Uranium

Goldman puts 'for sale' sign on Iran's old uranium supplier

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

(Reuters) - Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank are quietly trying to get out of a business few people know they are even in: trading supplies of raw uranium known as yellowcake.

In the last four years, the banks have amassed low-grade stockpiles of the nuclear fuel ingredient larger than those held by Iran, and enough to run China's nuclear plants for a year.

Goldman's uranium business can trace its roots back to an apartheid-era South African trading conglomerate that sold Iran its only known source of foreign yellowcake 35 years ago. To this day, that uranium delivery underpins Iran's disputed enrichment program, which western powers fear is aimed at developing atomic weapons, although Iran denies that.

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Uranium ban overturned

Friday, October 25, 2013

A narrow majority of the Greenlandic parliament passed a measure to overturn the country's ban on uranium mining.

By the slimmest of margins, Greenland’s parliament has passed a measure to overturn the country’s ban on uranium mining. Coalition partners Siumut and Atassut secured 15 votes in favour of the measure to end the ban, implemented in 1988. Fourteen voted against. Speaking in favour of overturning the ban, Greenland’s premier, Aleqa Hammond, said it was a matter of economic priorities.

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Burning ship had tonnes of radioactive material

Friday, May 17, 2013

After a freighter went up in flames at the start of the month while carrying radioactive material into Hamburg's harbour, it has emerged that the German port city receives such hazardous cargo up to seven times a month.

Fire fighters said they had only narrowly been able to prevent a catastrophe on May 1st when the freighter "Atlantic Cartier" caught fire - complete with its radioactive load.

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Secret UK uranium components plant closed over safety fears

Friday, January 25, 2013

A top-secret plant at Aldermaston that makes enriched uranium components for Britain's nuclear warheads and fuel for the Royal Navy's submarines has been shut down because corrosion has been discovered in its "structural steelwork", the Guardian can reveal.

The closure has been endorsed by safety regulators who feared the building did not conform to the appropriate standards. The nuclear safety watchdog demands that such critical buildings are capable of withstanding "extreme weather and seismic events", and the plant at Aldermaston failed this test.

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Areva confirms private investigator was hired

Saturday, January 21, 2012

A senior director at Areva, France’s state-owned nuclear champion, has confirmed that he did hire a Swiss intelligence firm to examine its disastrous €1.8bn purchase of a uranium miner but denied that it was part of a plot against Anne Lauvergeon, the company’s former chief executive.

Ms Lauvergeon, known as “Atomic Anne” after 10 years at the helm of one of the world’s leading nuclear manufacturers, shocked the French business and political elite this week when she accused her former employers of spying on her and claimed that she had been victim to a long-running “plot” to destabilise her, directed from the “highest levels of the state”.

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Tuareg Activist Takes on French Nuclear Company

Friday, November 12, 2010

For the past 40 years, the French state-owned company Areva has been mining uranium for Europe's nuclear power needs in Niger, one of the poorest countries on Earth. One local activist is taking on the company, claiming that water and dust have been contaminated and workers are dying as a result of its activities.

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Radiation leak at Germany's sole uranium enrichment facility

Sunday, January 24, 2010

An accident at Germany's sole uranium enrichment facility in North Rhine Westphalia has left one worker in hospital under observation.

The incident occurred at the plant in the town of Gronau, when a room in the uranium enrichment facility was accidently exposed to radioactive material. The worker was in the room when the accident occurred, and was taken to the hospital as a precaution. He is expected to be released Friday.

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Bitter row throws French nuclear industry into turmoil

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The French nuclear industry is in turmoil as uranium supplies have dried up and the treatment of spent fuel has been blocked amid an increasingly bitter row between the heads of its two main state operators.

EDF, the electricity group that runs 58 reactors in France, said that Areva, the nuclear energy group, had stopped uranium deliveries on January 4 and was refusing to take away spent fuel for reprocessing.

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The Coming Nuclear Crisis

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The world is running out of uranium and nobody seems to have noticed.

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German Company Sent Nuclear Material for Open-Air Storage in Siberia

Monday, November 9, 2009

The Western media reported last week on how the German company Urenco shipped nuclear material to Siberia, where the highly toxic waste was stored in containers in the open air. The company has stopped deliveries and will store the material with higher standards in Germany in the future.

The radiation warning sign was so small that few passers-by took note in the commuter rail station in Kapitolovo, Russia. Fifty-six steel canisters were sitting there on a summer day three years ago. Just a stone's throw away, people were waiting for trains to take them to downtown St. Petersburg.

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