A few days ago the French upstaged the US mighty nuclear reactor construction industry under our very noses in broad daylight making us appear as Homer Simpson napping at the control plant of Mr. Burns’ atomic energy plant in Springfield. Most of the media never mentioned the event. Only one gave it token coverage hidden on pg. A13 without realizing its true significance.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy signed a landmark deal with the Indian Government to sell billions of dollars of nuclear reactors and fuel for the next 25 years, while the US is battling in hard economic times, beset by unemployment to maintain a grip on India’s extremely profitable and growing nuclear industry. The French, Japan, Korea and China are actively building reactors. In fact India, desires to develop nuclear electricity as a cleaner alternative to coal based energy to satisfy India’s increasing needs. India is on record of having about 4560 Megawatts of nuclear power now, but desires to multiply that approximately 14 times by 2032. French President Sarkozy recently returned from Mumbai saying that the Nuclear Agreements are “very favorable to the French Nuclear Industry.” Moreover the French are building a state of the art, new generation nuclear reactor in Finland.
The United States is constantly laboring to court India’s very profitable and blossoming nuclear energy industry. President Sarkozy has invaded the marketplace which has been historically commanded by America. Admittedly, it is important to protect polar bear habitats, but simultaneously we should defend a sector in which we were pioneers going way back to the Manhattan Project led by Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer and Meitner. These visionaries were thrown out of the “Fatherland” because they espoused a new physics that was antagonistic to the classical German rocket technology. This erroneous decision was later regretted by the Nazis as they failed in the race to build “the a-bomb.”
There is another major crisis over the near term. America is one of the largest users of uranium and a lot of the uranium comes from Russia. More than 90% of uranium consumed in this country is imported. However, that program with Russia is coming to an end by the end of 2013 and the U.S. will need to find alternate supplies. Time to wake up, Homer.
The readers of my newsletter were notified back in October to build positions in the promising uranium mining sector especially domestic assets and specifically assets found in Wyoming. Wyoming is a mining friendly jurisdiction and there are a lot of miners nearing production.
