re: uranium to be more expensive given time
Thanks Bresvegas
USEC to lose sole Russian uranium rights - Rosatom Sat Jul 15, 2006 11:39am ET Email This Article | Print This Article | Reprints [-] Text [+] By Christian Lowe
ST PETERSBURG, Russia, July 15 (Reuters) - U.S. uranium trader USEC Inc. (USU.N: Quote, Profile, Research) will lose its exclusive right to import Russian nuclear fuel to the United States by 2009 at the latest, Russia's atomic energy chief said on Saturday.
Sergei Kiriyenko said an agreement on civil nuclear cooperation announced by U.S. President George W. Bush and Russia's President Vladimir Putin contained a clear mandate for the U.S. government to end the monopoly.
If that does not happen, Russia will seek to overturn the monopoly in the courts anyway, said Kiriyenko.
Bush and Putin, meeting on the eve of a Group of Eight summit in Russia's second city of St Petersburg, issued a statement on Friday on civil nuclear cooperation.
It included a line that the two sides recognised the benefit of a commercial trade in civil nuclear material and technology.
"As far as getting rid of monopoly intermediaries is concerned, (that is) the magic phrase," Kiriyenko, head of the Rosatom agency, told a news briefing. "That is all we need."
He said Russian officials were in "active negotiations today" with the office of the U.S. Trade Representative on ending the USEC monopoly.
"By my estimates the process will take two or three years. If we take the negotiated route it can be resolved more quickly, in the course of this year. If in the courts it will be resolved in the course of two or three years."
Under a programme known as "megatons to megawatts", the United States imports uranium recovered from Russian nuclear weapons that have been dismantled in line with arms reduction treaties signed at the end of the Cold War.
The recovered material is used to fuel U.S. nuclear power stations. Washington has given USEC exclusive rights to import that uranium.
Anti-dumping tariffs that the U.S. government imposed on Russian nuclear fuel in the 1990s make importing any other uranium from Russia prohibitively expensive. The recovered uranium is exempt from those tariffs.
"A monopolist go-between ... is not liberal, it is not (consistent with) a market economy," Kiriyenko said.
"We want to sell direct to American companies at a fair price and American companies want to buy from us openly and under market conditions."
Russian state nuclear firm Techsnabexport, also known as Tenex, said last week it had filed a petition in a U.S. trade court challenging a decision to prolong anti-dumping measures against Russian nuclear materials
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