Now that Ukraine has taken Kherson, some experts fear Putin might feel cornered and yet resort to using nuclear weapons. Whether Putin will, of course, is uncertain. What isn’t, and what’s deeply weird in light of this worry, is that the United States continues to buy uranium from Rosatom — an entity identified as being in charge of Russia’s nuclear weapons complex. This must end.
As I explain in the attached piece, “Stop Funding Russia’s Nuclear Weapons,” posted yesterday by The Hill, the U.S. nuclear industry has lobbied to keep these uranium imports flowing. They have succeeded even though, when combined with European Union purchases, these buys have fattened Rosatom by as much as a billion dollars a year — easily as much as it costs Rosatom to operate Russia’s nuclear weapons facilities.
Unlike the industry, some of the Hill’s most ardent nuclear supporters oppose relying on Russian uranium imports even in the short run. They have proposed legislation that would block them immediately. Both they and their critics understand that we have better ways to fuel our nuclear plants, options that don’t help Russia weave ever more nuclear rope to threaten us and our allies with.
November 13, 2022
Author: Henry Sokolski
Stop funding Russia’s nuclear weapons
As Washington and the commentariat wring their hands about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sword rattling, the United States and the European Union (EU) continue to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars to Rosatom — a Russian nuclear firm that maintains Moscow’s nuclear weapons complex and just filched a $60-billion Ukrainian nuclear plant.
Why would Washington and Brussels back such a nuclear villain? Do we really want to support Russian organizations that are critical to Putin building the nuclear bombs he is now threatening us with? No one will say yes, but the nuclear industry in Europe and the United States insist we can’t afford not to.
Besides being in charge of all of Russia’s nuclear weapons production and development, Rosatom supplies nuclear fuel to nuclear plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary. Any European Union (EU) decision to cut off fuel to these plants would immediately harm these states economically. So, when Poland, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany recently recommended that the EU ban Russian nuclear imports to avoid funding Russia’s military efforts, the Hungarians and French howled and Brussels blinked.
What’s Paris’s brief? Russia buys two-thirds of France’s electrical steam generators. Also, French nuclear fuel fabricator Framatome just struck a major nuclear fuel development cooperation agreement with Rosatom.
Click here to read the full article.