Uranium mining in the United States hasn’t been profitable since the Russians flooded the global market with predatorily priced ore and processed fuel a decade ago.
Long before, the nation’s atrophied uranium enrichment industry, episodically idled by market paralyses and perpetually frozen in costly multi-jurisdictional regulatory entanglements, had ossified into obsolesce.
In 1980, the United States produced and processed 90 percent of the uranium used by 251 nuclear power plants that generated 11 percent of the country’s electricity.
In 2021, only 5 percent of the uranium used by the 55 nuclear power plants operating in the United States—which now generate 20 percent of the nation’s electricity—was produced domestically….