The utter lunacy of the USA’s foreign policy pretensions can be seen by the fact that the USA still has no ability to enrich uranium.
America no longer had the capacity to enrich uranium.
Pause. Rewind.
America no longer had the capacity to enrich uranium — I only learned myself this year — which meant it could no longer fuel itself without the help of foreign governments. Mostly, that placed us at the mercy of Europe, which refused to fuel our military bases. But we were also buying enriched uranium from Russia. In fact, we were buying it that very afternoon in November 2023, as war raged in Ukraine. Our government hadn’t included enriched uranium in its initial sanctions against Russia on account of it really couldn’t. Fuel-dependence was not only a risk to our grid, but a risk to our national security.
Nuclear energy, despite its somewhat confusing status in our culture, where battles for its adoption are often waged with great, righteous indignation, as if attempting to persuade some alternative course for our civilization, presently accounts for nearly 20% of American energy production.
In labs across the country, reactors produce critically important medical isotopes for use in cardiology, oncology, orthopedics, and neurology. Then, military applications are obvious, as are their critical importance to our nation’s security, and require significantly greater enrichment than anything used by civilians.
In all of this, we need fuel. American companies used to enrich it. They no longer do. Today, nuclear enrichment is dominated by Russia’s Tenex (Rosatom), Europe’s Urenco, France’s Orano, and China’s CNNC, all of which are state-backed or closely aligned with national governments. Here, a few (foreign operatives) would probably quibble. There is one plant in America. But while Europe’s Urenco operates a facility in New Mexico, it uses European centrifuge tech and security protocols, which means — via braindead policy agreements — while there is technically some capacity to enrich on the U.S. mainland, our government doesn’t control that capacity, and can’t even use it to power our military bases.
But don’t worry, they’re working on it!
General Matter is a nuclear enrichment startup, which means once its enrichment facility is up and running in Paducah it will be producing fuel for nuclear power plants, including the classic giants cooked up in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the sexy sleeker modern microreactors and small modular reactors (SMRs).
In the meantime, I suppose we could just buy some from Iran. It’s a good thing that whole “totally destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” thing was nothing more than an expensive sound-and-light show.
If it wasn’t already clear to you before, then it should be now that there is absolutely no way the USA is in any position to fight a war with either Russia or China. Free trade theory has entirely hollowed out not only its industrial infrastructure, but its military power as well.