Teva Meyer is a researcher at CRESAT (the French Centre for Research on Economies, Societies, Arts, and Technologies) who is also associated with IRIS (the Institute for International and Strategic Relations). In this book [The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Industry: The Power and Might of a Dual Industry], he provides a comprehensive overview of the geopolitical implications of nuclear power, both civil and military.
Over four sections that break down the nuclear industry (from uranium mines to power plants, via enrichment and nuclear waste, not forgetting nuclear weapons), he demonstrates the important role played by nuclear power in international relations, despite its objectively limited relative presence: it represents 4 percent of global energy consumption (half as much as wood, for example), and arms expenditure on nuclear deterrence is marginal.
From the very first pages, through an analysis of the uranium market, Meyer deconstructs the myth of aspatial nuclear power. Just because its energy density seems to remove nuclear power from all geographical considerations, that does not mean that nuclear power is not strongly linked to geographical territories by other parameters.
Gaps between uranium production and resource requirements are the norm for nuclearized countries, and even more so for the major powers of China, Russia, and the United States (with 50 percent, 75 percent and 99 percent imported uranium respectively; 100 percent for France). Even in the chapter on ore and fuel, the line between civil and military nuclear power appears blurred: from 1996 to 2013, nuclear disarmament agreements (the Megatons to Megawatts program) resulted in the arrival on the US market of fuel equivalent to 153,000 metric tonnes of uranium, or eight years’ consumption.
The second part of the book is about enrichment: increasing the proportion of the isotope uranium-235 (0.7 percent of natural uranium) in relation to that of uranium-238. This is a crucial phase, without which uranium ore is useless, and a strategic one, since the output can be used for multiple purposes: energy (enriched to between 3 percent and 5 percent), research, use in naval propulsion or medicine (enriched to 20 percent), and finally military (enriched to over 90 percent). When talking about independence, it is therefore this phase that is often emphasized, rather than the origin of the ore, as it could also be a bottleneck — only eleven sites are capable of enriching natural uranium. These analyses of uranium ore and its enrichment exempli...
