Uranium

Uranium is the only commodity on this list whose possession is itself regulated. Everything else here is governed by how it is traded, taxed, extracted, or emitted; uranium is governed by who may have it at all. The Non-Proliferation Treaty and the safeguards administered under it make this the single commodity subject to international physical inventory audit — every gram accounted for to an outside body with a right of inspection.

Its date is c. 1940, on fission and the weapons programs, with pitchblende traded earlier as a pigment for glass and ceramics. That makes uranium the cleanest case on the list of a commodity whose value has nothing whatever to do with the property for which it was first bought. It was a colorant, and then its nucleus turned out to split.

The chokepoint is not the mine. Natural uranium runs to a few parts per million in ordinary rock and is widely distributed; what is scarce is the capacity to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238 — two isotopes of one element differing by three neutrons. Four companies held more than 99 percent of world enrichment capacity in 2025: China National Nuclear Corporation, Rosatom, Urenco and Orano. There are five conversion plants on earth, one each in Canada, China, France, Russia and the United States. Uranium and the rare earths are this list's two separation commodities, and they have the same shape: the material is common, the species are nearly identical, and all the power sits with whoever can tell them apart at scale. Nonproliferation policy is centrifuge policy for precisely that reason.

It also produced the most extraordinary single transaction in this collection. Under an agreement of 1993 and a contract of 1994, with deliveries running from 1999, Russia downblended 500 tonnes of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium — the equivalent of some twenty thousand warheads — into roughly 14,446 tonnes of low-enriched reactor fuel, sold to the United States under a contract valued at $13 billion. The last batch was downblended at Zelenogorsk in August 2013 and shipped that November. Across its life the program supplied somewhere between 13 and 19 percent of world reactor requirements. Nothing else here has been converted from a weapon into a commodity by treaty and then burned to make electricity.

And there is a structural reason that mattered more than it is usually given credit for: the mines have never been sufficient. Mine production covered about 83 percent of world requirements in 2023, 87 percent in 2024, and an estimated 90 percent in 2025. The balance is secondary supply, and for two decades its largest single source was dismantled Soviet warheads. Disarmament was not merely compatible with the civil fuel market; it was load-bearing for it. When the program closed in 2013 the gap had to be made up by mining, which is much of why output has climbed since.

Supply is concentrated and the downstream chain is thinner still. Kazakhstan alone was about 39 percent of world mine production in 2023, close to Canada, Namibia and Australia combined, and six countries account for more than 90 percent. American reactors purchased 51.6 million pounds of uranium oxide equivalent in 2023, of which roughly 95 percent was imported — Canada 25 percent, Kazakhstan 21, Australia 21, Russia 12, Uzbekistan 9 — against domestic production of around one percent of requirements. The United States has one operating conventional mill, one conversion facility, three fabrication plants, and a single low-enriched uranium enrichment facility which is European-owned; it has no commercial high-assay enrichment and no reprocessing, and high-assay production was confined to Russia and China as of 2025. For the commodity behind roughly eighteen percent of American electricity, that is as thin a domestic chain as anything on this list.

On boundaries: uranium ore and concentrate, the converted and enriched product, and fabricated fuel assemblies are here. Depleted uranium in kinetic penetrators and armor is a weapon, with the uranium in it here. The electricity generated from it is electric power and the reactor is electrical equipment. Thorium and the rare earths occurring in uranium ores keep their own categories. Uranium salts used to color glass and ceramics are colorants, and the uranium in them is here. Enrichment and conversion sold as services are services where an entry turns on the contract rather than on the material. The date is c. 1940, on fission and the weapons programs.