It's the latest fallout from a series of foreign policy decisions crafted by Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton that inexplicably strengthened Putin's ability to wage economic warfare with energy supplies such as natural gas and uranium.
“[The] United States used to produce its own nuclear materials for bombs and then for nuclear energy, and it was the Clinton administration they made this deal with the Russians way back in the 90s to purchase all of this down blended material from, you know, the decommission nuclear warheads from Russia,” Seamus Bruner, co-author of the book, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday. “That got us addicted to Russia's supply,” he said, explaining that it led to a cratering of domestic supply.
Two deals, which took place during Obama’s vaunted "Russian Reset" that began in 2009, cemented the United States’ dependence on Russia nuclear fuel, Bruner said.
“[The] Obama administration certainly wasn't friendly. They made the famous deals with Russia, the [123 Agreement]; everybody remembers the uranium one deal, which was about nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons,” Bruner said.
“And so now we're in this tough spot. Now we do have domestic producers, who are, you know, producing uranium for our energy needs, but there are no way, there's no way they're going to catch up.”
As part of the flurry of diplomacy between the former Cold War rivals, the Obama administration penned the new 123 Agreement with the Kremlin, which was designed to increase cooperation on civil nuclear energy and further commercial opportunities between the two economies. The administration also signed new arms control and technology cooperation agreements as part of the diplomatic push.
The deal led to billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. utilities to buy Russian uranium to power their nuclear reactors.
Around the same time the agreements were taking shape, however, Putin’s state-controlled nuclear company, Rosatom, was making moves to corner the global supply.
The Russian company’s efforts to acquire a Canadian company, Uranium One, became a scandal for the Obama administration because it saw the virtual elimination of U.S. domestic production of uranium and raised corruption concerns about some of its chief officials.
“The the Uranium One deal was about shuttering our domestic mines, we had all of these uranium mines across…the Rocky Mountains…and closer towards the west, Midwest, that shut down the domestic production there, which was a boon to Putin, who had purchased, in addition to the mines in the United States, a bunch of mines in Kazakhstan,” Bruner said.
“And those are where he's able to pull out a ton of uranium and enrich it for civilian purposes, ostensibly, and and then sell it back to us at a premium.”
Before the Russian takeover, Uranium One was a Canadian company that mined Uranium around the world, with assets in Eurasia, Africa, and North America. Its facilities in Wyoming, Utah, and other states accounted for approximately 20% of U.S. uranium capacity at the time, necessitating a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to approve an acquisition by the Russia state-backed company.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on that committee and had a prominent role in shaping the administration’s foreign policy. The acquisition became a scandal that plagued her 2016 presidential campaign after investigative author Peter Schweizer and his Government Accountability Institute found nine Uranium One shareholders funneled $145 million into the Clinton Foundation before the deal was set to be considered.
The acquisition was subsequently approved, though Clinton’s team has repeatedly denied that the secretary had a major role in approving the sale.
Both Congress and President Biden, who had a front row seat to the reset, at least appeared to recognize the danger caused by the past missteps, but could do little to wean the U.S. off Russia’s supply before now.
Shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Congress passed and Biden signed the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act ostensibly to free the U.S. nuclear industry from dependence on Russia. Yet, the law only requires an end to U.S. imports of nuclear fuel from Russia completely by 2028, providing a waiver system in the intervening years.
“It was a terrible decision to make us dependent on on imports of uranium from Russia,” former Trump National Security Council Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz told the John Solomon Reports podcast.
Fleitz said the waiver system established by the law revealed how underdeveloped the United States’ domestic uranium production is, something Putin eagerly exploited last week.
“But utilities could ask for waivers, with the understanding it will take a long time for us to establish domestic sources of your reactor grade uranium,” Fleitz said. “The Russians knew that, and they're going to cut this off, and our reactors will have no where to go to get uranium.” Just the News
