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U.S.-Russia: HEU Parties Agree to Float Pricing The U.S. State Department announced yesterday that the United States and Russia have agreed to use a market-based mechanism to price U.S. purchases of uranium taken from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons (see GSN, Feb. 27). “The new market-based pricing mechanism will provide a stable and predictable procedure for implementing the [highly enriched uranium] HEU Agreement on a commercial basis that will obviate the need for periodic renegotiation to reflect changing market conditions,” State spokesman Richard Boucher said (U.S. State Department release, June 19). Under the new agreement, the market-based pricing mechanism will begin Jan. 1, according to the Wall Street Journal. U.S. Enrichment Corp, the sole U.S. purchaser of enriched uranium under the HEU deal, will buy nuclear fuel derived from 30 metric tons of weapon-grade uranium annually. To minimize the effects of short-term changes, USEC will use an index of U.S. and international spot-market uranium prices, the Journal reported. The previous fixed-price mechanism had caused problems for USEC because the price of uranium had markedly decreased over the last half of the 1990s, according to the Journal. “Resolving price issues with Russia for about half of our product supply is a key step in strengthening our core business,” said USEC President and Chief Executive Officer William Timbers (see GSN, June 19; John Fialka, Wall Street Journal, June 20).
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