Bill Clinton's uranium mistake benefited Russia

 Daniel Greenfield:

Uranium prices have shot up by as much as 40% since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

With nuclear power providing about a fifth of our energy, this is another blow for Americans.

Unfortunately our nuclear power plants are dependent on uranium imports from Russia and countries in its sphere of influence because our domestic mining industry was suppressed.

In December 2016, on his way out the door, Barack Obama announced that he was inventing the Bears Ears "National Monument" on over a million acres of land. While California environmentalists celebrated, tens of thousands of locals bitterly protested the move.

Billboards and stickers reading #RescindBearsEars were plastered across Utah towns in the area that expected catastrophic consequences from the destruction of their livelihoods.

Among these was uranium mining.

A uranium mine in the area has the potential to yield 500,000 pounds of uranium. Miners warned that the Bears Ears monument would force us to rely more heavily on foreign uranium.

But the Democrats, still busy blaming their election defeat on some sort of phantom Russian-Trump conspiracy, did not see any problem with making America dependent on Russia.

The Trump administration did not rescind Obama’s power grab, but did shrink the monument by over 80%. It was the latest battle in a long running war between Democrats looking to shut down mining in general and uranium mining specifically, and Republicans limiting, but not undoing the damage done by their abusive environmental regulations and power plays.

The Clinton administration’s euphemistic “mining reform” push already devastated mining in America. As the Wall Street Journal noted at the time, mining firms were “leaving the United States with the blessings, if not open encouragement, of the Clinton administration."

And with the blessing of the Clintons, America became dependent on foreign resources.

In 1980, the United States had produced over 40 million pounds of uranium, but under the Clinton administration that number stood at less than 5 million. Now it's well below a million.

Despite efforts by environmentalists to shut down nuclear power plants and leave Americans reliant on expensive and unreliable Chinese solar panels and other scam green investment vehicles for their donor base, our nuclear plants, which unlike wind and solar are capable of delivering a reliable power supply, still went on needing uranium.

As domestic production virtually vanished, imports skyrocketed. Some 91% of enriched uranium used in nuclear power plants is imported from other countries. While Canada is a leading source of uranium imports, our largest source of uranium remains Russia combined with countries in its sphere of influence like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In 2020, we bought about 11 million pounds of Canadian uranium, 8 million pounds of Russian uranium, around 11 million pounds of Kazakh uranium, and about 4 million pounds of Uzbek uranium.
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This is another example of how the anti-energy left is harming Americans and US national security.  We should be mining our own uranium and pumping our own oil and gas.  We should export liberals to enemy countries to ruin their economies.