I’m going to let former U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley kick things off…
“You never sleep with the devil because then the devil owns you. The Europeans are finding that out right now. We need to be smarter than that.”
She’s right. We need to be —but we aren’t. We certainly haven’t been, anyway. Haley is referring to Nord Stream 2 and reliance on Russian oil more broadly, but she might as well be talking about Uranium One and how we’ve been in this exact place before.
Back in 2013, after that thing happened that the Clinton’s say didn’t, but Peter Schweizer knew did and detailed in his book Clinton Cash, the homepage of Russia’s government-run news website ran with: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”
Here’s the New York Times describing the article:
“The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.”
According to Clinton Cash, in the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s State Department approving the Rosatom deal, total donations from Uranium One shareholders to the Clinton Foundation exceeded $145 million, which gave Russia control over about 20 percent of U.S. uranium.”
Corruption and poor national security decisions abound.
According to Reuters, “the United States relies on Russia and its allies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for roughly half of the uranium powering its nuclear plants – about 22.8 million pounds (10.3 million kg) in 2020 – which in turn produce about 20% of U.S. electricity.”
After the purchase of Uranium One, Rosatom scaled back uranium production in the U.S. Its Willow Creek mine in Wyoming produced 362 tons of uranium in 2013 and only an estimated 47 tons in 2017, the Blaze reports.
So corruption, poor national security decisions and stupidity abound (of course that’s what Russia was going to do).
Now, Biden has announced a ban on Russian oil —but how long before we’re off the wagon again? The U.S. is like an alcoholic who never kicked their crack problem —we’re dependent on Russia for far too much cheap energy. The worst offenders: U.S. utility companies.
“The National Energy Institute (NEI), a trade group of U.S. nuclear power generation companies including Duke Energy Corp (DUK.N) and Exelon Corp (EXC.O), is lobbying the White House to keep the exemption on uranium imports from Russia,” Reuters reports.
And it sounds like, so far, they’ve gotten their way — the latest energy ban didn’t include uranium. Why? Because we don’t process the stuff any more. So, the uranium will continue to flow freely. It should be no surprise that Exelon gave $160,000 to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign —more than double what they gave Trump. So if you want to know why the Biden Administration didn’t move faster on a Russian oil ban, Joe had to “check in” with our nation’s energy addicts.
Energy independence is a national security issue. We need to start drilling, digging, and whatever else we can do to get out from under Putin’s thumb. A ban is temporary and we can’t just walk down the block to the next dealer.
Although Biden is trying.
