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.Ĭanada must obtain U.S. 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. 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.” But, as the NRC explained at the time, “no uranium produced at either facility may be exported.”Īs NRC explained in a March 2011 letter to Republican Sen. The NRC announced it approved the transfer on Nov. 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.įirst, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to approve the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses in Wyoming from Uranium One to the Russian company. matter,” he told the Times, referring to the committee by its acronym. Clinton never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. We don’t even know if Clinton was involved in the committee’s review and approval of the uranium deal. Jose Fernandez, a former assistant secretary of state, told the New York Times that he represented the department on the committee. “When a transaction is referred to the President, however, the decision of the President is announced publicly,” Treasury says. Some information would have become available if the committee or any one of its members objected to the sale.
We don’t know much about the committee’s deliberations because there are “strong confidentiality requirements” prohibiting disclosure of information filed with the committee, the Treasury Department says on its website. “Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” the federal guidelines say. 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.įor 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. The committee can’t actually stop a sale from going through - it can only approve a sale. 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 on Foreign Investments in the United States Under federal law, the committee reviews foreign investments that raise potential national security concerns. Uranium One also has exploration projects in Arizona, Colorado and Utah.īut the deal required multiple approvals by the U.S., beginning with the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States.
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.Īt 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. So we will recap here what we know - and don’t know - about the 2010 deal. Now, the issue is back in the news, and numerous readers have asked us about it again. uranium rights to the Russians and claimed - without evidence - that it was done in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. We covered it during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump falsely accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of giving away U.S.
The 2010 deal allowed Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency, to acquire a controlling stake in Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with mining stakes in the Western United States. Two House committees have said that they will investigate the Obama administration’s approval of a deal that gave Russia a financial interest in U.S.
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