this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Why can we not buy nuclear fuel from Australia?
Australia produces uranium ore, but you need to enrich it to produce nuclear fuel. Austrlia does not have the facilities to do that right now. Russia controlls 40% of the global enrichment facilties. Right now France, USA, UK, Germany and the Netherlands also have such facilities and well some other countries too, but besides Japan an maybe India both of which do not have large ones, I would not rely on them either.
There are a lot of Soviet designed nuclear reactors in the EU. Those all tended to buy Russia production as it was cheap and the Russians obviously understood those reactors best. That still continues. Hungary has Russia build them a new nuclear power plant right now.
The soviet reactors part makes sense. Still we should strive to import the ore from Australia and enrich it ourselves
The EU is propably somewhat fine. 62% of enrichment is done within the EU, but 30% comes from Russia. The problem is that such facitilites are really difficult to build, so it takes years and to the best of my knowledge none are planned. Germany shutting down its reactors however should help in terms of that.
However if we actually would want to help out our allies it becomes much much worse. The US has only one single plant, which is enough to supply 5% of the US needs, due to the US buying weapons grade uranium from Russia after the Cold War ended, which destroyed the US enrichment industry. South Korea does not have an enrichment plant at all and Japans is tiny. So both are basicly fully dependend on imports. If you can not import from the EU and Russia then only other option is China. The democratic world certainly needs more of these facilities. However nuclear proliferation is a massive problem. Enriching uranium allows one to build nukes. One of the reasons Germany is not shutting down its enrichment plant is to be able to make sure the US keeps up nuclear sharing. If the US for some reason would stop it, there at least used to be plans to allow Germany to build a nuke within a few months. I imagen similar things would be possible for other countries as well.