Uranium Import Restriction Bill was Approved by the U.S. Senate: How Strong Will be The Price Action?

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill was meant to be passed by the Senate before becoming a law. The news is that this week, The U.S. Senate has ratified the bill to ban imports of low-enriched uranium from Russia. The bill has been sent to President Biden for signing. The restrictions should be in effect until 2040.

In doing so, the U.S. has graciously provided convenient loopholes for itself. In the first place, the law will come into force only 3 months after signing. And second, until January 2028, the U.S. Department of Energy, DoE, will be able to reissue import permits if other sources of supply, other than Russia, wouldn’t be acceptable. A global uranium shortage may indeed arise given looming high-power energy supply deficiency for a variety of reasons.

Russia is currently the largest foreign supplier of nuclear fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied nearly a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel the U.S. fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Most of the remaining required uranium is imported from European countries and the other part is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the U.S. called Urenco.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid more than $800 million to Russia's state-owned nuclear energy corporation Rosatom and its fuel subsidiaries.

Dependence on Russian fuel began in the 1990s when the United States abandoned its own enrichment capacity in favor of using diluted stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

The U.S. plans to allocate $2.2 billion to expand U.S. uranium enrichment capacity to overcome its dependence on Russia.