The Trump administration’s newly proposed budget would throw a $1.5 billion lifeline to the struggling U.S. uranium industry, long battered by declining demand and cheap imports.
If approved by Congress, Trump’s proposed “uranium reserve” would spend up to $150 million annually for 10 years to buy domestically sourced uranium, much of which would be mined in Utah and neighboring states, to protect the nation “in the event of a market disruption.”
This strategic stockpile would supply the nation’s nuclear-generating plants and nuclear-powered naval fleet.
But environmentalists fear the reserve amounts to a subsidy to prop up a commodity that has left a toxic legacy across the Colorado Plateau, where uranium was heavily mined in the 1960s...