Nothing to do with the fact that the Obama Administration authorized the export of Rosatom uranium to Europe, fraudster.
Barr says there's more reason to pursue that than the "Russian collusion" witch hunt.
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.
RSB Logistics’ current export license, which expires in December, still lists Uranium One as one of its suppliers of uranium.
Uranium One, which is now wholly-owned subsidiary of Rosatom, sells uranium to civilian power reactors in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration. But U.S. owners and operators of commercial nuclear reactors purchase the vast majority of their uranium from foreign sources. Only 11 percent of the 50.6 million pounds purchased in 2016 came from U.S. domestic producers, according to the EIA.
Although Uranium One once held 20 percent of licensed uranium in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S., that’s no longer the case. There were only four in-situ recovery facilities licensed by the NRC in 2010. Currently, there are 10 such facilities, so Uranium One’s mining operations now account for an estimated 10 percent of in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S., the NRC told us in an email.
As for production, the company was responsible for only about 11 percent of U.S. uranium production in 2014, according to 2015 congressional testimony by a Department of Energy contractor. More recently, Uranium One has been responsible for no more than 5.9 percent of domestic production, according to a September 2017 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission.
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The Hill story also rehashed an FBI investigation that resulted in “charges against the Russian nuclear industry’s point man in the United States, TENEX director Vadim Mikerin, as well as a Russian financier and an American trucking executive whose company moved Russian uranium around the United States.”
In 2015, Mikerin was sentenced to 48 months and required to pay more than $2 million in restitution for conspiring to commit money laundering, according to the Justice Department.
The Hill quoted the attorney for a former FBI informant in the TENEX case as saying her client “witnessed numerous, detailed conversations in which Russian actors described their efforts to lobby, influence or ingratiate themselves with the Clintons in hopes of winning favorable uranium decisions from the Obama administration.”
The convictions of Guryev and Mikerin are not new, and there’s no evidence that either case has any connection to the Rosatom-Uranium One merger. Nevertheless, the article has prompted the Republican chairmen of the House intelligence and oversight committees to announce a joint investigation of the merger.
On Fox News, Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said that “we’ve been communicating back and forth through different channels” with the FBI informant in the TENEX case.
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Update, Nov. 1: This story has been updated to say that NRC now estimates that Uranium One’s mining operations account for about 10 percent of in-situ recovery production capacity in the U.S. That’s half of what it was in 2010, because more in-situ recovery mining operators have been licensed since 2010.
We also added that Uranium One is responsible for no more than 5.9 percent of domestic production, according to a September 2017 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/facts-uranium-one/