The last few days have also laid bare that there is no sovereignty without nuclear weapons. A civil nuclear fleet is a stepping stone to nuclear weapons stewardship.
(Even absent nuclear weapons, see the special treatment of Zaporizhzhia [1] over Ukraine’s other power infrastructure.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_P...
It's not guaranteed that every geopolitical rival would have those considerations when deciding whether to care about, or plan to actively attempt, triggering a nuclear meltdown in your nation.
The only way to be independent is to invest in renewables and storage.
Honestly, we need to stop burning carbon and nuclear can help with this.
And like, I'd prefer to live in a world where we have far too much energy than far too little.
Note also that you can use nuclear/renewables to make hydrogen to potentially store more energy.
And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.
Edit: Parent meant enriched uranium, not ore so this comment is not relevant.
Canada, Khazakhstan, Namibi, and so on. Russia is pretty far down the list. Australia has the largest known reserves of uranium they just haven pushed to extensively extract it.
Not wrong, but Russia controls about half of the world's enrichment capacity.
If you want to avoid possible lock-in, then you may want to look at reactors that do not need enriched uranium (like CANDU: it does have an extra up-front cost for 'heavy water' though).
> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Heck, >25% of the US's uranium comes from Russia:
* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/where-the-u-s-gets-its-enri...
Being able to use "plain" uranium greatly expands your supplier options.
I doubt that the US is buying from Russia—you know, the country/government which it threw sanctions on in all sorts of ways—because "it's cheap".
Recently a ban on importation was started, and it included a couple of billion for more processing facilities in the US:
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/climat...
It's a supply chain issue that took some time to sort out:
* https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-nuclear-fuel-agreemen...
* There are uranium enrichment facilities outside Russia, even in Europe
* There's uranium outside Russia, even in Europe (look at Czechia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...)
So, let's build a plant.
>And where does the nuclear fuel come from? Russia.
Nonsense.
And even after years of the war in Ukraine, Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports
Italian companies that work on reactor design, decommissioning and technology commissioned by foreign countries, for example.
>Russia is still the second largest source of uranium for the EU, making up a quarter of imports
The vast majority of contracts are multiannual, the EU will rely much less on Russian uranium export once they expire. Italy has no reason to sign them with Russia.
Not true at all. Russia is producing 5% of the world Uranium, and they probably use quite a lot of that domestically given they produce 8% of all nuclear power in the world with their own plant.
Kazakhstan + Uzbekistan is 50% of the word production. Canada is second and will be happy to start selling to the EU. Namibia and Australia both produce twice as much as Russia.
Not to say that supply of natural Uranium is not a concern because you do depends of a small list of countries but we don't need to buy any from Russia.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...
> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Also a list of countries operating enrichment facilities does not say anything about capacity (Russia 50%) or market share (Russia 44%).
https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/ura...
The reality is that both the US and Europe are dependent on Russian uranium services, with the biggest dependency in Eastern Europe for fuel rods for Soviet-style Reactors. It's slowly changing, but will probably take decades.
On the other hand Germany managed to decouple itself from the Russian fossil gas industry within months.
So tell me again "How it can be done anywhere" when we apparently can't do it without Russia 3 years into the war.
Enel has built/is managing nuclear plants in Spain and Slovakia: https://www.enel.com/media/explore/search-press-releases/pre...
Eni is involved in building the first fusion plant: https://www.ansa.it/english/news/science_tecnology/2024/04/0...
I didn't know that Enel operates nuclear power plants, that's interesting, but they seem to come from an acquisition of Endesa and have been constructed way before that acquisition, and from designs of foreign places. So they aren't modern generation reactors that one would want to build from scratch.
As for the Slovakian nuclear power plant, it's a russian design as well.
I don't doubt that Enel could operate nuclear reactors of foreign design, where Canada, Russia and France have strong capabilities, but if the design comes from a different country, do you really achieve the independence goal?
Absolutely correct. It will never serve as a power plant. It's a giant experiment, that's what the E stands for. We should be so lucky that one day it will generate a few minutes of power :)
And do you really want another target for foreign sabotage?