law mattered not at all to the international cartel. market and divvied up the market among the members of the cartel, which they dubbed “The Club.” That these actions violated U.S. They created a marketing cartel designed to increase prices outside the restricted U.S. The foreign producers-governments themselves plus the multi-national, trans-governmental firm Rio Tinto Zinc-responded in the only way they thought they could. uranium market-the largest in the world-by erecting protectionist barriers to foreign suppliers. Finally, the AEC effectively denied foreign producers access to the U.S. The agency continued to deny potential customers access to the uranium market on their own, forcing them to transact their business through the U.S. Then, reacting awkwardly to the unintended consequences of its push for production at any price, the AEC furthered the reach of its government-created buyer’s monopoly. By first creating a glut of uranium in order to supply its burgeoning weapons program, the AEC produced a predictable result: a crash in prices that destroyed all but the biggest U.S. The Mary Kathleen papers kicked off a major political and foreign policy dispute involving virtually all of the uranium producers and users around the globe and straining relationships among the United States and some of its closest allies, including France, England, Australia, and Canada.Īs it turned out, the uranium cartel was a direct product of the misguided policies and practices of the Atomic Energy Commission with regard to the supply of uranium. The pages documented two years in the history of a worldwide government and industry cartel organized to manipulate the price of yellowcake on the world market. When Harding peeled off the wrapper, he discovered a trove of material from the files of Mary Kathleen Uranium, the only Australian uranium mining company at the time. “I had done a speaking tour there on uranium, so that’s probably how I came to their attention.” “I never really knew who in Australia had gotten it to me,” he said in an interview. Harding said later he didn’t know who in the Australian group decided to ship the papers to him. In Australia, the local chapter of Friends of the Earth asked Bridenbaugh to take the package to Harding, someone they trusted who was in a position where he could make use of the information. He was delivering it to Harding following a visit to Australia. Bridenbaugh had no idea what was in the package. Harding, a young resource economist who had previously worked for the feisty environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth, was an assistant to Ronald Doctor, an economist who served on the commission created by the state legislature in 1974 to serve as an antidote to the perceived industry bias of the California Public Utilities Commission.Īs Harding recalled thirty-five years later (unsure of the exact date of the transaction), he was in his office that morning when Dale Bridenbaugh, a nuclear engineer who had recently left General Electric with two other engineers in an anti-nuclear blast against their former employer, showed up with a two-inch-thick package wrapped in plain paper. It was an unremarkable day in Sacramento, California, when Jim Harding arrived at his office at the California Energy Commission in the summer of 1976. In this POWER exclusive, we present the 18th and 19th chapters, “The Great Uranium Conspiracy” and “Breeding at the Turkey Farm,” the final two chapters of the “False Scarcity and Fools for Fuels” section. Road to Atomic Energy implies, nuclear power has traveled a rough road. As the book title Too Dumb to Meter: Follies, Fiascoes, Dead Ends, and Duds on the U.S.
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