NIRS has joined our counterparts in Ukraine, calling for sanctions on Russia’s nuclear industry, including a ban on imports of uranium from Rosatom, the state-owned nuclear conglomerate. Doing so should not depend on there being no impact on the U.S. economy–we should have the courage of our convictions, and bringing an end to the wanton destruction and incredible suffering in Ukraine has to be worth some degree of burden.
But in the case of sanctioning Russia’s nuclear industry, that is not even an issue. People in the U.S. will never even notice, while another arm of Russia’s political and economic capital to sustain this war would be compromised. And as we have said before, we must directly sanction Rosatom (Russia’s state-owned nuclear conglomerate) for its direct involvement in the attacks on and occupation of Ukrainian nuclear power facilities in order to ensure that this war does not establish a precedent “normalizing” attacks on nuclear reactors and radioactive waste sites as legitimate military targets. Doing that in a way that will not even affect the lives of ordinary people in our country should be a no-brainer.
Yet, the U.S. nuclear industry has tried to confuse the public and policymakers about this since the first calls for economic sanctions to stop Russia’s invasion. Initially, nuclear corporations and their trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, lobbied the White House to be exempted from sanctions on Russia. They argued, falsely, that it was in the interest of protecting U.S. consumers from increases in electricity costs and keeping the lights on…
