 Welcome this morning. We have a special treat for you. We are unrolling a website, unveiling a website, that we have developed in conjunction with Cindy Vestegard and the Danish Institute for International Studies. And so we're very excited and pleased to share this with you. Before I start introductions and everything else, may I remind you to turn your cell phone ringers off? And this is webcast for those of you who are joining us via the web. First, I just want to give thanks to our whole external relations team and the folks who, even though their names may, I don't know if they appear on the website, but this is really their baby. And that's Paul France, Johnny Harris, Beverly Kirk, Allie Boers, and the rest of our ER team. They did a fantastic job. Cindy Vestegard is going to walk us through the website. She is the creator, not only of this website, but also the project as a whole governing uranium. And then we also have, we're pleased to have Melissa Mann with us today, who's president of Urenco USA, Inc. For those of you who know a little bit something about the uranium business, you know that Melissa's not involved in uranium, but she's a user of uranium. Urenco is a uranium enrichment consortium. So, and then we'll have a short discussion and open the floor up to questions. But for Cindy, we'd be very happy to have Cindy as a visiting fellow a little while back here at CSIS. While we were working on this uranium project together with her, she's a senior researcher in Copenhagen at the Danish Institute of International Studies and formerly with the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is also a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention Coalition. You may have seen some of her work on the CSIS website on the CWC and Syria, for example, and also a member of our Fissile Materials Working Group. Melissa has been in the nuclear business for a long time. We're not gonna say how long, but she's an expert and a wonderful colleague and she has really not only knowledgeable about the ins and outs of industry finances, but also on the nonproliferation end of it, including an export control. So I'm gonna turn over the floor now to Cindy who will introduce this project. Great, thank you so much. And it's always a pleasure to be back at CSIS. We have a lot of fun when we're here. So I'm looking forward to this morning. And also I wanna also extend my huge gratitude to those at the back of room, Paul and Allie and the team, because this is their creation. They took this data and created this. So why don't we start with the intro video and then we'll take it from there? These three questions, where does uranium come from? How is it processed and shipped? How is it protected and regulated? These are the three questions that the website attempts to answer. So therefore it's meant to be an education and information tool. There is no promotional message. It's up to the reader to decide if they're for or against mining or uranium or the nuclear energy or power. This is not our objective. Our objective is to provide this platform of information. And I think it's quite jam-packed. So I'll take you through the parts where the user can really benefit from what the various tools and chapters that are there. And basically it becomes this one-stop shop specifically for uranium security, if we could call it that, and safeguards. The target audience therefore is the general public, certainly, civil society, media. And again, trying to provide this kind of neutral platform for this information. And also for new suppliers who are entering the nuclear fuel cycle. One of the things with the project, which I'll introduce here in a second, is that we have found a lot of new suppliers, particularly who come to the fuel cycle, have no nuclear legislation in place at all. So they're kind of building everything from scratch. And their understanding of what is involved at the international level, even though it's limited, there are requirements. And so this is also one of those platforms to be able to help them, at least with the initial understanding of what everything could be required. So this is an interactive format for the governing uranium project, which was launched in January 2013. It's a two and a half year project. It's led by DEES, the Danish Institute for International Studies, and it involves up to 25 researchers globally. So CSIS, for example, did the US country report. We have in total, actually, seven of the nine facto and de facto nuclear weapon states country reports being done. The only two we have not being done is Israel and North Korea, for obvious reasons, I do think. Not that actually we didn't try for a couple of them, but we kind of knew where they were gonna go. So all of those reports have actually been published. There's just one on Pakistan that's still yet to be published. India was just published three weeks ago. And then there's also, and we're looking in total at 15 countries, producing and consuming states. So along with the seven possessors of nuclear weapons, we're also looking at major producers, such as Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, smaller ones such as Brazil. And Africa, we have Tanzania, Malawi, South Africa and Namibia. There was talk about whether we should go into Niger, but there were a lot of security concerns for researchers to go. One of the things that is important for the research is field visits and being in country. So the, for example, with the possessors of nuclear weapons, like CSIS, but also France, Russia, it is done by researchers in those countries. Also for language purposes, but archives. And so it's very much across and brings in this global network of research. The project is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. We received $600,000 from the MacArthur Foundation. Huge thank you to them for recognizing that the front end of the fuel cycle rocks. We do like our puns and I'm not going to apologize for them. And also in part funded by the Danish Institute for International Studies as well. And for my, just a kind of a quick background, Greenland is also a big issue for us because it is a new supplier, even though it's within Denmark. It is looking at potentially mining. So a lot of the things that we're doing internationally do have domestic benefits within the kingdom of Denmark. So this is an interactive format taking this research. Basically, it was kind of like a data dump to the external services group here. And they were able to take all this wonderful facts and information and chunk it down into a variety of graphics and photos, stories, pop-ups, little kind of case studies that pop up. Can we walk through that now? Yes, I want to take us through first to the China, to the China one. So for example, oh, sorry, the supply one. So one of the things we also try to do is show how the market shifts, market shift. This isn't to show any kind of fear factor or anything, it's just to show how they shift over time. And this is the current shift we're in. So Kazakhstan has taken over as the largest supplier in the world, Canada is now number two, Australia three. If we were to flip this on the number of resources, Australia would be first, for example, but they only mine. They don't mine all of their resources. Can we, let me just take a quick poll. How many of you know a lot about uranium in this audience? Well, okay, well, so that's about half, but for the other half, what kind of, just big picture uranium, what's the market in terms of, or production? And you can see from this graphic that there's a lot concentrated in just a handful of countries. Yes, that's true. And Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan, as you can see, it's way more than 50%. We're talking, if you do the math. But, and then we have these smaller ones. And this has been shifting and also the spot price has really kind of shifted as well over time. So since 2007, we had this, I would call it a bubble that went up and we had around $137 for a spot price of U-308. Per pound. Per pound, yeah, per pound. This is also one of the things I should highlight. We do at times get a mix between short tons, metric tons, pounds, U-308, uranium ore concentrate and ore. And so if there's any clarification there, please. Or if you see a mistake on this website, let us know. Please. It might have slipped through the cracks. And it's actually been something we've actually had a challenge with across all the boards. But basically here, so there is shifting and then we have these new suppliers. So maybe we could use Malawi as an example here, Paul, for a second. The little beautiful graph, yeah. Malawi is the world's newest supplier. They entered in 2009. As you can see, incredibly small country. And same thing there. They actually, they would be a case study in what not to do to start off with. They actually started mining before they had nuclear legislation in place. And the Malawians will say, that's not what you should do. It creates a lot of cost and redoing things that you can do from the beginning. So they started in 2009. In 2011, they put in their legislation. And within a year or two, they actually became, they went from zero to the 10th largest supplier. So this is just an example of how things are shifting. With the low spot price, however, Malawi then, the mine that they had went on care and maintenance last year, 2013, yeah. For the new suppliers, are they doing them themselves or are foreign companies coming in? All of this is foreign companies. So Malawi, it's actually an Australian company called Paladin that came in there. Malawi also has, I think it's about 10 different countries doing exploration. Now, a lot of times exploration will be done by a variety of different foreign entities, but then they will sell to whether majors or kind of a medium company in the Paladin case. Sometimes you do have junior companies that want to become medium over time. If we can just go to China, then I can show how, also what's happening and if this idea of a nuclear renaissance, if we talk about that. So China is a fascinating case as well. It's hungry for more uranium, and that's because it's producing a lot of more plants. And what's interesting about China is that it has actually kind of exploded in terms of its number, sorry for that term, for its number of power reactors since 2000. So they had six and then now they've increased by 90% up to 20. They currently have 28 reactors that are being constructed with another 50 to be planned down the line. So their current need for uranium supply is around 4,000 tons at the moment, and metric tons per year, and they need up to 10,000. Oh, we need to change those tons on that, just as a note. And then they need up to 10,000 tons by 2020 and then so on, even increasing more when they get another additional on. And they're looking for that uranium abroad? And mostly in Africa. Everywhere, everywhere, right. Right now, the world's newest mine that's being currently under construction is Husab, and that'll be the world's largest second mine. And that one, actually, there was discussion about that it's not following market price. They need the uranium hits, and it's going to be a massive mine. And that is in Namibia. In Namibia. And so these are the kinds of case studies, and as Paul had kind of shown before, when you click on, you can get these little pop-ups, and there'll be a paragraph or two of basic information about how the market has shifted in that little country and what is the main nuggets that kind of pop up from the research. So the first chapter goes through production and consumption, as we're showing here, how the market has shifted over time. The second one is what we call the pit to port. Now it is meant to be illustrative because some uranium goes pit to conversion facility and do not have a port in between, but pit to port is basically to show how uranium travels along within the fuel cycle and then actually goes from the mine and the mill to conversion refining and the conversion facility. And this is where we highlight too that there are five countries in the world that have commercial conversion facilities, so everything has to go to these facilities. And we'll just take you through a transport example. This is one of the longest transport, and this is from Australia, and it starts off in Olympic Dam, and then it goes through multimodal road and rail to Adelaide, stops over in Auckland, and then goes to Fiji and onwards and goes to Canada and Australia, sorry, Canada and US, and then goes by road, by truck, to either Blind River for the refining or to Metropolis, which is the only conversion facility in the United States. That is 20,000 kilometres right there, or around 12,500 miles. That is actually not the longest transport route. The longest transport route was actually from Australia to Russia. And because it didn't go this way, it went this way. So it was, I can't remember the actual kilometres, but that was the longest that was ever done, and that's, we've only done that once, Australians have only done that once. But otherwise in Africa, for example, they travel by truck to Port, and there we're talking around 2,000 kilometres there. So they do travel incredibly long distances, these drums, and they go through a variety of transfer of authorities, and so this is also what we're trying to highlight that there is physical protection in place. Industry does use what we call prudent management practices when it comes to securing these drums, also safely securing them, and making sure that they get to Port that they're sealed and tracked along the route. So that is an incredibly important thing, I think that we highlight with them, not only in the website, but also what we have found within the research. Then we have the next chapter, basically goes through what we call order bomb. It is very much focused on nuclear weapons, who has them talking about testing, so that we do have that component in there that because the focus is security and non-proliferation on the site, we want to make sure that we also highlight that the public is aware of what the different relation, what is this all material, for example, and then taking them through that. The fourth one is where we get into non-proliferation and safeguards, and this is probably the most dense in terms of wording, and you can't really do a picture of safeguards, right? I mean, you have that, exactly, or maybe update that for an IAE inspector, but that's kind of boring, I guess, for a lot of people, but safeguards, what we've been finding in the project is that because the international regulation over guidance over the very front end of the fuel cycle up into conversion is very limited, and particularly the new suppliers are having a challenge with understanding what these reporting requirements are or even that they even exist, and they are minimal. It's a basic reporting requirement, but the IAEA is also in the process of moving what we call the starting point of safeguards further forward into the front end, so this has huge implications. The first moving, the line happened in 2003, and so whereas before you had to report only exports and imports of yellow cake, let's call it yellow cake, uranium or concentrates, what was coming in and what was leaving the country, that had to be reported to the IAEA. In 1997, the additional protocol came along and then there was more reporting on how many mines you had, what was their capabilities, capacities, which ones were shut, which ones were operating, these kinds of things. Then the IAEA in 2003 moved it further forward and said basically captured urinal nitrate, which is in the conversion process, so whereas before it would be considered the product of the conversion process, now it's moving further forward into the conversion itself, so this has huge implications actually for Canada. The Blind River facility for the first time became fully captured by IAEA safeguards. Now the IAEA is even looking at bringing it further forward and this could and will have a potential on the product of mills, so they will then start to having to be under full material accountancy and control, not just reporting of how they're moving between countries, but actually the full accountancy that goes with it and that will capture a lot more facilities than what happened in 2003. So this is also an attempt to try to get that further forward moving or understanding as to what this means. And the reason why we focus on security and safeguards, why safety isn't on here for example, safety there is a lot of information already out there on and we are non-proliferation walks in the project and because non-proliferation and security issues hadn't really been looked at at the front end. And when we're looking at nuclear security it's about the entire fuel cycle, not just highly enriched uranium or waste, it's about having a culture of course that goes across and also understanding the requirements. And the IAEA is also looking at and has developed a technical guidance on how to apply prudent management practice to the very front end of the fuel cycle. So this is kind of where this all comes together, that's any questions that kind of come out of the safeguards? Part before I just say what we wanna do with it next. Well I think there's a perfect lead in to let Melissa, so one of the questions that I have as you're talking about expanding safeguards is there are certain financial implications of that and business, it affects business practices. I think one of the things that you talk about most often in the uranium market is what is the price of uranium today? And I mean it is tracked in some cases by the hour. So the people who do uranium sales are just, they live and die around that price. And so the price today is just a little over $38 per pound. That tells you that some of the mining resources that are in the ground are not going to be economically mined at that price. You know when we saw the price spike up to the $130, $150 per pound level there was uranium coming out of everywhere. Everybody thought they had a lively pit that they were going to exploit. So when you get down to the current market prices and the market really is in what we would call the slump. Any additional perceived cost means that those pounds are going to stay in the ground. And so you have mines that are only economical at, maybe it's $20 per pound, maybe it's $40 per pound. In some cases it's $70 and higher. And so I think on the mining side there's a concern that if you start adding additional regulatory requirements beyond those they already have, that that just further hinders the ability to develop that resource. So that's the first I think bit of anxiety that you might get around this changing regime. I also think that part of the industry has missed that transition in some ways. Those of us who deal with fissile material in the industry have lived and breathed safeguards controls from day one. Uranium has been, it's been given a lesser regulatory level over the years. You talk about prudent management versus actual physical protection, more stringent safeguard measures. As that starts to shift there's an element of education that has to be done even within our industry. I think we're finally seeing the uranium miners starting to understand what the additional protocol looks like. What does material control and accountancy look like? What does it involve? How do you do it? And that's a fairly arcane bit of regulatory practice. So one question that comes to mind, today we can take our cell phones and walk into a supermarket and scan things. So information technology has gone crazy, right? So will that make any of this kind of accounting easier or cheaper or, and understanding that uranium mining in some countries is really kind of very atavistic. I mean, they're miners, right? They're not high, not all of it's quite high tech. I think one of the observations I'd make about uranium, it's different from the balance of the nuclear fuel cycle in several ways. One, you might have five converters, you have five major enrichers, you have slightly more fuel fabricators, but you've got literally just tens and tens and tens of mines and mining companies all over the world. So you've got a different volume of entities that you're trying to capture and educate. A lot of those companies, uranium is not their primary business. It's a byproduct of copper mining or some other commodity-based business that they have. And so uranium is a sideline at best and maybe not one where those people are not steeped in what the nuclear industry is and all these other things that come along with it. And the other fact is it's just, it's where it's located, it's in the ground. This is not something that you get the technology for and you go and build where you think you need it. It is where it is, and then you've got to get it to somewhere else. So you take all of that and then you start to add on the additional layer. It's a little hard for some of these mining companies to figure out, well, how do I do that? And why isn't it just, I think you said, send you a commodity like every other commodity, like cantaloupe or selenium or copper or something like that. And this is one of the things we come across with the industry as well is that why isn't, we want uranium to be treated like any other commodity, but it's the only commodity that's regulated internationally. Because it does make nuclear weapons. This is not something you can get away from. And it's what regulators of course are have to have oversight on and it's not just the environmental and safety sides of things, but it's also making sure that this goes to where it is supposed to go for peaceful purposes. And that is an incredibly important part. And just on the technology side of things, I was surprised at a variety of different sites, not all of them certainly, that it still works in a ledger system. And even with the reporting requirements for the imports and exports, it's actually been faxes to the regulator and then the regulator has to take it and put it into a different system and then that goes to the IAEA. And that has just been starting to be addressed. And these reporting requirements have been around since 1972. So it's, well, depending on the country of course, but so, I mean, we are a long way behind, I think, on getting the technology to come up to be able to facilitate inventory controls in a much more efficient way and it will reduce costs. I mean, Michelle, one of the things we look at from the information side is tracking. I mean, you look at that for the material that we ship, both natural uranium that's been entrusted to us by our utility customers and our actual low enriched uranium product that we're delivering to our utilities. And there are ways to track that, but one of the things to recognize is that the transport environment is actually a fairly hostile one. These containers are being put on ships out in the ocean and you may think, well, you get RFID tags and I see them in all sorts of other products. They don't do very well, transversing across the oceans and across cold environments and they don't really withstand some of the conditions that you get in the processing plant themselves. Those are largely optional requirements at the moment in many cases and they're not cheap. I mean, we spend a tremendous amount of money tracking our shipments. We do that, it's an extra regulatory determination by our company because we think it's worthwhile because it's a very expensive, valuable product in addition to having the security implications. And in some cases, we're trying to make sure we're gonna not lose somebody's material on route. But not everybody has the ability or the finances at hand to do that. Right. So before I open it up to all of your questions, I have to ask this, Cindy. So what's the coolest piece of information that you found in this? I mean, we found some interesting things in our governing uranium in the United States report, but as you look across, the great thing about this website is it makes uranium sexy, right? So what are some of the kind of most interesting things you didn't know about before you started this project? Oh, I didn't know a lot. I think entering the front end is something that we kind of think, well, it comes out of the ground and then it gets processed and then we become interested because then it becomes more of a proliferant issue. But I think what, well, one, actually how a professional, the majority of these sites are. And also how open industry, to be honest, has been very welcoming opening their doors for us to come to these facilities, see refining plants, mills. And so there hasn't been any kind of veil that comes over as soon as we're knocking on doors and sending emails. There has been a little bit of skepticism to start off with and but then once they realize that we're trying to understand and not rank and not condemn and it's about understanding how things are governed particularly since the IEA is starting to move forward. So we need a baseline. I think the, I mean, the tracking part and it's probably more the gaps that come out. The tracking part, for example, one conversion facility, when these drums come into conversion, they can hang out there for five to 10 years before they get fed. So, and like I said, like it's just like a sticker with a marker written what's in the drum. And so after five to 10 years, that gets weathered away. So while there, of course, there is a reconciliation when a drum comes into a conversion plant and everything gets reconciled and it's all good in the books, when it comes time to actually feed that material, they might, they won't know what it is because it's been rubbed off. And I think that is something that industry should be concerned about. It's not just a matter of once it gets through the gate and then okay, we're done. The responsibility does keep going further down. And actually what I was very, what was cool to see is how this one conversion facility is trying to do a pilot project to be able to change that approach because obviously it has an impact on their business, particularly if you're feeding flagged material. And then just going to these facilities, I mean the size, the scale and how they work in these incredible environments. And it is kind of a, what would you call it, conveyor belt system, right? I mean, it does work incredibly well and they're very proud to talk about their work and how they do it safely and securely. It's been a pleasure to actually be working with them throughout the whole thing, okay? What's next for this website? Well, this is the starting point for this. As we do not have a safety and environmental side, it's something we have been told would be great, a lot of suggestions for using that. So it is going to remain static for about a year. It is updated up until basically December last year. I need to get more money. Funding is always an issue. And then we'll add a, and as you can see, I mean we can, the way that CSIS Ideas Lab has put it together is that we can build on this. So a safety and environmental side and then also to really build up the safeguards information and take that forward. So I think as of starting next year around this time or March-ish and then going for a year, year and a half, two years, it will be built up over time and become hopefully the resource out there on all things very front end. And people's comments and suggestions can be sent where? Me. Definitely, any time. Yeah. So let's open it up to questions from the audience. Yes. Stephanie Cook. Wait for the microphone. Stephanie Cook with Nuclear Intelligence Weekly. I have a question either for Cindy or Melissa on these addition, I came late, so apologies if I'm asking you to repeat yourself, but this business of what's been going on since 2003 to bring additional safeguards, I guess what you're saying down to the uranium level. Given that most uranium companies have to do some accounting for their annual quarterly reports, pounds produced, et cetera, and tonnage is mined, what actually do they have to do that they don't do now, most of them anyway? And have you been able to put a cost per pound on these additional requirements? If you could just explain what they're going to, what it's looking like that they're gonna have to do and then any cost estimates, that'd be great. I'll start, and yeah. So in 2003, when it was moved to the urinal nitrate part, because it was in the middle of the process, or kind of in the beginning of the process, and let's take Blind River as an example, what the Canadians did was said, well, we can't kind of start safeguards in the middle. How do you do that? We actually put a math figure on there, and particularly since they were getting waste material also coming in. So you can't have an unsafe guarded stream and a safeguarded stream of material. So then they said, okay, we'll start. As soon as we take the drum and we dump it into Blind River, full material accountancy and control. So everything from there on in is reported, accounted for, and given to the IEA, went to the regulator and to the IEA. Can you back up for a second? Blind River, I don't know if we have a graphic on here that will show that. What was the transport, the one that went up to Canada? Yeah, the Canadian. Yeah. So Blind River is taking the drums. The drums, which hold what? Uranium ore concentrates. Uranium ore concentrates and feeds them into a, it's a chemical process and refines it and turns it into what we call U03. Most conversion facilities have the refining process and the conversion process together. For a variety of reasons in Canada, it is split between Blind River and then after U03, then it goes to Port Hope, about what, 2,000 kilometers away? Do we have a graphic that shows the different stages and the chemical composition? Yeah, we have that fuel cycle. Fuel cycle check? Fuel cycle, that'll be good enough. There it is. So there's basically two streams. So once you get, so the trucks go in and then from conversion then you have, either goes to uranium dioxide or fuel fabrication into a nuclear power plant or it gets and wretches through. So by, with policy paper 18 in 2003, Stephanie, it was, by starting at that point from when the drum enters, it left out all the tens of thousands of drums from, that was not part of it. Now with the IAEA, they're looking at clarifying basically the purity level. And there is still a lot of work to be done on this in terms of what it means, how is the IAEA going to put this effort into the money? It's always cash strapped. And then looking at how, what is currently already in place and then what needs to be done better? I mean, we're in the beginning of this process. The purity level, yeah. So it's trying, because with basically what, they're trying to get too technical. But the reporting requirements or the starting point is when the material is what we consider isotopically enriched or ready or for fuel to have pure, yeah, to be fed, ready to be used as fuel. And of course, over the years, we have technologically advanced. So there are products that are coming out that are almost ready to be fed into. It depends upon the grade of the ore and the ground and what they need to do to purify it to get it ready for fuel cycle years. Yeah, yeah, not ore, not rock. Just when the decision might be made or what's the timing on this? It's essentially a work in progress. It is a work in progress, yeah. So I, it is under development at the moment. And at the same time, Stephanie, we do have the additional protocol coming into use, which is now requiring that uranium mills, for example, report in far more detail what it is they're doing, how much they plan to export, what they are actually exporting year on end. And of course, now we of course have the potential for complimentary inspection, complimentary access by the IAEA. And so that is still fairly new for that sector of the industry. But I have not heard to your question the specific price per pound of what that adds on. And I suspect it's gonna vary dramatically for a company like Camico, on which operates the Blind River Facility or a new Malawian mining entity. How big a threat is this? How big a concern is this? Has, and let me back that up by asking a earlier question, which is, has some of this material gone missing? Different places. And why? I know one answer to that. We have one example on the site of the Plumbad Affair, and that goes way back. That goes back to before actually international safeguards came in. And this was a case where material was diverted from Germany. It was supposed to be going to Italy to a port there, and it never ended up getting there. And instead it ended up basically in the Demona reactor in Israel. Now, your Tom did have safeguards in place at the time. But, and this is where kind of the geopolitics and everything else comes in, Europe at the time was kind of fighting with each other. They do that from time to time. And so it should have been more efficient and picked this up, but it did get through. So we don't really have those kinds of cases. I have heard that industry loses amounts. It's not something that they like to talk about, but it's also part of kind of the process in the business when you've got these huge volumes of rock. It goes through, it gets crushed and milled. And so it's really, it's not something where you can say we put in this amount of tons of rock, and then this came out and it's a perfect mathematical equation. But the other, I think, problem or challenge would be is that the regulators have these very small minimum amounts that have to be reported if they're lost. There is self-reporting requirement. And Australia, Canada and the United States, for example, all have these very minimum or none. No amounts are allowed to be lost, but they've never had a self-report. And you can kind of understand why, because why would you do a report for 15 pounds? I mean, imagine the amount of paperwork, but at the same time it would be good so that we could actually understand the process. So the reporting requirement is so low that people don't take it seriously. Exactly. Because it would just be in the wash. There was a case in the United States where some quantity of material was up for sale and there was a prosecuted case. I think we put that in our, back in the 70s, if I recall, and that's in the governing uranium in the U.S. report. But the question that we come to, there's safeguards, which is where you're thinking somebody might either an insider or a country, such as in the Plumbad Affair, might divert material. But then there's just the question of security. And you're, in order to put enough material together that would presume that you need, you have processing facilities somewhere. It's a lot of material, right? It's truckloads, 10 truckloads worth, I think, if you're coming from a mine. Well, I'm even just talking about, I should have addressed your question of the threat. I mean, a drum is 400 pounds, right? I mean, it's not something you can walk out with. And you do need insider assistance. There was this case in Namibia where it was a police thing to go in and kind of check the security of one of the facilities. And there was not the same checks for damaged drums as there was for the product drums. So actually insiders were able to utilize that to remove and sell the damaged drums. So these are the kinds of things that just because it's heavy and yeah, it still needs to be processed and everything else. And we recognize that you can't use this and then make a nuclear weapon. But it has a huge psychological impact. And I don't think you will ever see your secret services move so fast if there are drums of uranium missing. I think, you know, well, she's gonna elaborate. Maybe there was a question. Go back there, Tom. Elaborate and then we'll bring the microphone at this time. What I was gonna say is, you know, one of the differences we see is the control on the material at the processing site. Once it actually leaves and goes further into the nuclear fuel cycle, you get a tremendous application of tracking mechanisms that are done for a variety of reasons. Some of them are contractual. Some of them are financial. Some of them are in fact safeguards. Some even come from trade restrictions on dealing with sanctioned entities or material subject to anti-dumping control. So there's a phenomenal amount of paperwork that happens but only once it gets out of the mine site and into the rest of the fuel cycle. Yeah. Melissa, I want to challenge. What I took is the implication that this could be very costly and mining industry wouldn't see, look kindly on that. First you said we're gonna slump in terms of spot price. I would remind you that the long-term, constant dollar price of uranium has not gone up. It's spiked a couple of times but it's essentially been steady since the 50s. So your $38 a pound is, divide that by seven or eight and you get back to the 80C prices in the 50s, 60s, so forth. So the second point is that you haven't discussed at all the environmental costs associated with any of these. The number one country that you put up on the chart was Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan has essentially no regulation, environmental regulations, worker safety regulations over this industry. A lot, if not most of their mining is in situ leech. The cost of reclamation or doing it right would swamp the cost of whatever reporting requirements you're talking about as being onerous on the industry. Now, in the United States, in situ leech, EPA has, as we speak, a proposed rule to increase the environmental monitoring for in situ leech. Those costs would swamp any safeguards costs associated with tracking material after it's turned into U308. So I just think the cost issue is kind of in terms of safeguards is a phony issue. I think you should branch out and look at the environmental aspects of this industry, which on an international basis are pretty atrocious, particularly with regard to in situ leech mining. I know NRDC has been involved in a lawsuit in the United States, which we're appealing to the commission as we speak, over the environmental aspects of in situ leech in the US. And other countries like Kazakhstan, it's nonexistent. Thanks, Tom. Yeah, I mean, Tom, I'll just make a few comments on that. I mean, you're right. I remember when you'd hear the uranium miners say, man, if the uranium price gets to $10, then we're gonna have all this material, or it gets to $16. But a lot of those resources have since been mined. So the entities that are looking now at market price, they really aren't even remotely possible until you get to a higher dollar price. And I'm not a specialist on the mining side. And there's no doubt that the market price of uranium, it reflects what somebody's willing to pay for it, not what all the externalities are that are involved in that. And there's no doubt that if you were to get a group of uranium miners in the room, they're gonna be far more apoplectic about the pending EPA rules than they are about the cost of doing MCNA work. Well, you know, how much of it? Just compare the cost of hauling all of that ore to the mill to the paperwork involved in monitoring some canisters of U-308 at the mill. It's just, you know, that's a phony issue that it costs too much to do safe start. Cost too much. I think there's a fear that they don't know what it involves. So we are running a little short on time. So we're gonna take a few questions at the same time. I know I saw one back there, others, and then these two, and then we'll have our, okay, so there are two over here and two over there. So first the gentleman and then the young lady in front of her. So let's take all the questions together. Sure, relatively quickly, you've described basically, I'm sorry, Brian DiNuno, Department of Energy. You've described a sort of a very narrow set of conversion facilities that are more regulatory savvy and then sort of dozens or hundreds of mines which are less aware. And I'm just wondering exactly where is the seam in terms of when the material is owned? When it leaves the mills and is being shipped these thousands of miles, is at that point, is it owned by the conversion facility or do they not take ownership till it's actually arrives at the conversion facility? And is that seeing one of the things that you're really looking at? Next question right in front. We're gonna take all the questions together. Hi, my name is Emily Rostin. My question is considering how tightly stretched the IAEA already is both in terms of manpower and financial resources, do they actually have the capacity to do all of the various steps that would be involved in expanding the processes under their purview considering the constraints they already have? Good question. And then we have two on this side. Brian. Sorry, Brian Corder, nuclear fuel trader. Question is, so the Iranians already own a share of a mine in Namibia. So it's not like they can't access Yellow Cake if they wanted, but we all know that the process to make a nuclear weapon is very complex. So my question is if you have a mining company their goal like any other company is not lose product, just like Target doesn't want people shoplifting from them, right? So wouldn't it be better just to let them regulate themselves instead of putting on these international regulations? Good morning, my name is Scott Morgan. I have a question going back to Africa. In the past, one of the largest suppliers of uranium was the DRC and considering the weak mining regulations there, I was kind of surprised to see that you were not interested in what has been going on in the Congo considering it was the source of the material that was used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bounds. I was wondering is that still a concern or is that a country you're going to be looking into in the future? Thank you. Okay. Great. I'll pick the first one on the ownership chain because once it's produced it's actually probably never owned by the converter or the enricher. What happens is nuclear utilities go out and they procure various materials and processing services throughout that nuclear fuel cycle. So it may be that as soon as it's produced it's sold to a utility, which then has it moved to the conversion facility, it procures the conversion services. Has that material then moved on to an enrichment facility and so on? But it's typically the utility that has that ownership throughout the entire processing stage. On the IEE, is it stretched beyond capacity? I mean across the board, I think the answer is yes. And I think this is where when we're talking about it being in development they have a lot of their own research to do as to how they are going to apply the new starting point and how they're going to be able to actually mobilize their inspectors if I could use that term. I have heard that inspection itself isn't that costly. And I don't know in terms of relation to whatever but it also would help then this is where the inventory controls come in because if we can move from a ledger system and a fax system then we could certainly have something that can go into the IEA and make it more digitalized. Of course, I understand there are cyber issues and security issues there but at least in terms of more real time reporting. So this is a process that we're going through and we'll have to ask that question again in a year or two or three or five. On Iran and Namibia, actually they've owned 15% of Rossing but they have no access to the board. They have no access to information, to documents and it's been well since just before sanctions or but it's certainly since sanctions that they've had that they haven't had any access. So there's nothing from Rossing that goes to Iran. The export control system would prohibit that in the first case. So but your question in terms of self-regulation. No, in particularly since we're talking about we've got eight majors in the mining company. They're across all countries and so they themselves say they use their own standards across all these countries and there's a reason for it because standardization is a good thing. It helps all their automated systems, their own reporting internal and it'd be the same thing for looking at the IEA. There's a reason why we regulate uranium and self-regulation is not something that from a non-proliferation perspective has had great dividends in the past globally. And on the last question on the Belgian country. On DRC, yeah, I mean picking 15 countries which ones are we gonna focus with? I mean obviously you could go for 25, 30 all the historical ones and keep on going, going, going. We've had questions about why didn't you go with the Czech Republic and with Wismut in Germany and we're trying to focus on this shifting current. So DRC is a while ago but in the Africa report that is published and actually Paul if you wouldn't mind just showing the bottom page there and clicking on the DEES website itself. The governing uranium one, sorry. If you go back, yeah, so you have the link at the end there, up top, the DEES one. All information for this project? Yeah. So all of the governing uranium reports are there and the Africa report that was done by SIPRI in August, sorry, December 2013 in there there does have a little bit of the history and going through the continent as a whole. It does focus on the four countries at the moment but it does do that historical overview. So thank you first off to Cindy and Melissa. Thank you. But thanks to all of you for coming out this morning. We welcome your comments, your suggestions and stay tuned here. We're gonna have another report that we're releasing in March. Bigger report on the nuclear fuel cycle and a new approach to that and be sure to look for an invitation in your email. Thanks so much. Thank you guys.