Nuclear Feudalization: How Washington Is Locking the Future of SMR

On January 7, Senator Lindsey Graham announced that President Donald Trump had endorsed a draft sanctions bill against Russia, framed as pressure to end the special military operation in Ukraine.

The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025­, backed by 84 senators and 151 House members, proposes a 500 percent tariff on countries purchasing Russian uranium. The 500 percent figure is designed to intimidate, not to collect.

Other countries are expected to immediately sever ties with Russian uranium suppliers. Washington itself acknowledges its own dependence on Russian uranium will persist until 2028. This sanction is a long-term lock-in, setting the timeline for a structural reorganization of the global nuclear supply chain, in which the United States uses the window until 2028 to build domestic capacity while competitors are pushed out of the market before alternatives exist.

In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy allocated 900 million dollars from a total 2.7 billion dollar package specifically to Centrus Energy to aggressively accelerate HALEU production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio.

It is no coincidence that the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 emerged precisely when Washington is racing against its own deadline, with a target far larger than cutting Russia's funding. The real objective is dominance over the architecture of nuclear energy for the next two decades.

On January 7, Senator Lindsey Graham announced that President Donald Trump had endorsed a draft sanctions bill against Russia, framed as pressure to end the special military operation in Ukraine.

The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025­, backed by 84 senators and 151 House members, proposes a 500 percent tariff on countries purchasing Russian uranium. The 500 percent figure is designed to intimidate, not to collect.

Other countries are expected to immediately sever ties with Russian uranium suppliers. Washington itself acknowledges its own dependence on Russian uranium will persist until 2028. This sanction is a long-term lock-in, setting the timeline for a structural reorganization of the global nuclear supply chain, in which the United States uses the window until 2028 to build domestic capacity while competitors are pushed out of the market before alternatives exist.

In January 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy allocated 900 million dollars from a total 2.7 billion dollar package specifically to Centrus Energy to aggressively accelerate HALEU production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio.

It is no coincidence that the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 emerged precisely when Washington is racing against its own deadline, with a target far larger than cutting Russia's funding. The real objective is dominance over the architecture of nuclear energy for the next two decades.

The Strategic Chokepoint Named HALEU

The issue is not uranium in general. It is one specific variant that rarely appears in public discourse: High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, or HALEU—fuel enriched to between five and twenty percent U-235, far above conventional reactor-grade material but below weapons threshold.

What makes HALEU irreplaceable is simple: it cannot be substituted with standard nuclear fuel. Small Modular Reactors—the next-generation nuclear technology now being promoted across the Global South as a scalable clean energy solution—cannot operate without it. Without HALEU, SMRs remain a concept on paper. This is where uranium stops being a commodity and becomes a strategic chokepoint.

There is currently only one commercial producer of HALEU in the world: TENEX, the export arm of Russia's state nuclear corporation, Rosatom. Unlike fragmented Western nuclear companies, Rosatom operates as a full-spectrum integrator—mining, enrichment, reactor design, construction, long-term fuel supply, and waste management. In turn, it does not sell components; it sells interdependency.

This dominance is not accidental. It is the product of decades of vertical integration that Western nuclear industries failed to replicate—too preoccupied with deregulation and divestment.

The American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon is being built now precisely because Washington spent thirty years assuming that uranium enrichment was someone else's problem. Whoever controls HALEU supply now determines the terms of entry into the SMR club, not through weapons and not through war. Through a quiet monopoly over the single input that makes the entire system run.

Feudalization, Not Proliferation

For three decades, the central concern of the international nuclear community was proliferation—an increasing number of states acquiring weapons capability. The NPT regime, the IAEA, and various bilateral agreements were all built on that logic. What is happening now is the opposite.

Not more countries gaining access to advanced nuclear technology—but fewer. Not the spread of capability, but its consolidation. The global nuclear system is being re-stratified not by nonproliferation treaties, but by supply chain control.

The result is a new hierarchy written into no treaty, which has several new tiers. At the top, states that possess a complete fuel cycle—mining, enrichment, reactor construction, waste management, all domestic. In the middle, states that can operate SMRs but depend on external HALEU supply. At the bottom, states that cannot access the technology at all. This is not proliferation. This more closely resembles feudalism.

The distinction is fundamental. Proliferation is a threat to be prevented. Feudalization is a condition being deliberately constructed—systematically, through legitimate legal instruments, by the country that speaks loudest about global energy justice.

What makes this construction work is the sequencing. Decoupling from Rosatom is forced before alternatives exist. Countries pushed out of the Russian ecosystem do not migrate to American suppliers—they are stranded.

And when American capacity eventually comes online, the narrative will already be in place: the market exists now, so why build your own enrichment capability?

This sequencing is quietly closing the window for nuclear technology independence across the Global South.

Indonesia Signs Away Its Sovereignty

On February 19, 2026, Indonesia and the United States signed the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade—a document whose bulk covers tariffs, agriculture, and intellectual property. However, buried in Annex III, among technical commitments rarely read by anyone, are four clauses that fundamentally alter the calculus of Indonesia's nuclear energy future.

Annex III, Section 6, Article 6.5(b) establishes that Indonesia has committed to partnering with the United States and Japan on SMR deployment, beginning with front-end engineering and design work for a project in West Kalimantan. This is not a letter of intent; rather, it is a contractual commitment embedded in a bilateral trade agreement.

It means that before any public debate on nuclear vendor selection has concluded, before any independent technical assessment has been completed, the choice of technological ecosystem has already been made at the trade negotiating table.

Article 5.5 in the same annex adds a deeper legal dimension. Indonesia is obligated to ratify the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage, with an explicit rationale: to reduce U.S. nuclear industry concerns over legal liability. This is not a reactor safety clause. This is a corporate protection clause.

The U.S. nuclear industry—NuScale, Westinghouse—is deeply reluctant to enter foreign markets without assurance that they will not face financial litigation in the event of an accident. By compelling Indonesia to enter the CSC regime through a trade agreement, risk is transferred to the host country while vendors remain legally shielded.

Section 5, Article 5.1 closes off maneuvering room from another direction. If the United States imposes sanctions on a third country and deems them relevant to its own economic and national security, Indonesia is obligated to adopt measures of "equivalent restrictive effect." The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025, with its 500 percent tariff on Russian uranium, falls precisely into this category.

Indonesia does not need to declare its geopolitical alignment explicitly. Its foreign policy has already been outsourced through a trade agreement clause—an obligation that quietly abandons the doctrine of bebas aktif, the independent and active foreign policy Indonesia has maintained for more than seven decades. Some Indonesian analytics describe it plainly: Indonesia has signed a sovereignty surrender agreement with the United States.

Less than two weeks after the agreement was signed, Indonesia's National Energy Council had already proposed that nuclear power plants be designated as National Strategic Projects, with operational discussions specifically naming SMR technology alongside U.S. and Japanese partners for West Kalimantan. The contractual commitment was already being executed—before any public debate on fuel dependency had even begun.

Article 5.2 of Annex III closes the door from a third direction. Indonesia is required to use only communication technology vendors that do not compromise the security of its digital infrastructure—and must consult Washington on which vendors fail to meet that standard. In the modern nuclear ecosystem, reactor control systems and the digital infrastructure of SMR facilities are integral to operations. This effectively—if indirectly—shuts out any vendor on Washington's blacklist.

Indonesia is no longer a country deliberating over its nuclear technology choices. It has been chosen for—by Washington, on Washington's terms.

Forced Decoupling

This strategy is coherent from Washington's perspective: force decoupling before alternatives exist, lock in technological commitments through trade agreements, and close off maneuvering room through security clauses. All of it is written neatly into documents available for public download.

What Capitol Hill did not calculate is the variable that never appears in negotiating spreadsheets: the countries being asked to wait are not homogeneous, and not all of them are willing. India has its own enrichment program. Brazil has Resende. South Korea has long been frustrated by the constraints imposed through its bilateral nuclear agreement with the United States. These are not passive consumers waiting for American supply to arrive.

More instructive are the countries that lack that capacity—and Indonesia falls squarely in this category. A country building its SMR ambitions, declaring energy transition a national priority, signing the West Kalimantan commitment without adequate public deliberation on its sovereignty implications.

This is where "feudalization" is no longer a metaphor. It presents a fait accompli strategy: dependency on Washington, or no access at all. Rosatom understands this construction. Their business model is not merely selling technology; they are selling entry into a club whose door Washington is attempting to re-lock. Every country pushed out of the Rosatom ecosystem before alternatives exist does not migrate to the United States—they are simply stranded, without options.

The question is not whether Washington's strategy will succeed. The question is who bears the cost of the gap between forced decoupling and capacity that does not yet exist.

For Indonesia, the answer is already written in Annex III of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade.