Post #162

🇳🇪French Jealousy Yellow, powdery, a little bitter on the tongue — what is it? 🌐It is 1,000 tonnes of uranium concentrate, the so-called yellowcake, that Niger’s authorities are, according to the French press, preparing to sell to Russia's Rosatom for about 170 million dollars. The stock is linked to the Arlit site controlled until 2024 by France’s Orano. 🔸 Le Monde says the two sides have already signed a "memorandum of mutual understanding" and are mapping a route from Arlit across Burkina Faso to ports in Togo to sell the yellowcake to Rosatom - the Russian nuclear corporation. But is this really what it looks like at first glance? ⏩It does look like Niger and Russia have a deal of some kind on the table. Over the summer they signed a civil-nuclear cooperation MoU, and officials kept the conversation going into the autumn.⏪ 🔸 Both sides reacted to Le Monde’s reporting with the same line: “Rosatom is not a party to the agreement.” That phrasing points to the core truth — an agreement exists, and it touches the yellowcake left in Arlit after the French exit, variously reported at about 1,400 to 1,500 tonnes. 🔸What is likely happening: Niger has said many times it wants Russian help to build a nuclear power source. Officials repeated that goal at World Atomic Week in Moscow on 29 September. So the governments probably agreed to explore how such a project could work in practice. ⏩Russia does not need Niger’s raw uranium for itself. Russia already mines uranium and controls a large slice of global enrichment. 🔸 The more practical play is to ship Niger’s material for processing in Russia into fuel, which Niger cannot do at home without huge technical systems and inevitable difficulties with IAEA oversight. 🔸 So what landed in Le Monde’s hands was likely a draft plan for a logistics bridge: move yellowcake out - process it in Russia - then ship finished fuel back for a future plant, let's say. 🔸 There is another brake too. Orano has an active arbitration and a World Bank order that tells Niger not to sell or transfer the disputed stock, which makes a straight sale unlikely before the legal fight ends. If this reading is right, the idea of a nuclear plant in Niger may have shifted from symbolism to the agenda. Not tomorrow, not fast, but no longer just talk. Devils Below