The Looming Uranium Crisis: Strategic Implications for the Colder War

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

In the wake of one singular event—the disaster at Fukushima in March 2011, the effects of which are still being felt today across the planet—nuclear power has seemingly fallen into utter disrepute, at least in the popular mind. But this is largely an illusion.

It’s true that Japan took all 52 of its nuclear plants offline after Fukushima and sold much of its uranium inventory. South Korea followed with shutdowns of its own. Germany permanently mothballed eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022. Austria and Spain have enacted laws to cease construction on new nuclear power stations. Switzerland is phasing them out. A majority of the other European nations is also opposed.

All of this has resulted in a large decrease in demand for uranium, a glut of the fuel on the market, and a per-pound price that fell as low as $28.50 in mid-2014, down nearly 80% from its peak of $135 in 2007.

Currently, it’s languishing around $39 per pound, still below the cost of production for many miners—about 80% need prices above $40 to make any return on investment, and even at that level, no new mines will be built. It’s easy to hear a death knell for nuclear energy on the breeze. And that may well be the case for Europe (except for France). But Europe is hardly the world.

South Korean plants are back online. Japan is planning to restart its reactor fleet (despite a great deal of citizen protest) beginning in 2015. Russia is heavily invested, with nine plants under construction and 14 others planned. China, faced with unhealthy levels of air pollution in many of its cities due to coal power generation, is going all in on nuclear. 26 reactors are under construction, and the government has declared a goal of quadrupling present capacity—either in operation or being built—by 2020. India has 20 plants and is adding seven more. And in the rest of the developing nations, nuclear power is exploding.

Worldwide, no fewer than 71 new plants are under construction in more than a dozen countries, with another 163 planned and 329 proposed. Many countries without nuclear power soon will build their first reactors, including Turkey, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and several of the Gulf emirates.

For years, China, with its stunning GDP growth rate, has been seen as the leading destination for natural resources. “Produce what China needs” has been every supplier’s ongoing mantra. Yet, as many Americans fail to realize, it’s their own home that is the biggest uranium consumer. Despite having not opened a new plant since 1977 (though six additional units are scheduled to open by 2020), the US is the world’s #1 producer of nuclear energy, accounting for more than 30% of the global total. France is a distant second at 12%; China, playing catchup, sits at only 6% right now. The 65 American nuclear plants, housing just over 100 reactors, generate 20% of total US electricity.

Yet uranium is the one fuel for which there is very little domestic supply.

As you can see, the US has to import over 90% of what it uses. That’s a huge shortfall—and it’s persisted for many years. How has the country made it up?

In a word: Russia.

America’s former Cold War archenemy—and antagonist in the unfolding sequel, the Colder War—has in fact been keeping the US nuclear fires burning, through conduits like the Megatons to Megawatts Program.
When the USSR collapsed, Russia inherited over two million pounds of HEU—highly enriched uranium (the 90% U-235 needed to fashion a bomb)—and vast, underused facilities for handling and fabricating the material. Starting in 1993, it cut a deal with the US dubbed the Megatons to Megawatts Program. Over the 20 years that followed, 1.1 million pounds of Russian weapon-grade uranium, equivalent to about 20,000 nuclear warheads, was downblended to U₃O₈ and sold to the United States as fuel.

That source was very important in helping to fill the US supply gap for those two decades. It represented, on average, over 20 million pounds of annual uranium supply, or half of what the country consumed. I’m sure it would have come as a shock to most Americans if they’d realized that one in ten of their homes was being powered by former Soviet missiles.

Megatons to Megawatts expired in November 2013, but US dependence on Russia did not. Russia is easily able to maintain its sizeable export presence, due largely to present economics.

Because of all the uranium swamping the market since Fukushima, separative work units (SWUs) are trading at very low prices. SWUs measure the amount of separation work necessary to enrich uranium—in other words, how much work must be done to raise the product’s concentration of U-235 to the 3-5% that most reactors require for fission?

The tails that are left behind when U-235 is separated out to make warheads still contain some amount of the isotope, usually around 0.2% to 0.3%. When the price of SWUs gets low enough, it’s a condition known as “underfeeding,” meaning it’s worth the effort to go back and extract leftover U-235 from the tails. That’s done through the process of re-enrichment, the reverse of the procedure that creates HEU. It’s kind of like getting fresh gold from old ore that had already yielded the easy stuff.

After the Soviet Union broke up, Russia had a lot of enrichment capacity it no longer needed for its military program. And major uranium companies like Areva and Urenco had sent trainloads of enrichment tails to Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Great stockpiles were built up, and they’ll be put to use until the pendulum swings the other way and we get “overfeeding,” where the price of SWUs makes re-enrichment too costly to continue. We will go from under- to overfeeding in the near future. Rising demand from the Japanese restart and new plants coming online ensures that it will happen, and probably within the next 24 months. The market is already anticipating it, with the per-pound price of uranium up more than 35% in the past few months. It’s going to double to $75… at the least.

Meanwhile, though, the ability to profitably produce fuel-grade uranium from tails confers on Russia a number of significant advantages. Among them:

• It permits the country to exploit a previously worthless resource.

• The more tails it can use as feedstock, the fewer it has to dispose of.

• Most important, it means Russia can conserve much of its mineral supply for a future when higher prices will dramatically increase its leverage. That includes in-ground ore, of which it has a lot, and probably uranium picked up on the cheap when Japan did its massive post-Fukushima fuel dump (though it has never been officially confirmed who the buyers of Japan’s uranium supply were, I have some very connected sources who tell me it was the Russians who snapped most of it up).

This is one part of Vladimir Putin’s plan to dominate the world energy markets. In my book, The Colder War, I call it the “Putinization” of uranium.  And he has nicely positioned his country to pull it off.
In January 2014, Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russian energy giant Rosatom, was bursting with enthusiasm when he predicted that Russia’s recent annual production rate of 6.5 million pounds of uranium would triple in 2015.

Rosatom puts Russia’s uranium reserves in the ground at 1.2 billion pounds of yellowcake, which would be the second largest in the world; the company is quite capable of mining 40 million pounds per year by 2020. Add in Russia’s foreign projects in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia, and annual production in 2020 jumps to more than 63 million pounds. Include all of Russia’s sphere of influence, and annual production easily could amount to more than 140 million pounds six years from now.

No other country has a uranium mining plan nearly this ambitious. By 2020, Russia itself could be producing a third of all yellowcake. With just its close ally Kazakhstan chipping in another 25%, Russia would have effective control of more than half of world supply.

That’s clout. But it doesn’t end there.
Globally, there are a fair number of facilities for fabricating fuel rods. Not so with conversion plants (uranium oxide to uranium hexafluoride) or enrichment plants (isolating the U-235). And the world leader in conversion and enrichment is…. yes, Russia.

All told, Russia has one-third of all uranium conversion capacity. The United States is in second place with 18%. And Russia’s share is projected to rise, assuming Rosatom proceeds with a new conversion plant planned for 2015. Similarly, Russia owns 40% of the world’s enrichment capacity. Planned expansion of the existing facilities will push that share close to 50%.

That’s Putin’s goal—to corner the conversion and enrichment markets—because it wraps Russian hands around the chokepoints in the whole yellowcake to electricity progression. It’s a smart strategy, too—control those, and you control the availability and pricing of a product for which demand will be rising for decades.

And that control will tighten, because the barrier to entry for either function is very high. Building new conversion or enrichment facilities is too costly for most countries, and it is especially difficult in the West due to the influence of environmentalists.

It’s worth reiterating. Russia is on track to control 58% of global yellowcake production; currently responsible for a third of yellowcake-to-uranium-hexafluoride conversion; and soon to hold half of all global enrichment capacity.

There’s a word for this: stranglehold.

That is what Putin and Russia will have on the supply chain for nuclear fuel in a world where new atomic power plants are being constructed at warp speed, which will force the price of uranium ever higher. It will give Russia enormous global influence and great leverage in all future dealings with the US America can mine some uranium domestically and buy some more from its Canadian ally. But even taken together, those sources put only a small patch on the supply gap.

The US government would do well to make peace with Putin, if it can, because the domestic nuclear power industry—and by extension the economic health of the country—is at the mercy of Russia, indefinitely.
To get the full story, click here to order your copy of my new book, The Colder War.

Inside, you’ll discover more on how Putin has cornered the market on Uranium, and how he’s making a big play to control the world's oil and natural gas markets. You’ll also glimpse his endgame and how it will personally affect millions of investors and the lives of nearly every American.

The article The Looming Uranium Crisis: Strategic Implications for the Colder War was originally published at casey research

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The Colder War and the End of the Petrodollar

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

The mainstream media are falling over themselves talking about Russia’s just-signed “Holy Grail” gas deal with China, which is expected to be worth more than $400 billion. But here’s what I think the real news is… and nobody’s talking about it—until now, that is. China’s President Xi Jinping has publicly stated that it’s time for a new model of security, not just for China, but for all of Asia. This new model of security, otherwise known as “the new UN,” will include Russia and Iran, but not the United States or the EU-28.

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This monumental gas deal with China does so much more for Russia than the Western media are reporting. First off, it opens up Russian oil and gas supplies to all of Asia. It’s no coincidence that Russian President Putin announced the gas deal with China at a time when the tensions with the West over Ukraine were growing. Putin has U.S. President Obama exactly where he wants him, and it’s only going to get worse for Europe and America. But before I explain why that is, let’s put this deal in terms we can understand. The specific details have not been announced, but my sources tell me that the contract will bring in over U.S. $10 billion a year of revenue to start with.

The 30 year deal states that every year, the Russians will deliver 1.3 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas to China. The total capital expenditure to build the pipeline and all other infrastructure for the project will be more than $22 billion—this will be one of the largest projects in the world. You can bet the Russians won’t take payment in US dollars for their gas. This is the beginning of the end for the petrodollar.

The Chinese and Russians are working together against the Americans, and there are many countries that would be happy to join them in dethroning the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This historic gas deal between Russia and China is very bad news for the petrodollar. Through this one deal, the Russians will provide about 25% of China’s current natural gas demand. In a word, this is huge. It’s also not a coincidence that Putin sealed the deal with China before the Australian, US, and Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals are completed. If you read our recent Casey Energy Report issue on LNG, you know to be wary of the hype about LNG’s “bright future.” Take note: this deal is a serious negative for the global LNG projects.

I also stated in our April 2012 newsletter:

Putin has positioned Russia to play an increasingly dominant role in the global gas scene with two general strategies: first, by building new pipelines to avoid transiting troublesome countries and to develop Russia’s ability to sell gas to Asia, and second, by jumping into the liquefied natural gas (LNG) scene with new facilities in the Far East.

Pretty bang on for a comment that was made over two years ago in print, don’t you think?

So, what’s next? Lots. Putin will continue to outsmart Obama. (Note to all Americans: the Russians make fun of you—not just for your poor choice of presidents, but also for your failed foreign policy that has led to most of the world hating America. But I digress.) You will see Russia announce a major nuclear deal with Iran, where the Russians will build, finance, and supply the uranium for many nuclear reactors. The Russians will do the same for China, and then Syria. With China signing the natural gas deal with Russia and the president of China publicly stating that it’s time to create a new security model for the Asian nations that includes Russia and Iran, it’s clear China has chosen Russia over the U.S.

We are now in the early stages of the Colder War.

The European Union will be the first victim. The EU is completely dependent on Russia for its oil and natural gas imports—over one-third of the EU-28’s supply of oil and natural gas comes from Russia. I’ve been writing for years about this, and I’m watching it come true right now: the only way out for the EU countries is to use modern North American technology to revitalize their old proven oil and gas deposits.

I call it the European Energy Renaissance, and there’s a fortune to be made from it. Our Casey Energy Report portfolio has already been doing quite well from investing in the European Energy Renaissance, but this is only the beginning. If Europe is to survive the Colder War, it has no choice but to develop its own natural resources. There are naysayers who claim that Europe cannot and will not do that, for many reasons. I say rubbish.

Of course, to make money from this European dilemma, it’s imperative to only invest in the best management teams, operating in those countries with the political will to do what it takes to survive… but if you do, you could make a fortune. Doug Casey and I plan on doing so, and so should you.

For example, two weeks ago in this missive, I discussed “The Most Anticipated Oil Well of 2014,” where if you invested, in just two weeks you could be up over 40%. Not only did I write in great detail about the company, I even interviewed the CEO because of the serious potential this high-risk junior holds. I said in that Dispatch that the quality of the recorded interview wasn’t first class, but the quality of information was. The company just put together a very high-quality, professional video showing its potential, and I include it here for all to watch.

Since my write-up, the company has announced incredible news. It’s only months away now from knowing whether or not it has made a world-class discovery. Subscribers to the Casey Energy Report are already sitting on some good, short-term profits with this story, but it keeps getting better.

The more the tension is building in Ukraine (and it’s going to get worse), the more money we’re going to make from the Colder War. There’s nothing you can do about the current geopolitical situation, but you can position yourself and your family to benefit financially from the European Energy Renaissance.

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We expect great things from this company and other companies that are exposed to the European Energy Renaissance. You can read our ongoing guidance on this and our other top energy stocks every month in the Casey Energy Report. In the current issue, for example, you’ll find an in-depth report on the coal sector, uranium, and updates on all of our portfolio companies that are poised to benefit most from the European Energy Renaissance.

There’s no risk in trying it: If you don’t like the Casey Energy Report or don’t make any money within your first three months, just cancel within that time for a full, prompt refund. Even if you miss the cutoff, you can cancel anytime for a prorated refund on the unused part of your subscription.

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The article The Colder War and the End of the Petrodollar was originally published at Casey Research

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Energy Outlook: What’s Hot in 2014

By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist

Investors who want to know how the energy sector will be doing in the coming year are, in my opinion, asking the wrong question. There really is no such thing as "the energy sector," because the performance of the different resources—from oil and gas, to uranium, to coal, to renewables—can vary dramatically.


Case in point: while unconventional oil exploration and production have seen a huge upswing in recent years, thanks to the vast success of the Bakken and other oil rich shale formations, at the same time natural gas has taken a nosedive, due to a supply glut that still hasn't found its balancing point.

To find out which investments will deliver the greatest profits for well positioned investors in 2014, my team and I have identified three trends that are hot… and may become even hotter in the course of this year.

HOT: Service Companies in North America

The oil and gas production in the United States is mature. Rather than looking for new basins, companies are looking to "rediscover" the past by applying new technology to increase economic production from known oil and gas fields.

This new technology comes in a variety of shapes and sizes: better software, bigger rigs, more efficient drilling processes. And it's being applied everywhere, onshore and offshore, conventional and unconventional alike.

Just as an example, today we're seeing operators drill more than 50 horizontal wells from a single well pad, a far cry from just a decade ago.

Exploration and production companies know that the focus moving forward is not just the amount of oil they can pump out of the ground, but the profit they can extract from every barrel (what we call the "netback"). This is even more true in the mature unconventional basins such as the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the Marcellus shale plays, where the margins are tight and require an oil price of more than US$70 per barrel in order to be economic.

This means E&P companies have to use the best ways to increase production from every well—while at the same time reducing their drilling costs. Failure to do so would be to guarantee a firm's demise.

The dilemma for E&P companies is having to prioritize what their shareholders want in the short term—growing production and dividends—over whatever may be best for the company in the long term. At the same time, they have to fight the natural decline of oil coming out of their wells.

All the while, service companies continue to extract fees for their tools and services. Drillers, pumpers, frackers, and other oilfield-service guys make money regardless of whether E&P companies find oil or produce it at economic rates.

We've said it before: Many E&P companies are running on a treadmill, and the incline is going higher and higher, which means higher costs to produce the same amount of oil.

Of course, not all service companies will rake in the dough. The ones that will do the best are the ones that can consistently stay at the forefront of technology and keep signing contracts with the supermajors like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell.

HOT: European Energy Renaissance

Russia's grip on European energy continues to tighten, and there's a push to produce oil and gas within their own borders all around Europe.

2014 looks to be an exciting year for companies like one of our Casey Energy Report stocks, a TSX-V-listed oil and gas explorer and producer with a 2 million acre concession in Germany. We call the deposit it's sitting on the "Next Bakken" because we believe that its potential to deliver exceptional output could rival that of the famed North American formation.

This development is still in its early stages, but investors who position themselves now could see outsized gains for years to come. It's not really a question of "if" the oil is there—previous oil production in the very same location yielded more than 90 million barrels—but of "how much" oil can be extracted with the modern methods not available the last time companies worked on this field.

The company has completed its first well and will continue to drill additional wells (both vertical and horizontal) next year. While the initial well cost more than anticipated, it's a good start that indicates economic oil can be produced in Germany. We're also confident this company's experienced management team is applying the lessons of its first foray to reduce drill costs on future wells.

As our Energy Report pick proves up any of its projects in 2014 and early 2015, we can expect another of our holdings, which has just entered the German oil and gas scene, to either farm into the company or even buy it out.

We predict that by the end of 2015, our "Next Bakken" play, and others like it, will have attracted a lot of attention, not just from individual speculators, but from institutional investors as well—and investors who have gotten in early will be very happy indeed.

Another of our portfolio holdings is just beginning to drill on its Romania projects after a series of delays due to politics and bureaucracy. We have reason to be optimistic because its JV partner, a Gazprom subsidiary, has drilled successful wells on the same basin on the other side of the border in Serbia. If our pick has anything close to that level of success, the markets will surely take notice and its shares will go much higher.
As the "Putinization" of the global energy markets continues and Russia's dominance grows, European countries become increasingly more desperate to escape from under Putin's heavy thumb and to start developing their own energy resources.

The European Energy Renaissance is real, and we continue to monitor companies that are funded and have the permits and ability to drill game-changer wells in Europe in 2014.

HOT: Uranium

During a recent trip to London, I spoke with Lady Barbara Judge, chairman emeritus of the UK Atomic Agency and an advisor to TEPCO on the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. I asked her point blank whether Japan was willing to bring any nuclear reactors back online in 2014.

Her answer was an unequivocal "Yes." The Japanese have no choice, really, because the alternative—importing liquefied natural gas (LNG)—is far too expensive.

Japan is the world's largest importer of LNG and has had to double its imports since the Fukushima incident. For that privilege, the country pays some of the highest rates on the planet, almost four times more than what we pay for natural gas in North America.

South Korea also shut down its nuclear plants post-Fukushima to do inspections and maintenance upgrades, and it, too, has had to import a lot of LNG. Both countries are looking to restart their nuclear reactors so they can stop paying a fortune to foreign energy suppliers. When these countries restart their reactors, they'll also restart the uranium market, so we expect uranium prices to begin to shake loose of the doldrums this year.

Another driver will be throwing the switch at ConverDyn, the U.S. uranium facility that is slated to start converting natural U₃O₈ to reactor-ready fuel in late 2014 or early 2015.

We currently hold two solid uranium companies in the portfolio—one is a U.S. based small cap producer (one of the very few in America), the other is the lowest risk way to play the uranium market that I know of. Both, we believe, will take off in 2014 on the renewed interest in uranium and the associated stocks.

If you want to know more about our thoroughly vetted energy stocks and their potential for amazing gains in 2014 and beyond, give the Casey Energy Report a try. You'll find all my "What's Hot" predictions and the full names of the stocks I've mentioned above in our January forecast issue… plus the energy sectors you should avoid like the plague this year… as well as a feature article on elephant oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico and a new stock pick ready to profit from them.

Giving the Casey Energy Report a try is risk-free because it comes with a 3 month, full money back guarantee. If the Energy Report is not all you expected it to be, just cancel within those 3 months and get a prompt, full refund. Or cancel any time AFTER the 3 months are up for a prorated refund. Getting started is easy.......Just Click Here.


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How Russia Is Creating the Contrarian Play of the Decade....Tuesdays can't miss webinar

Years from now analysts will look back at the end of 2013 as the beginning of a historic bull market. They’ll see that the harbinger of this run up was in plain view for anyone who bothered to look.

I’m talking about uranium, and the harbinger I’m referring to is the historic Megatons to Megawatts agreement between the U.S. and Russia. This agreement expires in December 2013. Its ending concludes an era of cheap nuclear fuel for America and opens the door for Russia to sell its uranium on the world market to the highest bidder.

This is creating a profit opportunity of such magnitude that Casey Research has called together a world class faculty of energy experts for an urgent discussion:

·   Spencer Abraham, former U.S. secretary of energy

·    Herb Dhaliwal, former Canadian minister of natural resources

·   Lady Barbara Judge, chairman emeritus of the UK Atomic Energy Authority

·   Amir Adnani, CEO, president and director of Uranium Energy Corp.

These experts, along with legendary natural resource speculator Rick Rule, will sit down with Casey Research's chief energy investment strategist Marin Katusa to discuss the nuclear power industry and offer their insights into what's shaping up to be the kind of speculative opportunity contrarians live for.

The event is free and premieres online Tuesday, May 21 at 2 p.m. – click here to save your seat.

See you there!




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America’s Addiction to Foreign Uranium

America’s Addiction to Foreign Uranium

Posted courtesy of our trading partners at Casey Research.........

What most Americans don't realize is that dependence on foreign oil isn't the main obstacle to US energy autonomy. If you think America's energy supply issues begin and end with the Middle East, think again. One of the most critical sources of foreign energy is due to dry up this year, and the results could mean spiking electricity prices across the country.


In 2011, the US used 4,128 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity. Nuclear power provided 790.2 billion kWh, or 19% of the total electrical output in the US. Few people know that one in five US households is powered by nuclear energy, and that the price of that nuclear power has been artificially stabilized. Unfortunately for us, the vast majority of the fuel used for powering our homes must be imported.
In the chart below, you see where most of our uranium comes from:

The overwhelming majority of that Russian uranium comes from a 20-year-old agreement called "Megatons to Megawatts" that allows weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) to be converted to reactor-grade, low enriched uranium (LEU).

By December 2012, "Megatons to Megawatts" had produced 13,603 metric tons of LEU for US consumption and provided the fuel for nearly half of the US electricity generated from nuclear power.
In December 2013, that agreement expires, and Russia will be free to put its uranium out on the open market and demand higher prices. With 17 nuclear reactors in China and 20 in India – not to mention Japan, France, Germany, and others all vying for nuclear fuel – competitive bids are poised to drive prices higher, and early investors stand to make spectacular gains.

If this information is news to you, you are not alone. While the mainstream media focus on the US's "Middle Eastern energy dependence," the real story remains unnoticed. That's why Casey Research invited the field's top experts – including former US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Chairman Emeritus of the UK Atomic Energy Authority Lady Barbara Judge – for a frank discussion of what we think is America's greatest energy challenge.

Join us on Tuesday, May 21 at 2 p.m. EDT for the premiere of The Myth of American Energy Independence: Is Nuclear the Ultimate Contrarian Investment? to learn how the end of "Megatons to "Megawatts" will affect the US energy sector and how you can position yourself for outsized profits. Attendance is free – click here to register.



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