The coup and U
What the military overthrowing the government in a top uranium producer means for nuclear energy. Plus U.S. nuclear deals and Fukushima water.
On July 26, a top general in the West African nation of Niger overthrew the elected president. The new junta promptly scrapped military deals with France. In the days that followed, supporters of the coup rallied in the capital Niamey to condemn the former European colonizer in part by shouting chants of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine Paris opposes.
The geopolitical contours of the event were broad and not easily pinned down. The United States, which has grown closer to Niger in recent years, is in the midst of building a giant military base for launching drone attacks across a Sahel region increasingly plagued by Islamist insurgencies. Russia, whose mercenary Wagner Group has become a powerful force in restive neighboring countries such as Mali, issued a public statement casting the coup as a win in its confrontation with the West.
But the implications were perhaps most acute for France, from which Niger gained independence in August 1960. For nearly half a century, the French state-backed firm now known as Orano has mined uranium there to power the fleet of nuclear reactors that provide most of the European country’s electricity. Europe is depending more than ever on France’s atomic energy as the continent seeks to cut back on Russian natural gas and make up for Germany’s widely-criticized decision to shut down its last nuclear plants in April.
Would Niger’s new military rulers cut off uranium exports? Or turn its vast deposits, which provided roughly 5% of the global supply of the metal last year, over to Russia and China?
Luckily for Europe, the answer to the first question – at least so far – is no. And even if it were yes, experts say it wouldn’t really matter anyway.
The reason why demonstrates one of the key advantages of nuclear power.
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Unlike oil and gas, which need to be constantly replenished with freshly-drilled fuel from countries who leverage hydrocarbons’ addictive nature for political ends (OPEC, anyone?), nuclear reactors only need to be refueled every few years and require a relatively small amount of uranium.
And far from quashing Western investment in its uranium industry, Niger is moving forward with a mine whose Canadian owners say will extract the highest-grade stuff in the entire continent of Africa.
I spoke with Bob Tait, the vice president of investor relations for the Toronto-based Global Atomic Corporation, who told me progress is continuing at the company’s Dasa project in central Niger. I also talked to France’s Orano, which said its lone remaining mine in Niger is operating normally. Orano defended its record in Niger, insisting it has cleaned up radioactive materials and helped find jobs of miners laid off when it closed a depleted uranium mine back in 2021.
The full story gets into some fascinating details of the uranium market, and how mining works in a country like Niger.
You can read it here on HuffPost.
A HALEU Mary
Mining uranium is just the first step in the process of making nuclear fuel. The next few are jealously guarded.
Few countries have the capacity to enrich uranium ore into uranium-235, the unstable isotope that splits apart more easily in a reactor to make energy. U-235 is rare in nature. So, to make fuel for traditional light-water reactors, uranium needs to be “enriched” to the point where up to 5% of the metal is U-235.
Even fewer countries produce the even rarer type of fuel needed to run a new generation of “fast” reactors like those being designed by the California startup Oklo Inc. and Bill Gates’ TerraPower. That fuel – called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU (pronounced HAY-loo) – is enriched up to 20%. And the Russian government is the only commercial vendor for the stuff.
That might not be true for long. The U.S. company Centrus Energy – which was born out of the Manhattan Project and became a private firm in 1992 – is preparing to start making HALEU at a facility in Piketon, Ohio. This week, in sign things are inching forward, Centrus made a big deal with Oklo.
This isn’t included in the story, but it’s been a big week for Oklo, which announced plans to provide power from its microreactors to the U.S. Air Force at its base in Alaska.
You can read more about the HALEU deal here on HuffPost.
WTFukushima?
You may have heard that the Japanese government began releasing radioactive water from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was an imminent danger.
For months, the Chinese government expressed outrage over the plans. So did South Korea, at least up until a few weeks before the pumping started, at which point Seoul admitted that any risk was “scientifically negligible.” And few were louder (or more sympathetic) than the Japanese fishermen who believed the releases would, if not actually cause danger to the seafood supply, do serious damage to the reputation of their exports.
The latter concern appeared well founded. In the lead up to the releases, Hong Kong banned imports of Japanese fish.
So, what’s the deal? Is the Pacific now irradiated with dangerous, cancer-causing isotopes?
The short answer is no. What is now flowing out of the Fukushima plant is water laced with a radioactive isotope of hydrogen known as tritium. This isotope, which has a short half life of about 12 years, is what remains after the cooling water keeping the melted-down reactors in the plant from overheating is filtered to remove the actually-dangerous radiation. Tritium, by contrast, is basically harmless. There is no recorded evidence that tritium causes cancer in humans. Though out of the abundance of caution that applies to anything nuclear, international laws strictly cap how much can be released into the environment far below what naturally occurs as a result of cosmic dust mixing with gasses in our atmosphere.
And while pumping this stuff into the ocean sounds sketchy, experts say it’s actually a safer way of dealing with the tritium, which could be more problematic if it were accidentally dumped all at once from storage tanks in the event of, say, another earthquake or tsunami like the one that triggered the Fukushima disaster in the first place.
Nuclear power plants emit small amounts of tritium all the time at levels indistinguishable from the natural amounts of tritium in the waterways. And China’s growing fleet of nuclear reactors release the stuff in far greater quantities than this one Japanese plant.
But never let a good propaganda opportunity go to waste.
I’ll be tracking the tritium releases from Fukushima going forward and will update you if we learn anything new, scary or otherwise.
For now, you can read the full story here on HuffPost.
“We are definitively pro-capitalism here. And I think the nuclear industry frankly hasn’t been for a very long time. So the question really becomes, how does capitalism and nuclear interact with each other?
“Because when I hear case studies from people that they want us to copy, I hear, ‘Hey Jigar, it’d be really good if the government just did everything and left the private sector out of it, and just let us make all the money on the backend.’ Or I hear, ‘Hey it’d be great if we could just have all the U.S. military bases do this for us so we didn’t have to do it in the utility sector.
“The Loan Programs Office rejects that as the central premise for how the nuclear industry should operate. We believe the nuclear industry is capable of being a professionally-run industry that actually knows how to construct things on time and on budget, and figures out how to do proper planning up front and integrated project-delivery models with their contracts. I do think the Loan Programs Office has more recently played a very useful role in slapping the nuclear industry silly and getting them to understand what it means to actually show real leadership. I think they were complaining like a small child six years ago”
- Jigar Shah, the director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, to Dr. Chris Keefer of the Decouple podcast
The U.S. should ditch France in Africa. If you aren’t already subscribed to An Africanist Perspective, the Substack by the Georgetown University African studies associate professor Ken Opalo, you really should. His work is regularly excellent. This recent piece on why the U.S. should dump the French colonial baggage from its policy toward West Africa in particular is timely and worth reading in light of the Niger news.
Not in my DAC-yard. Bloomberg reports that some neighbors of sites the Biden administration picked as hubs for direct air capture technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere really don’t want to be guinea pigs for this still experimental form of infrastructure.
All about the green. Construction firms tied to donors to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp are getting suspiciously good contracts from the Republican administration’s efforts to prop up major clean-energy projects in the Peach State, according to the American Prospect.
Wind in the sails. Per the BBC, shipping firm Cargill has commissioned a new type of cargo ship that harnesses the wind to propel itself, using technology developed for racing. It likely won’t replace bunker fuel anytime soon, but it’s a creative effort.
Property smothers. Struggling to recover from the work-from-home revolution of the pandemic era, the commercial real estate industry is now facing major problems getting insurance against mounting climate disasters, Heatmap reports.
Lithium shortage. The world could run short on the conductive metal needed for everything from electric car batteries to cellphones as early as 2025, according to an alarming new analyst note covered by CNBC.
Thank you for your time and attention. I hope my writing earned it. If not, maybe this music recommendation will. It’s by Florence Adooni, the self-declared “Queen of Frafra-Gospel,” whose banger of a hymn here is sung in the Frafra language:
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Signing off from sunny Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where McDonald’s is going retro, the empty flagship store that gave rise to the Century 21 empire is being reborn as an “urban retail landscape,” and the Uzbeks and Georgians are establishing themselves as a culinary force.