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Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Uranium mining

(Re-)Creating Nuclear Fuel Demand in East Asia

November 16, 2017 By Rod Adams 2 Comments

South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, three historically large markets for uranium and fuel cycle services, have been under siege by organized antinuclear opponents who have made the most from Fukushima to rally public support for their efforts.

To paraphrase a cliché, nuclear energy opponents did not let an attention-getting crisis go to waste. As a result of the traditional reluctance by nuclear energy supporters to speak up, the antis have been largely unopposed.

From its recently opened office in east Asia, Greenpeace International has issued a torrent of news releases and messages designed to stoke fear and distrust. They’ve sponsored widespread screenings for a disaster movie about a fictional event at a nuclear plant.

Here is a sample quote from a March 2017 (fundraising?) article on Greenpeace’s web site:

“The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe may feel like ancient history in a world constantly bombarded with news of another tragedy or disaster. But for those who were impacted by the worst nuclear disaster in a generation, the crisis is far from over. And it is women and children that have borne the brunt of human rights violations resulting from it, both in the immediate aftermath and as a result of the Japan government’s nuclear resettlement policy.”

So far, their efforts have succeeded, probably beyond their initial hopes and goals.

Japan has about 40 operational reactors that have not operated since 2011.

Three of Taiwan’s six reactors have been shutdown for an indefinite period of time and the country passed a law in January mandating a nuclear-free grid by 2025.

South Korea elected a president in July who pledged to halt new reactor construction, to prevent license renewals and to phase out nuclear energy completely.

Each of the nations have nuclear plant construction projects that are currently stalled by government direction.

There are reasons to hope that the war is not lost, even though the battle toll has been quite severe with the good guys on the losing side most of the time.

With a moderate investment in a well-designed strategic marketing campaign, the fuel cycle industry has an opportunity to rebuild a substantial customer base. Success in that effort may sway hearts and minds outside of Asia.


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South Korea’s Small Victory

A fee weeks ago, a South Korean citizens’ panel recommended a reversal of President Moon Jae-in’s decision to stop building Shin Kori units 5 and 6.

The 471-member panel decided, with a vote tally of 60% in favor of continuing and 40% supporting the halt, that the projects should be finished and operated.

It did not, however, provide a rousing endorsement for nuclear energy. A small majority of the members indicated that they supported the plan to gradually phase it out.

But those who supported continuing were convinced that it would be better for the country to complete projects for new reactors for which components had already been purchased and $2 billion had already been spent or committed.
Members accepted evidence that finishing the construction projects would put several thousand people back to work and mitigate the imposed economic harm to the host community.

Ulsan, the host community, had already made investments in infrastructure to support the facility and the construction work force. Its businesses and tax base had been significantly damaged by the abrupt work stoppage.

Completing the APR-1400s would also allow a nuclear phase out that maintained modern facilities in preference to older facilities with fewer safety enhancements. Continuing new construction would support KEPCO’s ongoing efforts to land additional international customers.

Korean opposition to nuclear energy continues to be politically strong. It seems to be relatively free to use emotional arguments without sufficiently being challenged by similarly framed arguments in favor of nuclear energy as the cleanest, most abundant, most affordable and safest available option.

While accepting the panel’s recommendation to complete the two Shin Kori units, President Moon reiterated his promise to his political base that he remains committed to shifting the electricity system to consume more natural gas and build more renewables.

Attention Getting Warning In Taiwan

Like South Korea, Taiwan is a small, resource-poor, isolated, export-dependent nation that logically invested in nuclear energy. It has three two-unit nuclear plants and a fourth under construction.

Three of the six operational reactors are currently closed for political reasons, while the new plant construction project has been halted since 2014 even though nearly complete. Nuclear opponents feel that they have a working majority of support from the public and plan to press forward with a complete exit from the technology by 2025.

In August, Taiwan’s public received a warning about the economic risk associated with an unbalanced and inadequately resilient grid.

A technician working on the gas supply system made an error that interrupted the flow of fuel to a large, six-unit natural gas fired station. The interruption lasted only two minutes, but it tripped all six generators and instigated a widespread power outage affecting more than 6 million customers. That outage lasted for more than five hours.

That event is an example of expensively identifying a fragile system with a single point failure vulnerability.

A series of somewhat less dramatic events have raised public awareness about the fragility of the island nation’s power system and have caused some to question the logic behind the policy of closing operational nuclear units.

A recent article in the Taipei Times that described a recent forum on nuclear energy featuring Environmental Progress’s Michael Shellenberger included the following statement.

“There used to be a tug-of-war between pro and anti-nuclear groups, but the anti-nuclear camp has gained favor ever since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, former Environmental Protection Administration minister Wei Kuo-yen said in the first panel discussion with Shellenberger.” (Emphasis added)

The recent power supply disruptions offer pronuclear forces a timely opportunity to make its case to a public that may be especially willing to listen. A public and a business community faced with the negative impacts of power shortages should be encouraged to join the pronuclear forces and powerfully drag the rope in the right direction.

Several independent pronuclear activists are doing what they can to help Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese understand that their nations need nuclear in order to grow and prosper.

Their efforts could be far more successful if aligned–but not co-ordinated with–a marketing campaign designed to sell nuclear energy to the public as a superior wealth and health enhancing power source.

When the citizens and businesses of the three Asian tigers recognize what they are being asked to sacrifice in order to appease a vocal minority, the demand for uranium and fuel cycle services should recover rather quickly.


Note: A version of the above was first published in Fuel Cycle Week, an industry newsletter that focused on the front end of the nuclear industry.

Filed Under: Uranium mining, Fossil fuel competition, International nuclear

Creating new markets for uranium

October 22, 2017 By Rod Adams 25 Comments

Disclaimer: I have been buying stocks in uranium producers for more than a decade. I accelerated my purchasing in 2011 when stock prices fell after Fukushima. I’ve added to my holdings each time there was a big drop in stock prices.

I am a contrarian who likes to buy high quality assets when they’re on sale.

Now a confession. Though my investments in Uraniumland™ are a small portion of my overall
portfolio, they are underwater and would make me look dumb if I ran an investment fund for other people.

Now a rant. I’m pretty certain that I am not dumb. Uranium is an amazing element. Its compounds and alloys have characteristics that give it fundamental advantages over most competitive or substitute materials that are in the same lines of work.

I was saddened by the headline column in the Sept. 29 issue of Fuel Cycle Week (FCW) describing a significant, employment-reducing reorganization of uranium industry marketing organizations.

Layoffs and retrenchment are always painful. As an investor, though, I was angry to find more evidence of companies that are confused about the difference between making sales to known customers and market creation strategy development.

The trouble with Uraniumland is that it is too insular. To this outsider, uranium producers avoid devising and implementing ways to attract non-consumers, which I’m defining here as anyone who is not currently buying your product. You must help them know that they both need and want what you can provide.

Over 100 Years of Uranium Glass

Here’s one example. When was the last time anyone made a large sale of uranium to the glass industry? Have uranium producers spent any time thinking about how they can take advantage of the unique chemical property of uranium that makes it glow in shades ranging from cream through yellow to lime green when illuminated by a blacklight?

Have they ever thought about the large base of interested non-consumers who are fascinated by the slowly shrinking inventory of glassware manufactured for more than 100 years, between 1830 and 1940?

That market abruptly disappeared because governments thought there was a tightly limited supply. Political leaders in the US, UK, France and Russia decided they needed to corner the uranium market in order to achieve a short term goal.

After being the only legal buyers for almost two decades, governments realized there was far more material than they could ever consider hoarding.

By the time the U.S. government abruptly stopped buying, Hermann Muller and his friends had successfully invented and spread atomic fear by claiming even tiny doses of radiation were harmful.

In response, “safety” regulators imposed tight controls over uranium as a useful material for adding unique colors and a responsive glow to glassware and ceramic products.

Even without a complete prohibition, those rules made it too difficult for anyone in the glass industry to consider reviving their formerly popular lines of uranium glass products or to consider new products like luminous glass bricks for decorative interior or exterior design.

The abrupt disappearance of the uranium glass market wasn’t caused by glass makers getting nervous about the negatively promoted health effects. After all, they routinely take precautions against ingesting the hazardous materials that are inescapable ingredients of their livelihood.

Silica dust is a known hazard, but so are lead and arsenic, two elements that remain in common use in specialty glass making.

Glassmakers knew from a century of experience that uranium glass products were safe and well accepted in the market. But they couldn’t or wouldn’t fight city hall by themselves.

There are provisions in U.S. regulations (10 CFR 40.22 and 40.23) that allow shipping and handling uranium under a general license. Unfortunately, the restrictions on quantity and the documentation requirements are too onerous to allow economic production for anything other than specialty applications.

It’s worth noting that the potential market is huge. Glass is one of the world’s largest material commodities by weight; some of the old recipes for uranium glass contained as much as 25% uranium oxide.

Creating a new uranium glass market would include efforts to promote the fact that low doses of radiation are not harmful. They would also include lobbying efforts to ensure that regulators use modern scientific knowledge to implement less onerous restrictions on commerce in materials like natural uranium or depleted uranium.

When I mentioned the idea of uranium glass to a friend who is a career radiobiologist, she reacted with excitement. Her scientific research over the past 30 years tells her that people would be more healthy with a little more radiation in their environment.

A vibrant uranium glass market would create a new sector of demand and introduce a completely new customer base. Customer diversification is a conventional, but important long term success strategy.

Uranium glass marketing would also result in growing public awareness of the utility and safety of the element. It could help them develop comfort levels approaching those earned by other potentially hazardous commercial items like gasoline, propane and natural gas.

Where’s the Uranium Association?

There once was an organization named the Uranium Institute (UI), which grew out of a somewhat infamous organization known colloquially as the Uranium Cartel or the Uranium Club. It focused on the interests of the uranium mining industry.

UI is now part of the World Nuclear Association. WNA’s membership has a wider span of interests. Although it isn’t exclusively focused on increasing the demand for uranium, it just re-launched the Harmony program, a call to action to governments to do more to ensure that nuclear energy makes the full contribution that society requires to meet its future clean energy needs.

The target for nuclear energy is to provide 25% of electricity in 2050, requiring roughly 1,000 GWe of new nuclear capacity to be constructed.

Instead of focusing on technology, WNA believes it is “vital that the global industry identifies and focuses on demolishing the real barriers to growth.”

While I’m not advocating the creation of an organization that engages in nefarious activities like establishing prices or allocating sales to suppliers, uranium is a commodity product like dairy, avocados, grapes, oil, coal or gas that deserves to have a trade association that can focus on lobbying and joint marketing efforts to build overall demand to match supply.

Though virtually all uranium sold is currently used by the “nuclear industry,” the interests of uranium producers only occasionally intersect with those of the rest of the industry.

It makes no sense for uranium producers to depend on the nuclear industry and expect that the nuclear industry shares its legitimate desire to regain enough pricing power to enable pro table and expanding sales.

In fact, it seems conventionally obvious that utility companies and their fuel purchasing arms would prefer for the uranium mining industry to continue as a tightly linked dependent with no other customers competing for the material.

If there was a Uranium Association, it could help stimulate creation of the uranium glass industry described above. It could also stand beside the currently lonely Nuclear Energy Institute and the American Association for Clean Coal Electricity.

Those organizations support the Department of Energy’s proposed rule that would require regional transmission organizations and independent system operators (RTO/ISO) to establish tariffs to provide full cost recovery and a fair profit for operating nuclear plants and certain coal plants that have large coal stockpiles.

A coalition of 11 organizations collectively calling themselves Energy Industries Associations filed a motion opposing the proposal.

Those groups, representing oil, natural gas, wind, solar and biomass, want the public to believe that today’s electricity markets are fair.

They claim there are no government hands pushing certain power sources to the detriment of others.

Environmental Progress says that the rule could be a big win for nuclear energy. The uranium industry could help by explaining the importance of maintaining the current nuclear fleet and its clean, reliable, affordable power supply.

It could explain why the vital uranium industry needs to keep its current customer base so that it has the human capital resources to expand.

That could be necessary to support the potentially large number of advanced reactors that might arise out of one or more of the 50 or so designs actively being developed.

Taking clues from competitors, the Uranium Association could describe its decades worth of proven reserves while also helping the public understand that there is virtually no limit on the amount of material remaining to be discovered.

A Uranium Association could respond with hard facts when the natural gas industry brags about its potential to supply almost 100 years worth of fuel that only produces half as much CO2 as coal does.

Eat Your Own Dog Food

Many sectors of the nuclear fuel cycle industry buy large quantities of electrical power. Some installations are located in remote areas without reliable connection to an affordable grid power supply.

It would make conventional marketing sense for companies whose profitability depends on customers purchasing uranium fuels and related services to use their own products.

This choice would help its direct, power plant-operating customers build interest and sales.

Fuel cycle companies could express their desire to purchase bundled power that is produced in environmentally friendly nuclear plants, just as companies can signal their high moral standards by arranging to purchase bundled wind or solar electricity from the power grid.

Some might even consider making public announcements that they want to be customers for independent power producers that use small modular reactors to supply a local power grid in remote mining towns.

Supplier companies and the leaders of those companies should show the value, ease of use and safety of their product in personal, demonstrable ways.

Customers are less likely to remain uncomfortable if they recognize that the people in the know support their words with actions.

Nothing tells the public that they are right to be concerned about safety than fuel producers who show by their actions they are reluctant to be too close to a power plant using that fuel.

Final Thoughts and Recommended Reading

“It is no wonder that corporate leaders throughout the world see market creation as a central strategic challenge to their organizations in the upcoming decade.

“They understand that in an overcrowded and demand-starved economy, profitable growth is not sustainable without creating, and re-creating, markets. That is what allows small companies to become big and what allows big companies to regenerate themselves.”

That is the concluding paragraph from a seminal article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Creating New Market Space.” It was published in the Jan-Feb 1999 issue. It provides case studies and advice that is highly relevant to today’s uranium fuel supply industry.

Market creation is a term of art that can result in useful search results for more ideas.

The most important message is that success comes from action and creative thinking. Repeated rounds of cost cutting and retrenchment under the assumption that suppliers are passive acceptors of whatever “the market” decides will only continue a downward spiral.

The uranium fuel cycle industry produces useful material and value-added enhancements to that material. Companies in that line of business should not allow them to shrink because they accepted false limitations and overt negative propaganda from competitors.


Note: The above was first published in the October 6, 2017 edition of Fuel Cycle Week. It has been revised and republished here with permission.

Filed Under: Uranium mining

Eminent domain and Virginia’s ban on uranium mining

October 20, 2016 By Rod Adams 5 Comments

Despite the currently abysmal state of the market, Virginia Uranium Inc. (VUI), owner of the 119-million pound deposit at Coles Hill, continues legal efforts to overturn the ostensibly temporary moratorium on uranium mining in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The most recent step in the process for overturning the moratorium, first established in 1982 pending the […]

Filed Under: Nuclear Energy Insider SMR, Uranium mining, VA Nuclear

Lake Gaston Association told to worry about uranium. Also encouraged to ask more questions

January 7, 2016 By Rod Adams 26 Comments

On Wednesday, Jan 6, 2015, the Lake Gaston Association (LGA) monthly meeting featured a presentation from Tom Leahy, director of the Virginia Beach Public Utilities Department. The announced topic was an update on uranium mining and coal ash control. I saw an opportunity to combine some exploration of Virginia backroads with the chance to meet […]

Filed Under: Uranium mining

Virginia Loves Nuclear But Hates Uranium – Why?

December 30, 2015 By Rod Adams 1 Comment

Virginia may be the only state in the U.S. with a law creating a public-private partnership structure whose mission is to strengthen and promote its nuclear energy and technology industries. There are two components of the partnership, the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium Authority (VNECA) and the Virginia Nuclear Energy Consortium (VNEC), which is a private, […]

Filed Under: Atomic politics, Business of atomic energy, Uranium mining, VA Nuclear

Sierra Club member asks Executive Director Brune to support nuclear energy

July 31, 2015 By Rod Adams

A few days ago, a friend from Californians for Green Nuclear Power shared a letter he had written to Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. He gave me permission to share his letter with Atomic Insights readers. My friend is a Sierra Club member because he agrees with many of its goals […]

Filed Under: Atomic Advocacy, Atomic politics, Uranium mining

Romance of Radium – How did our relationship with radioactive material sour?

June 10, 2015 By Rod Adams

Note – This post was initially published on February 23, 2013. After attending the ANS President’s Special Session about the way we should communicate about radiation, I thought it would be worth repeating. Sometimes, we need to look outside of our immediate time and place to find “best practices” that we should emulate. Hitting road […]

Filed Under: Atomic history, Health Effects, Radiation, Uranium mining

EPA’s Proposed ISR Rule

April 6, 2015 By Guest Author

By Andrea Jennetta During a March 16, 2015, meeting of the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP), FCW columnist (and Atomic Insights owner/blogger) Rod Adams listened to, challenged and followed up with Jonathan Edwards, Director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Radiation Protection Division. Edwards gave a talk entitled “Federal Directions in Radiation Regulations: […]

Filed Under: Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Nuclear regulations, Uranium mining

Uranium supply concerns associated with EEU

June 14, 2014 By Rod Adams

Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed an agreement to form a Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) on May 29. Uranium market watchers should pay close attention and understand the potential implications of the alliance on the stability of the world’s uranium supply, even though the alliance has been dismissed as unimportant by some media pundits. For example, […]

Filed Under: Economics, Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Uranium mining

Nukes kill more birds than wind?

April 30, 2013 By Guest Author

View of Crystal River from water

By Paul Lorenzini In the yin and yang of energy policy debates, we know some can get carried away. Normally we ignore the radical fringe, but sometimes their claims take on a life of their own and need to be addressed. One such charge has found its way as an authoritative reference on Wipikedia, alleging […]

Filed Under: Alternative energy, Guest Columns, Lorenzini, Uranium mining, Wind energy

What can Chatham, VA learn from Mt Airy, NC?

February 12, 2013 By Rod Adams

The leaders of Virginia Uranium need to talk with the leaders of the North Carolina Granite Corporation. VA Uranium is seeking to obtain permission to mine its granite formation while NC Granite is the current operator of a granite quarry that has been in continuous operation since 1889. If you will forgive the obvious pun, […]

Filed Under: Health Effects, Politics of Nuclear Energy, Uranium mining

France does not need Mali’s uranium despite all conspiracy stories to the contrary

January 24, 2013 By Rod Adams

There is a meme circulating on web claiming that France’s intervention in Mali can be traced to a desire to capture the country’s uranium resources. That idea is complete and utter rubbish that can only be believed by people who have done no math and no research to recognize whether such a theory can be […]

Filed Under: Uranium mining

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