By Marin Katusa, Chief Energy Investment Strategist, Casey Research
With Valentine’s Day coming up fast and furious, I wanted to take a moment to give heartfelt thanks to one of my personal heroes this year—the man who single-handedly destroyed US national security and will give smart uranium investors a lot to be grateful for in the coming months. This letter is addressed to him.
Dear President Obama (may I call you Barry?),
I’m writing this letter to you in sincere appreciation and heartfelt gratitude for your achievements regarding national security and the uranium sector.
Perhaps you wonder what on earth national security could have to do with uranium (unless it is used in those pesky nuclear weapons that you keep taking away from the mullahs).
In fact, I bet you do wonder, because apparently it never occurred to you that one could depend on a ready supply of the other.
But let’s take this one step at a time.
I know you’re used to receiving information on the state of the union from your slew of sycophantic advisors in the form of tidbits and sound bites, so I’ll try not to overwhelm your fragile cerebrum.
Please take a look at the facts listed below, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll begin to dawn on you…
7 Facts You Should Know About Uranium in America
Amount of electricity in the United States generated by nuclear power: 20%.
Number of homes in President Obama’s America that are powered by the Russians: 1 in 10.
Number of homes in President Kennedy’s America that were powered by the Russians: 0.
Percentage of imported uranium in President Obama’s America: over 90%.
Percentage of imported uranium in President Kennedy’s America: 0%.
In 1962, the US was the largest producer of uranium in the world.
In 2013, the US ranked #8 in uranium production, right after China.
But let’s not stop there. To fully understand in what way national security and uranium might be linked (except that they both share some of the same vowels and consonants), I need to insert a brief…
History of the DOE
Believe it or not, but it was good old Albert Einstein who was the catalyst for the creation of what’s known as the US Department of Energy (DOE) today. In 1939, seeing that the Germans had an alarming head start in the nuclear race, Einstein wrote a letter to your predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt, alerting him to that fact.
We know the rest from the textbooks: In 1939, Germany invaded Poland… in 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor… and within two months, in 1942, Roosevelt instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to build a nuclear bomb—the start of the Manhattan Project. The US dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, and in August of 1945, Japan surrendered.
The beginning of the Cold War led to the creation of the DOE.
In 1946, the US presented a plan for international control of nuclear research at the United Nations summit. The Soviet Union completely rejected the American proposal, launching the race for the nuclear bomb between the two superpowers.
After World War II, the Manhattan Project was turned over to the Atomic Energy Commission, which by the late 1940s had invested hundreds of billions of dollars into expanding the weapons complex.
By 1973, OPEC caused chaos at the pumps for Americans, and President Nixon announced an energy plan of independence for the US by 1980 (the first of many announced by subsequent presidents; I wonder why they never worked out).
Nixon created the Federal Energy Administration, and in 1974, his successor, Gerald Ford, signed the Federal Energy Reorganization Act. Like most political promises, the program failed to deliver, and by the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was facing high oil prices and low approval ratings.
President Carter created the Department of Energy, and nine days before Elvis Presley died of a heart attack, James Schlesinger was sworn in as the first secretary of energy.
I know, Barry, you’ve been impatiently shifting around in your seat, waiting for the punchline. Okay, now this is where you come in…
President Obama Makes Changes to the DOE
Perhaps you know that since its inception, the Department of Energy has been the largest holder of uranium in the world. The DOE’s mandate for uranium was a strategic one, and the essential goal—as an issue of national security—was for the US and its citizens to never become dependent on another nation for uranium.
All the DOE had to do was follow two simple rules for sales to the US utilities that required uranium to power American households. Here they are:
- Never sell more than 10% of domestic demand into the market per year.
- Never sell uranium at such a low price that it would sabotage domestic uranium production.
Enter you, Mr. President, Barack Obama. You rode your campaign horse to victory on slogans like “Yes we can” and “It’s about time. It’s about change.”
Unfortunately, you forgot to mention that rather than change American politics, you were about to short-change the American people.
Why, oh why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone? Every US president before you had obeyed those two rules I mentioned above—Republican or Democrat, from Truman to Kennedy to even George W. Bush.
In mid-2013, you, Barry, apparently not understanding the importance of national energy security, changed the law and dropped the two rules. (We’ve been writing about this for a while now, so thanks for providing us with editorial material too.)
Since your advisors obviously did such a dismal job explaining it to you, maybe we can help.
How You Destroyed the US Uranium Sector—and US National Security
You see, the DOE built up its strategic stockpile of uranium from domestic production to make sure that the nuclear power generation that is so vital for the United States’ supply of electricity was never at risk. (The US is the world’s largest consumer of uranium and makes up about 25% of the global demand.)
All the presidents before you, Barry, followed the two sacred rules because the Russians, due to their Soviet legacy assets, can produce uranium at much lower prices than the Americans. Therefore, it is crucial to keep domestic production economic and competitive.
However, your recent job numbers didn’t look so good, did they—so you decided to milk the nuclear sector in order to create jobs and raise $250 million for the reclamation of old nuclear sites.
(You never openly stated this, but we found out anyway. It was easy, you see—to figure out your agenda, all we had to do was work backwards through the nuclear chain and look at the companies the DOE approved for the clean-up jobs, because these companies have announced their work programs for the next few years. Nice try there, Mr. President.)
So to get your $250 million—do we still count in millions, by the way? I thought everything under a billion was viewed as chump change these days—you made the DOE sell significantly more uranium into the market than ever before in the history of the United States.
And of course your timing couldn’t have been worse. Namely, you decided to do this right after the Japanese started selling record amounts of uranium after the Fukushima incident, and the wave of uranium hitting the market dropped the spot price from over US$72/lb to US$34/lb… a more than 50% drop within 24 months.
Well, you got what you wanted: with the spot price slashed in half, 95% of all US uranium production is now uneconomic. That means the miners are losing money and the higher-cost producers will soon go bankrupt.
Thanks to your tireless efforts, the former “Land of the Free” is now a junkie dependent on Russian uranium supplies for its next fix. And the nice Mr. Putin, whose country was America’s sworn enemy not too long ago (remember that?), now essentially controls 10% of the entire US electricity matrix.
Which proves again that with friends like you, Barry, one can make do quite easily without enemies.
So why exactly am I writing you a thank-you letter?
Well, as a community organizer, you wouldn’t know such things, but you see, the cure for low prices is low prices.
Less uranium production = less supply = higher price. So thanks to you, the shares of first-class uranium explorers and producers now really have nowhere to go but up. Well done!
You may have endangered the welfare of your entire nation for the foreseeable future, but from an investor’s viewpoint, you deserve a ton of chocolate truffles. Because you have single-handedly created—oh, just the…
Greatest Investment Opportunity in Uranium EVER
So, thank you, dear Mr. President, because your loss is my gain.
Oh, come on now, no need to hide your face in shame. After all, this is not the first time government stupidity has set up an incredible opportunity to make a fortune—you’re in very good company.
Thanks to your stunning incompetence, I wouldn’t be surprised if you handed me and my Casey Energy Report subscribers a double or triple on our investments.
So I close my letter with the warmest wishes for the rest of your presidency. May you never change.
Yours in deep gratitude,
Marin Katusa
Now to you, dear readers: If you want to find out the true extent of the windfall my dearest friend, Mr. Obama, has so kindly provided for us, you should give the Casey Energy Report a try today.
The current issue is all about the latest and greatest opportunities in uranium investing, and in our article “Making the Grade,” we’ll take you to the richest uranium deposit in the world and tell you all about the company that’s in the best position to be successful there.
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