The heyday of commercial nuclear power generation in the U.S. began after the end of World War II. From the 1950s to the 1970s, there were 104 nuclear power reactors licensed for operation. From 1970 to 1979 alone, 58 reactors came online, according to the NRC.
At the time, the average time to construct and put a reactor online was five to seven years.
In 1976, Colorado joined the nuclear energy club with a unique high-temperature gas-cooled reactor — the first of its kind built for electrical power generation — near Platteville. The Fort St. Vrain Generating station was owned and operated by Public Service Company of Colorado, now a subdivision of Xcel Energy Colorado.
The plant suffered technical problems and frequent shutdowns and was permanently shuttered in 1989. The reactor was removed and today the facility uses natural gas combined-cycle gas turbines to power the existing generators.
No nuclear power plants have been proposed in Colorado since then. Several bills brought forward in the state General Assembly in the last couple of years to study the potential for new nuclear powerplants have failed.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Rod Pelton last year to require studies of advanced energy solutions, including advanced nuclear power, in two areas of the state passed and became law in August 2023. A report from the director of the Colorado Energy Office is due July 1, 2025.
Today, there are 94 operating power reactors in the US. The final two were the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia, both of which were online as of 2024, according to the NRC.
The U.S. has more nuclear power reactors than any other country, and they provide nearly 20% of the nation’s electricity and about 50% of low-carbon ”green energy,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Worldwide, as of March 2021, there were 433 nuclear power plants in operation, and at least 50 plants under construction and perhaps 50 more in the design and permitting process, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“It is noteworthy that in the 1980s, 218 power reactors started up, an average of one every 17 days,” said the World Nuclear Association. “These included 47 in the USA, 42 in France and 18 in Japan.”
Uranium is a ubiquitous substance in earth’s crust, but mineable concentrations have so far been limited, although experts say there are enough known reserves to fuel the existing fleet of reactors for a century into the future.
Worldwide, the annual need for refined uranium oxide commonly referred to as “yellowcake” or U-308, amounts to more than 87,000 metric tons or 191.9 million pounds. In the U.S., American reactor owners purchased 51.6 million pounds in 2023. Nuclear power reactors in the U.S. loaded 43.9 million pounds of uranium in completed fuel assemblies in 2023.
According to the Uranium Marketing Annual Report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the largest sources of uranium delivered in 2023 were of foreign origin, with Canada as the top source at 27%, followed closely by Australia and Kazakhstan with 22% each. Russian-origin material accounted for 12% and Uzbekistan uranium accounted for 10%. The United States accounted for 5% of total deliveries in 2023, the same percentage as 2022.
“There's no shortage uranium in the world. It's really the economics of extracting that uranium and getting it to market,” Chalmers of Energy Fuels told The Denver Gazette. “But it's a changed world we live in. Things like access to public lands in the United States. A lot of these things are changing where there are large resources, but there's also increased requirements to get projects up and running, getting permitted, if they get litigated against — it's harder to respond than it used to be.”
Energy Fuels Inc. is a uranium and vanadium mining and milling company that also produces rare earth elements for things like high-power magnets.
Chalmers said the obstacle to increased U.S. production has been low market prices. The market began to climb as the demand for clean, reliable carbon-free electricity rose. In January, prices for uranium spiked at $104 per pound, the highest level since an increase to $140 in June of 2007. Prices today are about $80 per pound. For many years, the market price had hovered in the $10 per pound range, which caused many U.S. producers to mothball operations.
Uranium miners say the higher prices make it economically feasible to restart mining operations.
Energy Fuels, which owns the Pinyon Plain uranium mine in Arizona, along with many other properties nationwide, restarted mining in the long-dormant mine earlier this year and began hauling ore from the mine to its Utah White Mesa uranium mill — the only operating uranium mill in the United States.
Chalmers noted a growing degree of bipartisan support for nuclear power in the U.S. and globally, driven by the need for carbon-free energy and the growing power demand from data centers. He emphasized the importance of government support for a sustainable domestic nuclear fuel cycle.
“If you're an enricher like the guys in New Mexico or something like that, are you going to go make a multi-billion-dollar investment in expanding your capacity if, in two years, Putin's dead, Russia's destitute, (and) they're coming back to the world: 'Oh, hey, please buy our cheap Russian uranium?' Are you going to make that investment and prices crash? No,” Chalmers said. “And so, it's going to take some sort of a government support or program to support the construction of that additional capacity.”
“There's a lot of work to be done because we let enrichment really fall to the wayside,” Chalmers added. “Conversion is starting to spool up. Both are starting to spool up, but it takes time. It it takes money, it takes people, it takes technology, it takes permits to get the wheels back on the bus.”