Speaker 1: Stomic test. The Russians have a bomb, were supposed to
Speaker 1: be years ahead of them, but thumps, What were you
Speaker 1: guys doing in Los Almus.
Speaker 2: Uranium, of all things, has become a hot topic this summer,
Speaker 2: in part, of course, because of the hit movie Oppenheimer
Speaker 2: about the Manhattan Project and the man often called the
Speaker 2: father of the atomic bomb.
Speaker 3: A shark. Time ago, an American aeroplane dropped one bomb
Speaker 3: on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That
Speaker 3: bomb has more power than twenty thousand tons of T
Speaker 3: and T.
Speaker 2: The bomb President Truman was talking about that devastated Hiroshima
Speaker 2: on August sixth, nineteen forty five, contained about one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty one pounds of enriched uranium. Uranium is still
Speaker 2: used in nuclear weapons, but it's the non military uses
Speaker 2: that we're talking about today and the reason it's in
Speaker 2: the news now.
Speaker 4: Uranium is the basic fuel that's used in nuclear power plants.
Speaker 4: It's not particularly rare, but the whole process of getting
Speaker 4: the U two thirty five isotopes concentrated high enough to
Speaker 4: run in a nuclear power plant very complicated.
Speaker 2: That's Bloomberg's Will Wade he and Jonathan Tyrone report that
Speaker 2: for decades, the US has depended on Russia for much
Speaker 2: of this hard to enrich uranium needed to fuel nuclear
Speaker 2: power plants, and that picture has become much more complicated
Speaker 2: since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 5: It's not just the enrichment that Russia is supplying, it's
Speaker 5: also conversion, it's also raw uranium, and so you see
Speaker 5: weak links along the nuclear fuel supply chain at every stage.
Speaker 2: Will and Jonathan are here to talk about a new
Speaker 2: push to rebuild the West's uranium capabilities. Some are likening
Speaker 2: it to a Manhattan Project two point zero, but this
Speaker 2: time for peaceful purposes. I'm Weskosova today on the big take.
Speaker 2: Can the US wean itself from Russian uranium? Jonathan? Why
Speaker 2: is the US dependent on Russia of all places for uranium.
Speaker 5: Well, it goes back to the end of the Cold War,
Speaker 5: and what happened was the US began a commercial relationship
Speaker 5: with Russia's national energy company Rosa Tolment. It was called
Speaker 5: Mega tons to megawatts, and basically we began importing Russian
Speaker 5: weapons grade uranium down blended into a mixture that could
Speaker 5: be made into fuel assemblies for American nuclear power plants.
Speaker 5: And that commercial relationship, you know, has extended for the
Speaker 5: last thirty year years. In that period of time, there
Speaker 5: are also serious stresses to the nuclear industry, first and
Speaker 5: foremost being the Fukushima Daishi nuclear power plants following the
Speaker 5: earthquake in twenty eleven. Then also we had the fracking
Speaker 5: boom in the United States with massive supply of natural
Speaker 5: gas to American electricity generators, which also served to displace
Speaker 5: participants in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Speaker 2: Will As Jonathan says, after the Cold War was over
Speaker 2: in the US and the Soviet Union were no longer
Speaker 2: competing in an arms race, it set up a whole
Speaker 2: different dynamic when it came to what uranium was actually worth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the whole US uranium industry is kind of almost gone.
Speaker 4: There's very little mining. The closest big mining is in Canada.
Speaker 4: There's almost no enrichment except for the plant in New Mexico,
Speaker 4: which is actually a European company. There's not a whole
Speaker 4: lot of conversion. There's one facility, but it was shut down.
Speaker 4: They're about to reopen it. In just the past several years,
Speaker 4: there have been about a dozen nuclear reactors have closed
Speaker 4: down for economic reasons because they just couldn't compete with
Speaker 4: the cheap natural gas electricity.
Speaker 5: So the last US owned commercial enrichment plant was in Paducah,
Speaker 5: Kentucky that used a radically different technology to enrich uranium
Speaker 5: called gaseous diffusion. The gaseous diffusion is a way of
Speaker 5: enriching uranium that uses uranium hexafluorid gas pressed through different
Speaker 5: membranes transferred through different chambers to enrich the uranium two
Speaker 5: thirty five isotope into a concentration necessary to sustain a
Speaker 5: fission chain reaction. The US is basically the last country
Speaker 5: to use gaseous diffusion for enriching uranium, the reason being
Speaker 5: it takes a lot more energy to enrich uranium through
Speaker 5: gaseous diffusion, and why did the US do that Because
Speaker 5: they were drawing massive electricity reserves off of the Tennessee
Speaker 5: Valley Authority, and so this whole industry of the nuclear
Speaker 5: fuel cycle in the US was wrapped up with national
Speaker 5: defense policy is about stockpiling during the Cold War, and
Speaker 5: the commercial enrichment services for nuclear power plants came from
Speaker 5: the same plant, but there wasn't much of a cost
Speaker 5: benefit analysis when it came to looking for the most
Speaker 5: efficient way to make uranium for fuel for reactors until
Speaker 5: after the Cold War ended and the commercial imperatives of
Speaker 5: competing in the market were thrust upon the US, and
Speaker 5: that's when they had to start developing what everybody else
Speaker 5: in the world is using for enriching uranium, which is
Speaker 5: the centrifuge. Centrifuges, which are supersonic spinning cylinders, is similar
Speaker 5: to your washing machine. These actually use only about five
Speaker 5: percent of the energy requirements that gashous diffusion requires. Centrifuges
Speaker 5: became the technology of choice in the post Cold War era.
Speaker 2: So will how much uranium does the US get from Russia?
Speaker 4: Well, Russia is the world's biggest supplier of enriched uranium,
Speaker 4: about a quarter of the fuel and our nuclear power
Speaker 4: plants comes from Russia. The uranium supply chain is long
Speaker 4: and complicated. You start with raw uranium ore. It's milled
Speaker 4: down into a powder they call it yellow cake. The
Speaker 4: yellow cake is mixed with a fluorine gas and it's
Speaker 4: converted into uranium hexafluoride. That's the conversion step of the process.
Speaker 4: The UF six gets sent to the enrichment site and
Speaker 4: that's where they concentrate it into the five percent necessary
Speaker 4: for fuel. And once you have the enriched uranium, and
Speaker 4: remember that's what we get mostly from Russia, then enriched
Speaker 4: uranium gets sent to a fabricator where they create nuclear
Speaker 4: fuel rods out of it.
Speaker 2: And so this can pass through a lot of different
Speaker 2: countries and a lot of different companies on the way
Speaker 2: to being the final product.
Speaker 4: It can, but it doesn't have to. Russia has all
Speaker 4: of the steps, China has all of the steps. It's
Speaker 4: only the US in Europe that's really broken it down
Speaker 4: into so many different places and people, and that kind
Speaker 4: of makes the whole process a lot more complicated.
Speaker 2: Does any of the uranium that comes from Russia wind
Speaker 2: up in US and nuclear weapons?
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 5: The dirty secret is that there's not a lack of
Speaker 5: nuclear fuel. It just that it's in the wrong place.
Speaker 5: Like the US has a lot of nuclear fuel, it
Speaker 5: just all in bombs. We could really screw up the
Speaker 5: nuclear fuel market if we decide to disarm and start
Speaker 5: to downblend. You can downblend the highly enriched uranium found
Speaker 5: in nuclear weapons and reconvert that into a lower enriched
Speaker 5: blend necessary for power plants.
Speaker 4: It's like you're unenriching it.
Speaker 2: And will you visited the only enricher of uranium in
Speaker 2: the US. It's a company called Urinko. What was that like.
Speaker 4: Well, it's in a tiny town called Unice, New Mexico.
Speaker 4: It's right on the eastern border of New Mexico. It's
Speaker 4: a mile from Texas. It was this spotless, pristine industrial
Speaker 4: site in the middle of the desert. There's armed guards,
Speaker 4: a lot of security getting in. It's been open for
Speaker 4: a long time, but it was spotless, just spotless that
Speaker 4: all the machines were gleaming. I was really impressed by
Speaker 4: how clean it is. So they take us into the
Speaker 4: room with the centrifuges and there's just hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 4: of them, all in a row. It just stretches on
Speaker 4: to the end of this vast room. I couldn't even
Speaker 4: see the end of it. They're spinning so fast. There's
Speaker 4: this really high pitched wine. We had to wear ear
Speaker 4: protection and it didn't sound that loud, but they told
Speaker 4: us that the frequency is exactly the right frequency that'll
Speaker 4: really damage your ears if you're not careful. So all
Speaker 4: the centrifuges, they look like long, thin tubes about twenty
Speaker 4: something feet tall. I couldn't tell for sure. The tops
Speaker 4: of it were concealed by these curtains because that's where
Speaker 4: they have the piping that connects one to the next,
Speaker 4: to the next to the next. They call that a cascade,
Speaker 4: and that is apparently a really important trade secret on
Speaker 4: how they managed to get the gear to flow from
Speaker 4: one to the next. They wouldn't let anybody see what
Speaker 4: that looks like.
Speaker 2: And once the process there is done, what happens with
Speaker 2: that uranium? Where does it go?
Speaker 4: Then it gets sent to the fabricator where it is
Speaker 4: converted into fuel pellets. The pellets are inserted into fuel rods.
Speaker 4: Every reactor has its own specific design for what those
Speaker 4: fuel rods are supposed to look like, and those get
Speaker 4: sent to the power plants after the break.
Speaker 2: What is the US doing to limit its reliance on
Speaker 2: Russian uranium? So, Jonathan, we've been talking about how and
Speaker 2: why the US is so dependent on Russia for uranium,
Speaker 2: and now the US government seems to have woken up
Speaker 2: to the fact that they need to change this. What
Speaker 2: are they doing.
Speaker 5: They're working with their allies to address this as a
Speaker 5: common security problem and not just a national security problem.
Speaker 5: There's different levels of concern. It's not just the US,
Speaker 5: it's also Eastern European allies, which, as former Soviet satellites,
Speaker 5: are operating about two dozen so called Vveer reactors which
Speaker 5: are almost exclusively fueled by Rosatum, Russia's national nuclear giant.
Speaker 5: So I mean that's a very acute problem affecting European
Speaker 5: power supplies. Then you move over to the North American
Speaker 5: supply chains, the nuclear supply chains, and there we see
Speaker 5: it's not just the enrichment that Russia is supplying, it's
Speaker 5: also conversion, it's also raw uranium, and so you see
Speaker 5: weak links along the nuclear fuel supply chain at every stage.
Speaker 5: So when President Biden met his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau
Speaker 5: earlier this year, they agreed to reboot North American nuclear
Speaker 5: fuel cycle.
Speaker 1: Because of our shared prosperity is deeply connected to our
Speaker 1: shared security in the past. In the past years have
Speaker 1: proved the Canada the United Days are not insulated from
Speaker 1: the challenge to impact the rest of the world.
Speaker 5: They subsequently went to the G seven meeting in Sapporo, Japan.
Speaker 5: A couple weeks later in April, they convinced the UK
Speaker 5: and France to come on board and the joint statement
Speaker 5: from Sapporo, they said that they want to push Vladimir
Speaker 5: Putin and Russia out of the nuclear fuel cycle entirely. Now,
Speaker 5: that will be pretty hard, because you know, even during
Speaker 5: the darkest times in the Cold War, the US, for example,
Speaker 5: was buying titanium from the Soviets for their nuclear deterrence.
Speaker 5: I think the important point to recognize is that it
Speaker 5: won't be easy to knock Roseat to them out of
Speaker 5: the nuclear fuel business. They continue supplying Eastern European utilities
Speaker 5: with the fuel they need for their reactors, and that
Speaker 5: business has in fact grown in the twelve months after
Speaker 5: the war began and continues to this day.
Speaker 4: But you know what, we should point out that they
Speaker 4: are starting to lose some of that business. Westinghouse, the
Speaker 4: US nuclear company, just this year, has picked up a
Speaker 4: couple contracts to supply fuel rods to those Eastern European reactors.
Speaker 4: Then they're going to have to build a new design
Speaker 4: fuel rod to fit those reactors.
Speaker 2: And will you also write in the story that the
Speaker 2: Biden administration is pushing Congress to spend a lot of
Speaker 2: money to try to jumpstart the US uranium process. Again,
Speaker 2: there's a push in Congress right now. To create a
Speaker 2: domestic stockpile of nuclear fuel, it'd be kind of like
Speaker 2: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Speaker 2: It's a huge amount of oil that stored and they
Speaker 2: release that oil to adjust pricing when necessary. And so
Speaker 2: the US wants to have a stockpile of nuclear fuel
Speaker 2: just as a buffer against any kind of international tensions.
Speaker 2: You said earlier that Russia has their entire uranium fuel
Speaker 2: cycle in their own country. They do it from beginning
Speaker 2: to end, and the US doesn't. What will it actually
Speaker 2: take for the US to get that capability.
Speaker 4: It would take long term commitments from customers. Especially remember
Speaker 4: talking to the head of Converdine, that's the company that
Speaker 4: does conversion, the process of turning the yellow cake into
Speaker 4: UF six. He said that they'd be happy to do it.
Speaker 4: It's not that complicated, but it's not that cheap. He'd
Speaker 4: need long term commitments, like long term means about ten
Speaker 4: years from about ten customers to justify really going into
Speaker 4: the expansion in a way that would be big enough
Speaker 4: to displace the Russians.
Speaker 2: To have that many customers will would that mean that
Speaker 2: the US would have to really ramp up its nuclear energy.
Speaker 4: It would mean that the utilities that operate nuclear power
Speaker 4: plants now would need to start signing contracts to buy
Speaker 4: all of their fuel from US suppliers instead of international suppliers.
Speaker 4: And in fact, the people at Urenko in New Mexico
Speaker 4: told me that since Russia invaded Ukraine, their orders have
Speaker 4: gone up about twenty five percent because they're American utility.
Speaker 4: Customers have come to them and said, we'd like to
Speaker 4: start buying more from the United States than from Russia.
Speaker 5: And there's another dimension as well, which is more future oriented,
Speaker 5: and it involves the next generation of American reactors. Foreseeing,
Speaker 5: these are the so called small modular reactors, which require
Speaker 5: a different kind of nuclear fuel, a higher concentration. It's
Speaker 5: called high assay low enriched uranium. Rather than five percent
Speaker 5: uranium two thirty five bus topes, you're looking closer to
Speaker 5: nineteen nineteen point seventy five percent. And the reason is
Speaker 5: that if you're deploying more nuclear reactors that are smaller,
Speaker 5: you want to have to refuel them less often. And
Speaker 5: so the higher grade, the higher concentration nuclear fuel, allows
Speaker 5: them to burn longer without being refueled. And right now,
Speaker 5: the US is one hundred percent dependent on Russia for
Speaker 5: high assay low enriched uranium, and this is a key
Speaker 5: bottleneck that has to be solved right now, because if
Speaker 5: we want to be deploying SMR reactors at the end
Speaker 5: of this decade, then that part of the supply chain
Speaker 5: has to be solved now. Because these are all long
Speaker 5: engineering processes. Factories have to be built, lines have to
Speaker 5: be built, environmental regulations, safety regulations. It takes a long process.
Speaker 5: So if we want to get it done by twenty thirty,
Speaker 5: it has to start now.
Speaker 2: And you write that some plants that had closed down
Speaker 2: are now being reopened.
Speaker 4: Well, the converdyine conversion facility in Illinois that was shut
Speaker 4: down if several years ago for economic reasons because the
Speaker 4: market was so oversupplied. They basically said, we can't make
Speaker 4: money selling this stuff. We're just going to sell out
Speaker 4: of inventory until further notice. And now they're starting to
Speaker 4: reopen that because the price has gone up about tenfold.
Speaker 2: When we come back, what would it take for the
Speaker 2: West to cut Russia out of the international nuclear fuel cycle.
Speaker 4: Nazier's new military rulers are in a standoff with the West,
Speaker 4: and some of their neighbors, refusing to hand back power
Speaker 4: to the man they oustd it. Nizer's coup leaders have
Speaker 4: closed the country's airspace until further notice.
Speaker 5: The regional bloc ECOWAS has said it wants a diplomatic
Speaker 5: and peaceful resolution to the takeover, but that no options
Speaker 5: are off the table.
Speaker 2: Jonathan, you write that the recent coup in Niger, which
Speaker 2: is one of the top uranium producers in the world,
Speaker 2: shows the geopolitical stakes of this business. What should other
Speaker 2: countries take away from what's happening there.
Speaker 5: So, Nizier's the sixth biggest producer of uranium or in
Speaker 5: the world. It's a key supplier for France and other
Speaker 5: European utilities. The lesson of Niger is what the companies
Speaker 5: call depth and defense. They need to have a redundant
Speaker 5: supply chain and so you will see or no investing
Speaker 5: in Canadian minds. You see additional Canadian minds responding to
Speaker 5: tightness in the ore market by opening up mothballed minds.
Speaker 5: Just another example. Everybody is talking about Niger right now,
Speaker 5: but you see Rosatom displacing US and European fuel makers
Speaker 5: and entering into a new agreement with South Africa to
Speaker 5: reboot that country's nuclear fuel cycle. So the thing to
Speaker 5: pay attention to isn't just income statement the balance sheet,
Speaker 5: it's also the geopolitical states that are shifting as Western
Speaker 5: companies try to displace Russia and vice versa.
Speaker 4: I think the lesson from Niger is the same lesson
Speaker 4: from Russia, which is you don't want to be dependent
Speaker 4: on countries that may not be stable as your supplier.
Speaker 4: And also we saw in South Africa, uranium isn't just
Speaker 4: a product you buy and sell to make a profit.
Speaker 4: It's a key part of international diplomacy.
Speaker 2: That's really interesting point. Will and you write then that
Speaker 2: the US government is grappling with this very question.
Speaker 5: The US Department of Energy has what is called the
Speaker 5: one two to three Agreement, which is a nuclear agreements
Speaker 5: that it enters into with different states which will trade
Speaker 5: US nuclear technology as long as countries do not enter
Speaker 5: the nuclear fuel cycle. This is what we've seen in
Speaker 5: the United Arab Emirates. This is a crux of negotiations
Speaker 5: with Saudi Arabia. This is why the US takes such
Speaker 5: a grim view of Iran entering into the nuclear fuel cycle.
Speaker 5: So this is a big deal because of its dual
Speaker 5: use potential, and just in terms of how you can
Speaker 5: build this resiliency in your supply chain. The CEO of
Speaker 5: Urenco told me something interesting. He was talking about the
Speaker 5: fact that some of his oldest centrifuges operating in Europe
Speaker 5: have been running now for fifty years. Imagine your washing
Speaker 5: machine on the spin cycle running from the last fifty
Speaker 5: years without ever stopping. In those centrifusias. They've been running
Speaker 5: through three Mile Island, they've been running through Chernobyl, they've
Speaker 5: been running through the Fukushima meltdowns. And he said, you know,
Speaker 5: the only thing that they don't like is to stop.
Speaker 5: He was talking about in terms of like a very
Speaker 5: physical material sense, and that you know, when you try
Speaker 5: to stop something spinning at supersonic speeds, sometimes mistakes happen
Speaker 5: and they spin out of control, so you want to
Speaker 5: keep them running. But more broadly, it's an anecdote about
Speaker 5: the commitment that economies need to make nuclear power profitable
Speaker 5: and it requires a long term vision, probably sometimes with
Speaker 5: state support. That is nurturing a strategic industry. You know,
Speaker 5: touches far more than simple company profit and loss statements.
Speaker 2: You've talked about how It'll take many years and a
Speaker 2: lot of money for the US to be able to
Speaker 2: be independent of Russia and other places for uranium. What
Speaker 2: happens if the situation in Ukraine escalates and the US
Speaker 2: and Russia no longer do any business. What would that
Speaker 2: mean for the US industry?
Speaker 4: Oh, you mean the worst case scenario, like if Russia
Speaker 4: decides to completely cut US off or we decide to
Speaker 4: completely boycott them, that would be bad. Most utilities tend
Speaker 4: to keep about eighteen months of inventory on hand. They
Speaker 4: have to refuel the reactors every eighteen months, so basically,
Speaker 4: it's like they've got one spare set of fuel rods
Speaker 4: laid around to put in when they need it, and
Speaker 4: eighteen months after that, if they don't have another set
Speaker 4: of fuel rods, then they have to turn the reactor off.
Speaker 4: No gas, out of gas. Personally, I don't think that's
Speaker 4: going to happen. I think that the chances of that
Speaker 4: are near zero. But yeah, if there was no uranium supply,
Speaker 4: if there was no nuclear fuel rod supply, that's what happens.
Speaker 4: Nuclear power plants aren't magic. You got to fill the
Speaker 4: tank every so often.
Speaker 2: And why do you think it's a near zero chance.
Speaker 2: Given how chill the situation is right now.
Speaker 4: I think the international community would come together somehow. They
Speaker 4: could figure out who needs some today and who could
Speaker 4: wait six months. I think there would be some ability
Speaker 4: to coordinate if necessary.
Speaker 5: It's not just an American problem. This is a transatlantic problem,
Speaker 5: and right now there is an installed industrial base that
Speaker 5: is underutilized in Europe and Oro. For example, the French
Speaker 5: National Champion is also sitting on a potential two billion
Speaker 5: expansion of its uranium enrichment capacity. But just like Converdyne,
Speaker 5: the conversion company here in the US, they're also waiting
Speaker 5: signals from clients that they're ready to enter into long
Speaker 5: term contracts. So there's a lot of money sitting on
Speaker 5: the sideline. There's a lot of ways to expand capacity,
Speaker 5: to create redundancies and supply chains, but it's a slow
Speaker 5: train that's just starting to get moving.
Speaker 2: Will looking ahead is someone who covers this industry. Where
Speaker 2: do you think it goes from here? Do you think
Speaker 2: the US eventually does wean itself from Russian uranium?
Speaker 4: Maybe not one hundred percent, but I think there's a
Speaker 4: really strong desire to build up enough domestic capacity to
Speaker 4: not be so dependent upon them.
Speaker 5: The US was the biggest enricher of uranium during the
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies. It supplied all Western capitalist economies. It was
Speaker 5: the biggest player out there. That's when Uranka was just starting, right.
Speaker 5: So this is like around nineteen seventy two, seventy three,
Speaker 5: seventy four. You fast forward a half a century, and
Speaker 5: the US looks like it's a rebooting Manhattan Project version
Speaker 5: two point zero, this time for exclusively peaceful purposes. It's
Speaker 5: a massive undertaking, but the US is proven it's capable
Speaker 5: and up to the task before it can do so again.
Speaker 5: But in terms of accomplishing some of the loftier goals
Speaker 5: of the G seven statement of pushing Russia out of
Speaker 5: the international nuclear fuel cycle entirely, that's probably less likely. Russia,
Speaker 5: even if it loses the Western markets, is busy building
Speaker 5: new reactors in Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, a bunch of
Speaker 5: different countries, and they're filling their pipeline up with new
Speaker 5: customers for decades ahead.
Speaker 2: Jonathan Will, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: Thanks thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take.
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Speaker 2: I'm west Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big
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