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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

We should have kept using nuclear? That nuclear of which refinement capacities are over 40% in Russians hands? For conversion it’s even a combined 63% for Russia+China.

“Russia's Stranglehold On The World's Nuclear Power Cycle”, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-nuclear-power-industry-graphi...

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The reliance on Russian nuclear fuel services is a consequence of decisions made decades earlier in U.S. made during Bush era and later Obama era.

"Following proposals from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Russia, and in connection with the US-led Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), there have been moves to establish international uranium enrichment centres."

"The first of these international centres is the International Uranium Enrichment Centre (IUEC) established in 2007 by Rosatom at Angarsk in Siberia"

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Reliance on Russian gas (which did increase after shutting down nuclear) is a bigger problem than relying on nuclear fuel: in nuclear energy fuel cost has much smaller impact on electricity cost than gas price for gas fired power stations.

In 2024, the EU imported a little over €700 million in Russian uranium products out of a total of €22 billion Russian energy imports.

https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/ending-european-union-impor...

Interesting article. According to it, the missing piece is scaling the conversion facilities from 8% to x%, and then scaling uranium enrichment process from 30% to x%. With that in place heavy dependency to Russia+China would have been solved, no?

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