> Canada, Khazakhstan, Namibi, and so on. Russia is pretty far down the list.

Not wrong, but Russia controls about half of the world's enrichment capacity.

If you want to avoid possible lock-in, then you may want to look at reactors that do not need enriched uranium (like CANDU: it does have an extra up-front cost for 'heavy water' though).

There's no need for Russia to get involved. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium

> The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Great: but how much spare capacity do they have? A lot of these are primarily serving domestic needs.

Heck, >25% of the US's uranium comes from Russia:

* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/where-the-u-s-gets-its-enri...

Being able to use "plain" uranium greatly expands your supplier options.

Because it's cheap. Russia needs money to wage war so it sells stuff. Again, nobody is wholly dependent on Russia.

> Because it's cheap.

I doubt that the US is buying from Russia—you know, the country/government which it threw sanctions on in all sorts of ways—because "it's cheap".

Recently a ban on importation was started, and it included a couple of billion for more processing facilities in the US:

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/climat...

It's a supply chain issue that took some time to sort out:

* https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-nuclear-fuel-agreemen...

Also, that uranium could have come from pre-war contracts. Anyway, I think we're in agreement:

* There are uranium enrichment facilities outside Russia, even in Europe

* There's uranium outside Russia, even in Europe (look at Czechia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...)

So, let's build a plant.