Hopes for a U.S. nuclear energy revival may be jeopardized by the tariffs that President Donald Trump continues to threaten to impose on Canada, as well as his plans to similarly target the European Union moving forward.
That’s because the nuclear industry depends on a global supply chain that can take uranium concentrate from Kazakhstani mines, for instance, convert it to uranium hexafluoride in Canada and enrich the product in France, before finally delivering it to a U.S. fuel fabricator. Trump’s tariffs will make that exceedingly complicated, costly and precarious, to the great detriment of the U.S. nuclear sector.
Flexible global market mechanisms have allowed the U.S.—a country with negligible uranium mining activities and limited downstream conversion and enrichment capacity—to secure enough fuel to operate the largest fleet of nuclear reactors worldwide, producing some 20 percent of the country’s electricity. All that will change if the Trump administration follows through on its threatened 10 percent tariff on uranium imports from Canada, among other products—which were imposed on March 4 but subsequently removed—amid threats of broadening the trade war to the EU. Trump left in place an additional 10 percent tariff he announced on March 4 on Chinese uranium imports, which were already under a 17.5 percent tariff as of Feb. 4.