April 23 (UPI) -- The Trump administration rolled out a plan Thursday to kick-start the nuclear power industry again in the United States, including $150 million in the 2021 budget for the domestic uranium reserve.
The recommendations come from the Nuclear Fuel Working Group, which produced a report. The group has been working since last July to come up with a strategy to boost nuclear energy in the country.
The United States is already the largest producer of nuclear power in the world, generating 30 percent of the globe's nuclear generation of electricity, but the country has not built a new nuclear plant in 30 years. Two new units are expected to come online after this year.
"The decline of the U.S. industrial base in the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle over the past few decades has threatened our national interest and national security," Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, said in a statement.
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"This Strategy to Restore American Nuclear Energy Leadership [report] recognizes this challenge and lays out an array of policy options to restore America's leadership in nuclear energy and technology. As a matter of national security, it is critical that we take bold steps to preserve and grow the entire U.S. nuclear energy enterprise," he said.
The report calls for strengthening the uranium mining and conversion industries, investing and consolidating technical advances in U.S. innovation and research and development in the field, ensuring domestic growth in the nuclear energy sector, and exporting technology to compete with other countries.
Nuclear critics and environmentalists argue there isn't a need for such an expansion domestically and would serve only to line the financial pockets of the nuclear industry.
"The industry wants a sweetheart deal," House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., told The Hill. "They want to expedite their critical minerals so they can just keep skip[ping] the process. And then more importantly, a guaranteed buyback. Talk about creeping socialism, my God. We're guaranteeing a revenue-based system. That rarely, if at all, happens."
