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06
2025
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The Trump Administration Could Throw A Lifeline To The Uranium Sector
The U.S. imports most of its uranium from Canada, Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan because it is cheaper and more abundant in those countries. However, the Biden administration did not recognize uranium as a critical mineral, with the Energy Act of 2020 stipulating that only a "non-fuel mineral" can be considered a critical mineral. And now the newly installed Trump administration could be about to change that. One of Trump's many"Unleashing American Energy" directives requires the Secretary of the Interior to instruct the director of the USGS to "consider updating the survey's list of critical minerals, including for the potential of including uranium." Categorizing uranium as a critical mineral would open up federal funds and fast-track permitting for domestic uranium projects. Uranium demand is likely to keep growing due to increasing power demand by AI data centers. According to the World Nuclear Association, demand from reactors is expected to climb 28% by 2030, and nearly double by 2040. Four years ago, China unveiled ambitious plans to build 150 nuclear reactors at a staggering cost of $440B over the next 15 years as the country looks to become carbon neutral by 2060. Last month, Trump announced a $500 billion joint venture with Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL), OpenAI, and SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) to build AI infrastructure in the U.S. The companies have pledged to commit $100 billion to start, and as much as $500 billion over the next four years toward the initiative, with Trump calling it “largest AI infrastructure project in history.” OpenAI, ChatGPT maker, said it expects the project, called Stargate, to help support American leadership in AI, and that it could create "hundreds of thousands" of jobs in the U.S. Other tech giants including Nvidia Corp.(NASDAQ:NVDA) Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) are also expected to be technology partners in the project.
Source: Y-Charts Ditching Russian Uranium It will be interesting to see if the Trump administration will make efforts to cut ties with Russian uranium. For a long time, the U.S. has been heavily reliant on Russian uranium, importing about 14 percent of its uranium and 28 percent of all enrichment services from Russia while the figures for the European Union are 20 percent and 26 percent for imports and enrichment services, respectively. And, there seems to be no end in sight despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy calling on the U.S. and the international community to ban Russian uranium imports following the Russian shelling near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya power plant. U.S companies are sending $1 billion each year to Russia's state-owned nuclear agency, Rosatom. Weaning themselves off Russian uranium is a tough call for the country considering that Russia is home to one of the world’s largest uranium resources with an estimated 486,000 tons of uranium, the equivalent of 8 percent of global supply. Russia is home to the world’s largest uranium enrichment complex--accounting for almost half the global capacity. The U.S. currently has one operational plant managed by its UK-Netherlands-Germany owners that can produce less than a third of its annual domestic needs. Further, the country currently has no plans to develop or find sufficient enrichment capacity to become domestically self-sufficient in the future. In contrast, China’s China Nuclear Corporation is working to double its capacity to meet the needs of China’s rapidly growing civilian nuclear reactor fleet, so that by 2030 China plans to have nearly one-third of global capacity. The Trump administration could also pursue uranium substitutes. What would give nuclear energy a major boost would be a significant technological breakthrough in substituting thorium for uranium in reactors. The public would likely be far easier to bring on board with the removal of dangerous uranium. Thorium is now being billed as the 'great green hope' of clean energy production that produces less waste and more energy than uranium, is meltdown-proof, has no weapons-grade by-products and can even consume legacy plutonium stockpiles. The United States Department of Energy (DOE), Nuclear Engineering & Science Center at Texas A&M and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have partnered with Chicago-based Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) to develop a new thorium-based nuclear fuel they have dubbed ANEEL. ANEEL (Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life) is a proprietary combination of thorium and “High Assay Low Enriched Uranium” (HALEU) that intends to address high costs and toxic waste issues (thorium must be paired with at least a small amount of a fissile material due its inability to naturally fissile on its own). The main difference between ANEEL and the uranium that is currently used in U.S. reactors is the level of uranium enrichment. Instead of up to 5% uranium-235 enrichment, the new generation of reactors needs fuel with up to 20 percent enrichment. Several years ago, CCTE started fitting existing reactor designs to enable them to use ANEEL fuel. Meanwhile, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved Centrus request to make HALEU at its enrichment facility in Piketon, Ohio, becoming the only plant in the country to do so. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com.
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Over the past couple of years, the nuclear energy sector has enjoyed a renaissance in the U.S. and many Western countries thanks to the global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, high power demand and nuclear’s status as a low-carbon energy source. Uranium demand has soared thanks to a series of policy "
