Friends,

In this week’s edition of The Charge, we look at Volkswagen unionization and plastic-bag bans. Amir Vexler, president and CEO of America’s only domestically owned uranium enrichment company, appears on “The Power Hour” podcast as well as in our “Ask the Experts” series. “The Regulatory Crusade” features senior research fellow Mario Loyola who discusses the need for regulatory reform to bring back domestic microchip manufacturing.

The CECE Team

(Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment)

The Charge is edited by Andrew Weiss

For more information, please contact us at CECE.info@heritage.org.

For media inquiries, please contact heritagepress@heritage.org. 

Q: The United States gets about a quarter of its nuclear fuel from Russia, which has 44 percent of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity and dominates the market. What does this mean for U.S. energy security?

A: The United States invented uranium enrichment. And for decades, countries around the world depended on the U.S. to supply their nuclear fuel. But the last of the government’s Cold War–era enrichment plants shut down permanently in 2013, and 100 percent of the world’s enrichment capacity now belongs to foreign, state-owned corporations. The United States has gone from the world’s largest exporter to the world’s largest importer of enriched uranium. In addition, America lacks the ability to enrich uranium for critical national security missions for the first time since 1945. Nonproliferation agreements prohibit the use of any foreign-origin enrichment technologies for defense purposes, which means that restoring a U.S. technology enrichment capacity is crucial to national security as well as energy security. Congress and the President recently approved—with overwhelming bipartisan support—a $2.7 billion investment in this critical supply chain. My company, Centrus Energy, is proud to be leading the effort to restore a domestic uranium enrichment capacity that can meet the full range of commercial and national security requirements for enriched uranium, and we look forward to competing for this new funding as soon as it becomes available.

—Amir Vexler, CEO of Centrus Energy Corp.

Reviving America’s Commercial Uranium-Fuel Enrichment Industry

Join Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Jack Spencer this week for a must-listen conversation with Amir Vexler, president and CEO of America’s only domestically owned uranium enrichment company. Jack and Amir discuss everything from the technical details of enrichment to the history of uranium enrichment in the United States to how uranium fuel markets work. Of particular interest is their discussion of how the United States became dependent on Russian uranium to fuel its reactors and what can be done about it.

Why Joining UAW Would Hurt Volkswagen Employees

In her latest article, CECE director Diana Furchtgott-Roth explains why a unionized Volkswagen (VW) would raise the cost of vehicles and cause layoffs among VW workers:

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will vote this week on whether to join the United Auto Workers [UAW]….

Dues for UAW hourly workers are 2.5 hours of pay per month. With average wages of $40 an hour, that’s $100 a month in dues, or $1,200 a year. This would help shore up the pensions of the UAW’s 580,000 retirees and pay the salaries of union officials….

Unionization would raise vehicle costs, undercutting VW’s competitiveness relative to the auto companies that were not represented by unions. For instance, Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive officer, said earlier this year that Ford had a $7 billion to $8 billion cost disadvantage over other firms due to higher costs.

Higher costs from unionization are one reason the Big Three are announcing layoffs….

[United Auto Workers president Shawn] Fain knows that electrification of the automobile will mean fewer auto workers. He said, “Stellantis’ push to cut thousands of jobs while raking in billions in profits is disgusting. … Even now, politicians and taxpayers are bankrolling the electric vehicle transition, and this is the thanks the working class gets.”

Read the full article here.

The High Costs and Questionable Gains of Extended Producer Responsibility 

In a recent article for The Daily Signal, Miles Pollard, a policy analyst, and Hope Canlas, a member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program, examine New Jersey’s plastic-bag ban;

As we approach Earth Day, it is time to evaluate how green policies have performed. Once such policy is the New Jersey Bag Ban which was ostensibly designed to tackle plastic pollution, requiring stores over 2,500 square feet to replace disposable plastic bags with reusable ones.

The ban bag is an example of “extended producer responsibility,” which is a waste policy that forces companies to use only reusable or recyclable products. Advocates of extended producer responsibility champion measures such as plastic bag bans, but the real-world implementation has only fueled inflation with minimal environmental benefits.

Researchers concluded that 90% of these reusable non-woven polypropylene plastic bags are used only 2 to 3 times before being thrown away or lost. To add insult to injury, reusable bags use 15 times more plastic and emit 5 times the greenhouse gases during production compared to regular plastic bags.

Instead of forcing everyone to use reusable bags that are emitting more greenhouse gases, the Alliance argues that disposable bags should be properly recycled. These disposable plastic bags are then more easily used to create new bags, with the alliance having a goal of 20% being made of recyclable material by 2025.

Read the full article here.

As Mario Loyola, CECE senior research fellow, writes:

Much will depend on whether we can become, once again, a world leader in manufacturing the microchips used in everything from cellphones to cars. Advanced microchips are still designed in the U.S., but most are made in Taiwan, which China has promised to annex by force. A war over Taiwan would disrupt vital supply chains for all sorts of electronics.

What chases high-tech manufacturing abroad is not the lack of government subsidies, but excessive regulation and taxation. The CHIPS Act of 2022, in which Congress appropriated $52 billion to bring microchip factories (aka “fabs”) back to America, is a case in point. The subsidies are meant to accelerate construction of fabs, but they trigger environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which turns the process into a years-long odyssey through the federal bureaucracy.

The Senate has passed a bill that would fast-track CHIPS Act projects by providing that federal funding does not by itself trigger NEPA where it is less than 10 percent of the project cost or is provided in the form of loans. Projects that merely expand existing fabs or are critical to national security would also be exempted.

Despite these narrow carveouts, the bill has stalled in the House of Representatives, largely because a few dozen congressmen who, while supportive of NEPA reform, oppose reforms that benefit only one sector. This concern is understandable but misplaced. Some of the most important NEPA reforms of recent decades started in just one sector and were expanded after proving their effectiveness. The expedited process for major infrastructure projects under FAST-41, for example, was born in the transportation sector.