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The United States imports 99% of the uranium concentrate it needs to make fuel for its nuclear reactors — but that could be changing.

The country’s 54 nuclear power plants produce about a fifth of all U.S. electricity. Most of the uranium they use is imported from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Russia and Uzbekistan.

But domestic uranium production has recently grown due to technological developments that bring U.S. mining costs down. At the same time, the fallout from the war in Ukraine, increased interest in nuclear technology and soaring electricity demand globally are increasing the appetite for reviving domestic nuclear fuel supply chains.

In 2024, domestic supplies of uranium concentrate increased more than 13 times, rising to almost 677 thousand pounds from just under 50 thousand pounds the year before, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (The rise isn’t visible in the above chart because the numbers are preliminary, and EIA hasn’t yet released numbers for imports yet.)

Uranium is exempt from the wide-ranging tariffs put in place by the Trump administration on April 2, according to documents released by the White House. The tariff situation is continuing to evolve, however.

The U.S. has been importing most of its uranium concentrate beginning in the 1990s, but in earlier decades, it was the opposite, as shown in the color switch in the chart above.

“We were the number one producer in the world in 1980,” said Scott Melbye, the president of Uranium Producers of America, an industry trade group, and CEO of the Uranium Royalty Corp, a uranium investing company.

But U.S. production started to lag as mining of large, high-grade uranium deposits in Saskatchewan, Canada ramped up in the 1980s and state-owned mining operations in Kazakhstan took off in the 1990s. Uranium from both places was cheaper than mining in the U.S. at the time.

Concurrently, a nuclear disarmament agreement between the U.S. and the newly formed Russian Federation repurposed highly enriched uranium in Soviet nuclear weapons for use in U.S. nuclear reactors.

“That became one half of U.S. supply of nuclear fuel for 20 years,” said Daniel Poneman, co-chair of the Nuclear Energy and National Security Coalition. Poneman is also the former CEO of Centrus Energy, a nuclear fuel company, and a former deputy secretary in the Energy Department. “And since nuclear is one fifth of our power, I used to tell people one in 10 light bulbs in America used to be a bomb pointing at you.”

Then after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, many countries started scaling back their nuclear footprints, leading many Western mining outfits to mothball their operations. Meanwhile, state-owned mining in Kazakhstan, unincumbered by the need to be profitable due to government backing, doubled down on production. Russia also continued flooding U.S. markets with cheap uranium after the disarmament agreement ended in 2013.

Now, world events may change this dynamic.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a U.S. ban on Russian uranium, to be phased in over several years, with a full-stop by 2028. The ban, combined with nuclear’s renewed popularity in the U.S., is restarting domestic uranium operations.

Newer mining techniques are also making U.S. deposits cost competitive again, said Melbye, noting that at least six member companies of the trade group he leads have restarted their U.S. operations.