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For Immediate Release
October, 30 2009, 01:42pm EDT
Contact:
Leonor Tomero, ltomero@armscontrolcenter.org 202-546-0795
ext. 2104
24 Experts Urge Congress to Address Proliferation Concerns of Laser Enrichment
WASHINGTON
In a letter to Congress,
24 leading nuclear experts urged policymakers to take into account the
proliferation risks associated with laser uranium enrichment and requested that
Congress conduct an inquiry into the proliferation risks associated with this
technology.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently reviewing a license
request by Global Laser Enrichment, a partnership led by General
Electric-Hitachi, for a laser enrichment facility outside of Wilmington, North Carolina.
The experts' letter requested that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
consider proliferation consequences during the licensing process.
The full text of the letter, which was sent to Chairs of the House
Energy and Commerce Committee, House Energy and Environment Subcommittee,
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is available online: https://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/nonproliferation/articles/103009_letter_congress_laser_enrichment/
The letter noted that the planned Global Laser Enrichment Commercial
Facility would complicate diplomatic efforts to discourage the use of this
technology in other countries. It stated, "If the United States
demonstrates that it is a commercially viable technology, it will dangerously
undermine U.S.
nuclear non-proliferation efforts by making it much more difficult to dissuade
other countries from acquiring this technology."
Concerns stem from the technical characteristics of this specific
method of uranium enrichment make it easy to conceal, and consequently
extremely difficult for international nuclear inspectors to detect. The letter
noted that laser isotope separation "enables
an enrichment facility to be smaller in size and to use less power than other
methods of enrichment such as centrifuge or gaseous diffusion which are
currently used to make low-enriched uranium fuel for use in nuclear power
plants."
Laser technology would be used as an alternative to
centrifuge or gaseous diffusion to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel. The
use of this uranium enrichment technology could detract from U.S. and international security
efforts to detect and monitor nuclear programs worldwide as global interest in
nuclear power grows. If enriched to a concentration of 20 percent uranium 235
or higher, enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons.
A laser uranium research program in Iran escaped detection in
2002. Another laser enrichment research experiment was also detected in South Korea
in 2004 after several years. The discovery of undeclared centrifuges enrichment
facilities in Iran, at Natanz in 2002 and more recently at Qom, underscore the
importance of being able to detect covert facilities that could be used to make
nuclear weapons-usable material.
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation is a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to enhancing international peace and security in the 21st century. The Center is funded by grants from private foundations and the generosity of thousands of individual donors.
LATEST NEWS
Pranksters Trick Former US Official Into Admitting Ukraine War Was Preventable
"This is as close to a smoking gun as I've ever seen on Ukraine," said one observer.
Dec 17, 2025
A former senior Biden administration official admitted during a recent interview with who she thought were aides to Ukraine's president that the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have been averted if Kyiv had agreed to stop seeking NATO membership.
Amanda Sloat—a former special assistant to then-President Joe Biden and senior director for Europe at the National Security Council—believed she was speaking with aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week when she sat down for a phone interview with who turned out to be the Russian prankster duo known as Vovan and Lexus.
“We had some conversations even before the war started about, what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion’—which at that point it may well have done,” Sloat said. “There is certainly a question, three years on now, you know, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do [at the] Istanbul talks? It certainly would have prevented the destruction and loss of life.”
However, Biden officials chose not to address Russia's main concerns regarding Ukraine and NATO—with disastrous results.
Sloat explained that she "was uncomfortable with the idea of the US pushing Ukraine" against pursuing NATO membership, "and sort of implicitly giving Russia some sort of sphere of influence or veto power on that."
"I don’t think [then-President Joe] Biden felt like it was his place to tell Ukraine what to do then, to tell Ukraine not to pursue NATO," she said.
Sloat is the latest in a series of former US officials who have fallen victim to Vovan and Lexus' pranks, including ex-Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Mike Pompeo, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland—who played a key role in a plot to overthrow the pro-Moscow government of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during the Euromaidan uprising of 2013-14.
Sloat's remarks during the interview implicitly belied the prevalent Western prewar narrative of an unprovoked Russian invasion—an assertion that ignored decades of provocation, beginning with the betrayal of a 1990 assurance by then-US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward" if the Soviets cooperated on German reunification.
Not only did NATO admit 13 new nations between then and the start of Russia's 2022 invasion, all of the new members were countries formerly in Moscow's orbit, and three—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—were ex-Soviet republics. The Biden administration's public pronouncements of an "open door" to Ukrainian NATO membership continued right up to Russia's invasion, and were particularly intolerable for Moscow—even if Russian leaders understood that the US was actually more opposed to Kyiv joining the alliance than in favor of such a potentially fraught outcome.
Responding to the prank, French political commentator Arnaud Bertrand said on X that "this is as close to a smoking gun as I've ever seen on Ukraine."
"Hundreds of thousands dead, a country in ruins, and the justification is America being 'uncomfortable' about not preserving optionality," he added. "Not even an actual gain—just the theoretical possibility of one day pulling Ukraine into NATO. The banality of evil."
"All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history."
Sloat's comments, noted Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen, come "after our political-media establishment has for four years smeared, censored, and cancelled anyone who claimed that NATO expansion triggered the war."
Referring to Sloat's acknowledgment that Russia's invasion of Ukraine could have been averted with a guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality, Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic wrote for Responsible Statecraft Tuesday that she "is not the first to have made this admission."
"As I documented two years ago, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and former Biden Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both likewise explicitly said that NATO’s potential expansion into Ukraine was the core grievance that motivated Putin’s decision to invade, and that, at least according to Stoltenberg, NATO rejected compromising on it."
"Zelensky has now publicly agreed to this concession to advance peace talks—only three years later, with Ukraine now in physical ruins, its economy destroyed, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and survivors traumatized and disabled on a mass scale," he lamented.
"All of this will surely go down as one of the great missed opportunities of history," Marcetic added. "Critics of the war and NATO policy have long said the war and its devastating impact could have been avoided by explicitly ruling out Ukrainian entry into NATO, only to be told they were spreading Kremlin propaganda. It turns out they were simply spreading Biden officials' own private thoughts."
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Trump's Surging LNG Exports Cost US Consumers $12 Billion in Just 9 Months
"Trump explicitly promised voters he would slash utility bills by half within the first year, yet in the first nine months of his term, they surged," said the author of Public Citizen's new report.
Dec 17, 2025
Underscoring expert warnings that exporting liquefied natural gas not only worsens the climate emergency but also drives up energy prices for Americans, Public Citizen revealed Tuesday that as LNG exports surged under the Trump administration, US households paid $12 billion more in utility bills from January through September than they did last year.
In other words, "the costs borne by residential consumers in the first nine months of 2025 are up 22%," or an average of $124 per family, according to an analysis of federal data by Tyson Slocum, director of the consumer advocacy group's Energy Program and author of the new report. "LNG exports are also up 22% over that same time."
His report highlights President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign pledges, pointing to a Newsweek op-ed and various speeches across the country. Slocum said in a statement that "Trump explicitly promised voters he would slash utility bills by half within the first year, yet in the first nine months of his term, they surged, squeezing some of the country's most vulnerable households."
Now, "1 in 6 Americans—21 million households—are behind on their energy bills," which "are rising at twice the rate of inflation," the report states. "Even registered Republican voters are increasingly blaming President Trump for the affordability crisis."
"Limiting or prohibiting LNG exports would provide immediate relief for households across the country, but it would require action from the White House."
It's not just "higher domestic natural gas prices, driven primarily by record LNG exports," affecting US utility prices, the report acknowledges. Other factors include "electric transmission and distribution costs, which include extreme weather and wildfire liabilities. These costs are administered by state or federal regulators and have been exacerbated by climate change."
"Electricity demand load growth, driven by the rise of artificial intelligence data centers, along with transportation electrification," is also having an impact, the document details. Additionally, "Trump's unprecedented cancellation and revocation of billions of dollars of permitted renewable energy projects, combined with his unlawful abuse of emergency authorities to impose punitive tariffs, have injected chaos into domestic supply chains, stifling domestic investment in energy infrastructure."
As the report explains:
Of these four factors, record natural gas exports not only represent the largest impact on natural gas prices, but feature clear statutory solutions to help protect consumers. The Natural Gas Act—passed by Congress during the Great Depression—asserts in Section 1 that "the business of transporting and selling natural gas for ultimate distribution to the public is affected with a public interest," with the US Supreme Court affirming that the "primary aim" of this 87-year-old law is "to protect consumers against exploitation at the hands of natural gas companies." Section 3 of the law forbids exports of natural gas unless the Department of Energy determines the exports to non-Free Trade Agreement countries are "consistent with the public interest."
Rather than living up to those obligations, Slocum said, "Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have acted as global gas salesmen, traveling to Europe to push exports and gut European methane regulations while attacking mainstream climate science. Meanwhile, Trump has done nothing to keep prices down at home."
"Limiting or prohibiting LNG exports would provide immediate relief for households across the country, but it would require action from the White House," he added. "Trump would need to stand up to some of his fossil fuel donors to make our energy more affordable."
It's not just Public Citizen pushing for action by the president. US Sen. Edward Markey (D–Mass.)—the upper chamber's leading champion of the Green New Deal—joined a press event for the group's new report. He stressed that "record-breaking levels of natural gas exports are breaking the bank on your monthly energy bill."
Public Citizen released the report just a day after Bloomberg also noted what the export boom means for US energy prices.
"We have been talking about, in apocalyptic terms, for a decade now when the world would start taking away America's cheap gas," Peter Gardett, CEO of Noreva, an energy trading platform specializing in power, told Bloomberg. "Well, we're here."
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Sanders Pushes for Moratorium on New AI Data Center Construction Amid Growing Backlash
"Do you believe that these guys, these multibillionaires, are staying up at night, worrying about what AI and robotics will do to working families?"
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Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called for a moratorium on the construction of new artificial intelligence data centers in the US amid growing nationwide backlash.
In a video posted on social media, Sanders (I-Vt.) explained why it's time for the government to hit the brakes AI data center projects, which have drawn protests all over the country for driving up electric bills and draining communities' water supplies.
Sanders began the video by acknowledging that AI has the potential to be a truly transformative technology, before noting that those who are pushing for its rapid development the most were the wealthiest people on the planet, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.
"So here is a very simple question I'd like you to think about," Sanders continued. "Do you believe that these guys, these multibillionaires, are staying up at night, worrying about what AI and robotics will do to working families of our country and the world? Well, I don't think so."
Sanders then argued that AI's biggest backers are pushing the technology to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else by replacing human laborers entirely with computers.
Sanders then quoted Musk, who predicted that AI and robots would "replace all jobs" in the future, and then cited a quote from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who said that "humans won't be needed for most things."
Sanders then questioned how people will survive if AI meets its backers' goals and deprives people of jobs on a mass scale. This problem is being compounded, Sanders continued, because "very few members of Congress are seriously thinking about this."
In addition to discussing AI's potential to vastly undermine working people's economic power, he also touched on its social implications, and said he was concerned that "millions of kids in this country are becoming more and more isolated from real human relationships, and are getting their emotional support from AI."
"Think for a moment about a future where human beings are not interacting with each other," he said. "Is that the kind of future you want? Well, not me."
Sanders concluded by arguing that the push to advance and integrate AI is "moving very, very quickly," and without proper considerations for the economic and social impacts it will have.
The Vermont senator argued for his proposed moratorium on data center construction to give "democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes we are witnessing."
Sanders' message on data centers came on the same day that MLive reported that both Republican and Democratic politicians in Michigan have been rallying against the construction of more data centers, which have been championed by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
During a Tuesday anti-data center rally, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel slammed plans to build a 2.2-million-square-foot data center in Saline Township, and pointed to electric service company DTE's efforts to rush through the construction approval process as reason enough to oppose it.
“Do you guys trust DTE?" she asked. "Do you trust OpenAI? Do you trust Oracle to look out for our best interests here in Michigan?"
Republican gubernatorial candidate Anthony Hudson told MLive that he shared Nessel's criticism of the data center plan, and he questioned whether Michigan residents would see any economic benefit from it.
"They don’t support local job growth," he said of the data centers. "They pull millions of gallons of water a day, and they’re going to strain the power grid that’s already crippled. And once they’ve made their money, like Dana Nessel said, they’re going to leave."
Earlier this month, more than 230 environmental advocacy groups, led by Food and Water Watch, demanded a moratorium on building new data centers, which they said consumed unsustainable amounts of water and electricity, while also worsening the global climate emergency.
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