On June 8, 2010, Uranium One
announced it had signed an agreement that would give “not less than 51%” of the company to JSC Atomredmetzoloto, or ARMZ, the mining arm of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency.
At the time, Uranium One’s two licensed mining operations in Wyoming amounted to about “20 percent of the currently licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S.,”
according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In-situ recovery is the extraction method currently used by
10 of the 11 licensed U.S. uranium producers.
Uranium One also has
exploration projects in Arizona, Colorado and Utah.
But the deal required multiple approvals by the U.S., beginning with the
Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. Under federal law, the committee
reviews foreign investments that raise potential national security concerns.
The Committee on Foreign Investments has nine members, including the secretaries of the treasury, state, defense, homeland security, commerce and energy; the attorney general; and representatives from two White House offices (the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy).
The committee can’t actually stop a sale from going through — it can only approve a sale. The president is the only one who can stop a sale, if the committee or any one member “recommends suspension or prohibition of the transaction,” according to
guidelines issued by the Treasury Department in December 2008 after the department adopted its
final rule a month earlier.
For this and other reasons, we have written that Trump is wrong to claim that Clinton “gave away 20 percent of the uranium in the United States” to Russia. Clinton could have objected — as could the eight other voting members — but that objection alone wouldn’t have stopped the sale of the stake of Uranium One to Rosatom.
“Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” the federal guidelines say.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
It is also important to note that other federal approvals were needed to complete the deal, and even still more approvals would be needed to export the uranium.
First, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to approve the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses in Wyoming from Uranium One to the Russian company. The NRC announced it approved the transfer on Nov. 24, 2010. But, as the NRC explained at the time, “no uranium produced at either facility may be exported.”
As NRC explained in a March 2011 letter to Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the Russian company would have to apply for and obtain an export license and “commit to use the material only for peaceful purposes” in accordance with “the U.S.-Russia Atomic Energy Act Section 123 agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation.”
In a June 2015 letter to Rep. Peter Visclosky, the NRC said it granted RSB Logistics Services an amendment to its export license in 2012 to allow the Kentucky shipping company to export uranium to Canada from various sources — including from a Uranium One site in Wyoming. The NRC said that the export license allowed RSB to ship uranium to a conversion plant in Canada and then back to the United States for further processing.
Canada must obtain U.S. approval to transfer any U.S. uranium to any country other than the United States, the letter says.
“Please be assured that no Uranium One, Inc.-produced uranium has been shipped directly to Russia and the U.S. Government has not authorized any country to re-transfer U.S. uranium to Russia,” the 2015 letter said.
“That 2015 statement remains true today,” David McIntyre, a spokesman for the NRC, told us in an email.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/facts-uranium-one/