RIO DE JANEIRO – Brazil plans to invest 3 billion reais ($1.8 billion) to build two plants enabling the country to carry out uranium enrichment entirely within its borders, Mines and Energy Minister Edisao Lobao said in an interview published Friday in business daily Valor.
“We calculate we have 1.1 million tons in uranium reserves. With those massive reserves, we must conduct all the treatment and enrichment steps in the country,” he told the newspaper.
Brazil, which has the world’s sixth-largest uranium reserves, currently relies on Canada and France to convert the ore into gas, a vital part of the enrichment process.
The uranium gas returns to Brazil, where Brazilian proprietary technology transforms it into fuel capsules for the giant South American country’s two nuclear-power facilities.
The new processing plants will make state-owned Industrias Nucleares do Brasil self-sufficient in uranium enrichment for power generation.
Work is already under way on a third power reactor, Angra 3, that is supposed to be operation in 2015, and the government wants to build another four nuclear-power facilities.
The government is also preparing legislation requiring private mining companies to immediately inform authorities if they encounter uranium while extracting other minerals, Lobao said.
“If the uranium deposit is bigger than that of the mineral that firm is exploiting, we could pay them compensation or we could propose a partnership” to extract the uranium, the minister said.
Until now, the state has claimed a monopoly over uranium mining in Brazil. EFE
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