In a November 15 op-ed in The Age, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that she would push her Labor Party to overturn its ban on selling uranium to India when the party meets next month. The unexpected announcement is a testament to the growing importance that Australia attaches to ties with India and should lead to a significant deepening of their bilateral partnership. In 2008, Australia’s Labor Party government reversed a decision by its predecessor to end the ban on export of uranium to India on the grounds that …
The Department of Energy (DOE) holds approximately the equivalent of 59,000 tons of natural uranium. This includes low-enriched uranium, highly enriched uranium, depleted uranium left over from past enrichment, and natural uranium. With additional processing, much of it could be used to fuel America’s nuclear reactors. Depending on the spot price of uranium and the process required to get it to usable form, the DOE’s excess uranium is worth approximately $7 billion. Leaving the uranium under government control makes no sense. It not only denies taxpayers the value of the …
Pyongyang revealed a covert facility for enriching uranium to a visiting U.S. scientist last week. Dr. Siegfried Hecker, former head of the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, stated he was shown a vast plant containing “hundreds and hundreds” of centrifuges—North Korea claimed 2,000—controlled by an “ultra modern control room.” The discovery affirms a U.N. report released earlier this month that North Korea continues to “use a number of masking techniques in order to circumvent the Security Council measures” to curtail Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. Although the United States has long …
Over at National Review Online they asked experts to weigh in on the situation with Iran and Heritage Expert Peter Brookes was asked to share his thoughts. Hey, Mr. President, how’s that engagement policy with Iran working out for you? Not so well, from what I can tell. While you were busy hoping for a breakthrough, holding fast to the Pollyannaish foreign-policy notion that “if we’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us,” the situation in Iran has only gotten worse over the last year — and precipitously so. …
Iran’s government today announced the successful launching of a research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trumpeted the launch as a “very big event” and promised on state-controlled television that “The scientific arena is where we could defeat the (West’s) domination.” The launch of the Explorer-3 rocket is part of Iran’s ambitious space program, which concerns many Iran-watchers because the same technology used to launch research rockets and satellites can also be used to deliver warheads in ballistic missiles. Significantly, the launch was …
Today Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki publicly rejected the U.N.-backed proposal to send about 70 percent of Iran’s known supplies of enriched uranium out of the country. Mottaki suggested that instead Iran would exchange its low-enriched uranium for an equivalent amount of slightly higher enriched uranium, but only on its own territory. This clearly would be unacceptable since it would put Iran closer, rather than slightly farther away from, acquiring sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, if the uranium were to be further enriched. French Foreign …
Heritage’s Nile Gardiner reacts to Iran’s admission that they have built a second uranium enrichment facility. Watch: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrTay-C1kXM[/youtube]
More evidence arises that the world is preparing for a global nuclear renaissance: although the spot price for uranium fell, global exploration for 2007 totaled $718 million according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency. To put this number in perspective, while it might be less than the 2006 total of $774 million, it is 254 percent more than in 2004. Australia has considerably uranium exploration; after spending only $3 million in 2002, the country spent $60 million in 2006 alone on …
Members of Congress have been right on at supporting bad energy policies while dismissing the good ones. For all their rhetoric about supporting the development of natural resources, energy independence and the creation of jobs, in practice policymakers oppose American energy independence because they persistently oppose tapping American natural resources—oil, most regularly, but most recently uranium too. In March Virginia bureaucrats have decided to prohibit land owners from even studying the viability of uranium mining on what is known to be the nation’s largest deposit. Here’s another case and this …
