Regardless of your stand on whether or not the Uranium One sale is a problem, you probably agree that it’s a bad idea to ship uranium that can be upgraded for weapons use out of America. One of the talking points the left is using to say that the Uranium One deal is not a problem is to say that since the uranium is not allowed to leave America, it really doesn’t matter who owns it. Well, it seems as if that is not the case.

Yesterday The Hill reported that uranium that can be upgraded for weapons use did leave the country.

The article reports:

“No uranium produced at either facility may be exported,” the NRC declared in a November 2010 press release that announced that ARMZ, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned Rosatom, had been approved to take ownership of the Uranium One mining firm and its American assets.

A year later, the nuclear regulator repeated the assurance in a letter to Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican in whose state Uranium One operated mines.  

…Yet NRC memos reviewed by The Hill show that it did approve the shipment of yellowcake uranium — the raw material used to make nuclear fuel and weapons — from the Russian-owned mines in the United States to Canada in 2012 through a third party. Later, the Obama administration approved some of that uranium going all the way to Europe, government documents show.

The article further reports:

NRC officials told The Hill that Uranium One exports flowed from Wyoming to Canada and on to Europe between 2012 and 2014, and the approval involved a process with multiple agencies.

Rather than give Rosatom a direct export license — which would have raised red flags inside a Congress already suspicious of the deal — the NRC in 2012 authorized an amendment to an existing export license for a Paducah, Ky.-based trucking firm called RSB Logistics Services Inc. to simply add Uranium One to the list of clients whose uranium it could move to Canada.

The license, reviewed by The Hill, is dated March 16, 2012, and it increased the amount of uranium ore concentrate that RSB Logistics could ship to the Cameco Corp. plant in Ontario from 7,500,000 kilograms to 12,000,000 kilograms and added Uranium One to the “other parties to Export.”

The move escaped notice in Congress.

Please follow the link above to The Hill to read the entire article. It details how things were done to avoid attracting the attention of Congress and to avoid Congress exercising the oversight role it should have played in this series of transactions.