Uranium isn’t a scarce resource that Vladimir Putin, or anyone else, is about to control.
Uranium is a massive drug on the international commodity markets. There is a worldwide glut. It is produced all around the world, and there is so much of it washing around that the price is in free-fall — and has been for almost 10 years. Right now the world’s uranium miners are so desperate that they are actually giving it away for less — literally — than it costs them to dig it out of the ground.
Uranium prices have collapsed by a staggering 88% since their peak in the summer of 2007. They are down about three quarters since the February 2011 Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster in Japan, which caused that country to switch off most of its reactors and caused everyone else to review their nuclear-energy production.