Scott Nolan

And so why build a bunch of new capacity in the U.S.

for enriching if we're not going to build a bunch more reactors?

We can just get this stuff from, we can get enriched uranium from our allies in Europe and, you know, other countries as well.

And if you rewind to the history of this, in the 50s the U.S.

built a bunch of enrichment.

This was, you know, Cold War era.

We were the world leader in enrichment.

We had these plants spread out throughout the country that used an old technique that was expensive.

It required a lot of energy to do it, but we had the most capacity.

And we built up a lot of enriched uranium that we stockpiled.

And those stockpiles, we knew they would last a really long time, you know, decades and decades.

And so with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we said, let's start trading with our former enemies.

We're allies now.

We can work together.

Free trade's good for the world.

And we can get this product elsewhere.

And so over the next couple of decades, we moved towards free trade and imports and decommissioned those old facilities.

assuming that that would be a fine thing to rely on with a bunch of different partners.

But now we're in a position where we need to grow nuclear energy.

And if you look at how much enrichment the US is going to need, right now we produce less than a third of what we need.