Uranium
A shortage of uranium is pushing up the metal’s price to record levels and underpinning a surge in the value of Australian and Canadian companies that mine uranium oxide used to create fuel for nuclear power stations.
Times 9th April 2007
At an energy conference in Houston, John Rowe, the chief executive of Exelon, one of the world’s biggest power utilities, took to task Mitchell Dong, an entrepreneur who had launched a uranium fund. “I know who you are . . . the biggest villain in the energy industry,” Mr Rowe said. The remark illustrates the growing animosity between utilities, which were comforted for more than 20 years by uranium prices of below $20 a pound, and hedge funds, which they blame for the price reaching record levels.
Times 9th April 2007
The flooding at Cameco’s Cigar Lake Uranium Mine under construction in Canada has reverberated around the world.
FT 9th April 2007
Immediately after the US and Russia signed their nuclear disarmament treaty in 1993, Mr Grandey flew to Moscow to point out the implications of flooding the market with 500 tonnes of uranium from disarmed warheads. Six years of negotiations followed. At one point, Mr Grandey persuaded Federico Peña, the then-US energy secretary, and Ralph Goodale, Canada’s minister of natural resources, to visit Moscow to hammer home to the Russians the importance of private-sector involvement. The result was an agreement that gave a private-sector consortium led by Cameco the right to buy and market most of the Russian uranium. It set up a system of quotas that resembled the rising output of a new uranium mine.
FT 9th April 2007
Star Wars
Kurt Beck, Mr Schröder’s successor as SPD chairman, launched the first salvo early last month when he told the Bild tabloid that US plans to create an anti-missile defence system with bases in Poland and the Czech Republic were a step back to the cold war.
FT 9th April 2007
