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# The Fuel We Still Buy From the Country We Banned
- URL: https://the-capital-memo.ghost.io/the-fuel-we-still-buy-from-the-country-we-banned/
- Published: 2026-10-03T09:45:09.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-03T09:45:08.000Z
- Author: James Coleman

American reactor operators bought 12,710 thousand separative work units of uranium enrichment services last year. Of that, 3,284 thousand units, or 25.8 percent, came from Russia. That was the largest single source, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and domestic American supply, which accounted for 23 percent. Russia's share was about 17 percent a decade ago, so it has gone up, not down.  
  
This is despite a law. The Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act was signed on the thirteenth of May 2024 and the prohibition took effect that August. It came with waivers, in declining annual quotas of low enriched uranium, and the statute is explicit about their end: any waiver shall terminate not later than the first of January 2028\. That is fifteen months from now. Spot enrichment has gone from about 60 dollars a unit in 2016 and 92 dollars in early 2022 to roughly 200 dollars this summer, though American utilities actually paid an average of 108.70 dollars last year because most of their supply sits inside long term contracts signed before any of this.

### The Historical Echo

This is not an analogy. It is the same counterparty, and the arrangement that created the dependence is a matter of public record.  
  
In February 1993 the United States and Russia signed the Highly Enriched Uranium Purchase Agreement, with a 13 billion dollar implementing contract between USEC and TENEX the following year. Over twenty years, ending in December 2013, Russia downblended weapons grade material into reactor fuel and shipped it west. The Energy Information Administration's final accounting records 475.2 tonnes of highly enriched uranium converted into 13,723 tonnes of low enriched uranium. In enrichment terms it was a deal for roughly 90 million separative work units, and at its height it supplied about a third of all the enrichment services used to fuel American reactors.  
  
It was, on its own terms, a success. It was also cheap, and that is the part that mattered commercially. Because USEC could buy Russian units rather than run and reinvest in its own plants, it did. The gaseous diffusion plants at Portsmouth and then Paducah closed. The American Centrifuge programme stalled. By this year the only operating commercial enricher in the United States is Urenco's plant in New Mexico, at 4.3 million units a year, and the company that inherited USEC's centrifuge work was reduced to a single cascade producing one tonne a year of high assay fuel as a demonstration.  
  
Twenty years of cheap supply from a single foreign source retired the domestic industry that the 2028 deadline now requires to exist.

### Where Patient Capital Is Positioning

Money is finally moving, and the timetables tell you everything about why this is not a problem that money solves quickly.  
  
The Energy Department committed about 2.7 billion dollars over a decade in January, split roughly evenly between three parties. Orano's project at Oak Ridge received 900 million, filed its licence application in March, expects to start construction in September 2027 and to reach commercial production in 2031 or 2032\. Urenco announced in June that it would add 2.1 million units a year in New Mexico, with the first cascades producing in 2032 and installation running to 2036, and that is a brownfield expansion at a licensed, operating site with utility contracts already signed. Centrus signed a 900 million dollar commercial contract in July for high assay fuel, targeting twelve tonnes a year with first new capacity in 2029.  
  
Set those dates against the deadline. Waivers end on the first of January 2028\. The only new Western enrichment capacity landing before then is a 700,000 unit tranche that Urenco completes in 2027, against 3,284 thousand units of Russian supply last year. The arithmetic does not work, and no amount of appropriation changes it, because the constraint is licensing and construction rather than capital.  
  
Rosatom holds about 43 percent of world enrichment capacity today and, on current plans, will still hold 38 percent in 2030 even after every Western and Chinese addition now announced.  
  
For long horizon capital the lesson is the one this letter keeps finding in different industries. A cheap import is not the same thing as a secure supply, and the bill for the difference arrives decades later, all at once, in the form of a deadline that cannot be met. The physical asset here is not the uranium in the ground, of which there is plenty. It is the licensed, operating, staffed capacity to turn it into something a reactor can burn, and that has a construction time measured in half decades.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/44/88/44885750-7681-4d57-825f-5d69f4c60045/content/images/2026/10/the-fuel-we-buy-from-the-country-we-banned-photorealistic.jpg)

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