I really hope Joe Biden has been informed of this.

There has been a lot of talk about sanctions against Russia for a Ukrainian invasion, and what Russia may do in rebuttal. I have read a lot about how the Russians may engage in monumental hacking attacks, or how they may cut off Europe’s critical fuel supplies.

What I have not read is this: Russia and its evil half-brother Kazakhstan supply 38% of America’s uranium. Uzbekistan, where my family comes from, is not as subservient to Russia, but they would have to comply if Russia made them an offer they can’t refuse, and they supply another 8% of America’s needs. All told, that’s nearly half of our uranium that Russia can control if it chooses to.

The United States has 56 nuclear power plants supplying power to 28 different states. Together those plants supply about a fifth of all power in the United States. If Russia and Kazakhstan were to impose an embargo on the sale of Uranium to the USA, it would have a massive impact on energy production. America’s allies, notably Australia and Canada, have substantial uranium resources, but can’t immediately supplant the supply from Russia and its allies. Similarly, nuclear power can eventually be replaced by other forms of energy, but not overnight. If Russia decided to take the most dramatic action and cut America off, a disruption like this could create chaos in the stock market, and could wreak havoc on everyday life in certain parts of the country.

Russia and the Kazakhs may not want to do this because they make a profit selling that uranium to the USA, so an embargo is a lose-lose, but they can do it if they feel it is necessary.

And you may have read this somewhere – Mr. Putin is not an especially nice person.

16 thoughts on “I really hope Joe Biden has been informed of this.

    1. That’s kinda-sorta true, but the way you have summarized it is misleading. It is like saying that the USA can be self-sufficient on oil if cost is no object – true, but cost IS an object. There is uranium in the Western USA, but only a small portion of it can be mined at a cost that is economically sensible, just as only a small portion of America’s potential oil can be drilled at a reasonable cost, which is why we choose to make the Saudis rich.

      So, yes, ultimately the USA could replace anything lost in a trade war, but at a cost that would probably mean that nuclear power is no longer a reasonable alternative to other forms of energy.

  1. You’re talking like our power plants burn through uranium like cars burn through gas.

    I don’t think they work quite that way, so any such moves wouldn’t have that immediate of an effect.

    (Also, to do do would be like declaring war with us, which would be a very bad idea for the economically depressed and low on buddies Russia compared to the flush and backed by NATO USA. Which is why Putin is such a paranoid insecure asshole to begin with.)

    1. You are correct in that the impact would be gradual. Also, I have no idea how long we can keep everything fueled on what we have right now. Months? Years?.

  2. Not to worry America will soon be switching from nuclear to dilithium crystals. šŸ˜› ~ Spock: “If memory serves, there was a dubious flirtation with nuclear fission reactors resulting in toxic side effects.” ~ McCoy: “It’s a miracle these people ever got out of the 20th century.

    Beam me up Scotty no trace of intelligent life on this planet …

  3. You could always ask Australia for some…

    World’s largest deposits of Uranium and all we dig up is exported.

    Cheers

    1. Yup. We already call on you for a shitload (11% of our needs), and we will probably require much more.

      1. Read that as well.

        Another 3 to 4 mines that can be opened.

        The only problem is that China has a 99 year lease on the Darwin port and can block access to whomever they please.

        Great move Australia!

        1. So Darwin is China’s Hong Kong in Australia? What, did Australia lose an opium war or something?

        2. I can’t see as how the lease would be an issue. As I understand it, the major reason the lease was controversial was because it was argued the Chinese company with the lease could be forced to engage in espionage by the Chinese government. If the company refused to allow uranium exports to the U.S. the Australian government could terminate the lease.

          The thing about boycotts of internationally traded commodities is that to be truly effective you can’t sell your commodity to anyone. For instance, if countries A, B, & C sell to countries X, Y, & Z, if A decides to boycott country X but still sells to Y & Z, countries B & C will sell to Country X. I understand that the uranium market doesn’t function that efficiently. But I am sure that U.S. has strategic reserves of uranium that would get us through any boycott since it has strategic reserves of everything else.

          As for nuclear power plants in the United States I think the last thing we should do is transition to other forms of electricity production because such a change over would increase CO2 emissions. Nuclear power generation releases no greenhouse gasses and can operate at night and when there is no wind. Personally, I think the long term answer to being dependent on Russian uranium might be to create thorium molten salt power plants. My understanding (to be clear I am a lawyer not a nuclear engineer) is that thorium reactors operate at lower pressures and literally cannot have a meltdown. That’s because the fission occurs in a reaction chamber with a frozen plug at its bottom. If power was lost, the plug would melt and the fissionable material would drain into a water filled compartment that would end the chain reactions.

  4. And people need to read up on the Uranium One deal which helped put the US in that position.

    1. No. Not at all. All of that existed long before Uranium One, and Uranium One had no impact on it. Russia did not gain any control of any uranium from that, but even if it had, it would only have raised their control from 46% to 47%. In fact, the whole Uranium One arrangement is a sweetheart deal for the USA, although it is so insignificant that the benefit was minimal. The entire scare was concocted by the right-wing disinformation media, particularly Sean Hannity.

      Itā€™s hard to believe anybody believed it in the first place, but research is difficult and requires sober, rational thinking. As Mencken noted, one thing is always lucrative, and that is ā€œunderestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.ā€ If you throw something out and defend it with a straight face, no matter how silly it is, there will always be people who believe it. The Pyramids were built for grain storage? The world is flat? The universe is 6000 years old? Sure, tell me more.

      Letā€™s review the case again, shall we?

      First Iā€™m going to give you a very quick summary of the uranium market, because it is important to understand it, and very few reporters enjoy mathematical analysis, so they have generally concentrated on Clintonā€™s involvement in the deal:

      1. How big is the deal itself?

      It is so small as to be virtually non-existent. The entire commercial uranium market in the USA is 25,300 tons per year. Of that, only 2,800 tons are mined in the United States. Of that, Uranium One, the controversial Canadian company owned by Russian state mining interests, only constitutes 300 tons of that market. Thatā€™s it. A whopping 1% of the total market.

      Uranium One does have 20% of the commercial, domestic uranium mining capacity, but the actual production of the company is less, only 11% of the uranium mined in the USA. But even if they produced ALL of America’s mining capacity, the deal would STILL be almost insignificant, because 89% of Americaā€™s commercial uranium is mined overseas, and the little uranium produced by Uranium One can only be purchased by Americans. (This was true both before and after the deal)!

      2. But canā€™t they just give all of our uranium to Russia?

      First of all, they canā€™t even sell that uranium to Canada, even though they are theoretically a Canadian company! The company’s charter forbids them to export uranium mined in the USA.

      Second and perhaps more important, what the hell would Russia do with it? They donā€™t know what to do with all the uranium they have now, except sell it to us. Russia, along with its buddies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, currently accounts for 46% of the uranium purchased in the United States. If they wanted to tighten the screws on us, they would do it with that 46% from their mines, not the other 1% from ours.

      3. Does Uranium One have any power at all?

      Not a lick. In fact the opposite is true. The charter of that company was always a sweetheart deal for the USA because the USA holds all the cards. Since that company is such a tiny portion of the market, our commercial users of uranium do not need to buy from them, but they do need to sell to us. (Since Uranium One canā€™t export the uranium, if we stopped buying from them, they would essentially have no business at all. They have to sell to us or close the mines. Why do you think those mining assets were for sale in the first place?) They are in a very vulnerable position, completely at the mercy of our plants to name whatever price they would like to pay.

      Most mainstream sources have covered the political side of the deal, and Iā€™ve already noted that the deal is insignificant to begin with, so Iā€™ll just give a top-line summary.

      A Russian company paid money to purchase controlling interest in a Canadian company which owned mining assets in the USA. Because of US laws involving strategic assets, a nine-person panel, consisting of representatives from nine different US agencies, had to approve the sale. None of them objected. One of the agencies is the Department of State.

      The State Department was represented on the matter by the Assistant Secretary assigned to the Foreign Investment Committee, Jose Fernandez. He made the decision not to object to the sale. Hillary Clinton never got involved in any way. (Itā€™s not clear whether she even knew about it, except as another matter in a very large in-box. We presume that Fernandez filed a written report to Clinton, and that she chose not to override him, but he pointed out that she never weighed in with him at all, so his decision stood.)

      In other words:

      1. The whole matter is insignificant because the uranium must be sold in the USA and the quantities involved are tiny relative to the size of the market.

      2. Hillary had only 1/9 of the power to approve. It was approved unanimously.

      3. Hillary did not even exercise her 1/9 to influence the decision. One of her subordinates, the one with specific expertise in that field, made the decision. Mrs. Clinton had no specific knowledge in this area, and presumably had actual significant matters to occupy her time.

      4. And even if it had been significant, and even if Hilary had been 100% responsible – it was a perfectly good deal!

    2. By “read up on”, do you mean go to some conservative conspiracy site? Because the uranium extracted by Uranium One has never been approved for export, so all of it has been used by US reactors.

    3. My name is MyKey & I approved this message. That is, these replies are excellent examples of Uncle Scoopy’s Other Crap’s positive contribution to our world. Helping to disseminate those timeless images of a fine young JLH on a tennis court in a bikini is another, maybe even more excellent, such example.

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