GoviEx Uranium Inc and its fully owned subsidiary GoviEx Niger Holdings Ltd have begun proceedings under the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States (known as the ICSID Convention), because Niger has breached its legal obligations under a May 2007 agreement between the state and GoviEx Niger, and under Nigerien law.

     The Vancouver-based company is seeking arbitration on the basis that the State of Niger breached its legal obligations when it cancelled the company’s mining permit for the Madouela uranium project earlier this year.
     GoviEx started operations in Niger in 2007, and has advanced the Madaouela mine from the initial exploration phase, through to the publication of a feasibility study in late 2022. The company said the project had been “poised for development” and that GoviEx had started to move forward despite the political changes in Niger since the coup d’état of July 2023. Over the last year and a half, it has received statements of interest in excess of two hundred million dollars for project-related debt finance, started social and environmental due diligence research with a prospective lender, updated the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, and begun front-end engineering designs and initial ground works, including the construction of an access road.

     With a forecast initial capital expenditure of three hundred and forty-three million, the Madouela project was forecast to create up to eight hundred jobs over its projected twenty-year mine life. During this time substantial royalty payments and taxes will be payable to the state. The companies said that they believe that the withdrawal of GoviEx’s rights to the project will have a serious negative impact on the economic and social development of the region.
     GoviEx said, “While the Companies have attempted to settle their dispute with the State amicably, including through initiating a local administrative recourse before the Niger President of the Republic, the State has shown no willingness to engage with the Companies to reach an amicable settlement. The Companies strongly believe that they are entitled to be reinstated in their rights to the Project and/or be awarded monetary compensation as a result of the State’s conduct in relation to the Project and are accordingly pursuing a legal remedy under the Mining Convention to safeguard their rights, adding that they may pursue other available remedies, including international arbitration as required. Notwithstanding the commencement of this Arbitration, the Companies remain committed to engaging constructively with the State to resolve the dispute.”

     Earlier this year, the Nigerien authorities also cancelled the operating permit issued to Orano subsidiary Imouraren SA for the Imouraren project. More recently, Orano confirmed that Nigerien authorities have taken operational control of SOMAÏR, its subsidiary which operates the Arlit mine. It is currently Niger’s only operational uranium mine. Global Atomic’s development of the Dasa uranium mine is ongoing. In November of this year, Mining Minister Ousmane Abarchi reportedly said that Niger was actively seeking to attract Russian investment in natural resources including uranium.

GoviEx

     Scott Nolan worked at SpaceX engineer before he became the CEO of a startup named General Matter. He is on a mission to help end Russia’s monopoly on a special type of more-enriched nuclear fuel for advance nuclear fission reactors by producing it at commercial scale in the United States and slashing its costs.
     Nolan incorporated San Francisco-based General Matter this year for the purpose of producing high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, for a variety of planned nuclear power reactors including small modular reactors, or SMRs, that backers hope will take off in the 2030s.
     HALEU is uranium enriched to between five percent and twenty percent, which backers say has the potential to make new high-tech reactors more efficient. The uranium fuel used in current nuclear power reactors is enriched to about five percent. Big Tech companies such as Amazon have plans to construct new reactors to serve power-hungry data centers.
     Nolan told an interviewer in his first media interview since forming the company that “We believe HALEU is the most urgent need in the market today, and the most sensitive to enrichment cost. We are focused not only on bringing back domestic capacity, but on bringing the cost down significantly.”
    The long-term goal of General Matters is to cut the cost of HALEU enrichment in half according to Nolan. Today, HALEU is made primarily in Russia, and its price is volatile. Current estimates range from twenty-five thousand dollars to thirty-five thousand dollars per kilogram of enriched uranium.
     The U.S. Department of Energy in October awarded initial contracts to four companies including General Matters seeking to produce HALEU in the United States. This is part of an initiative to kick start domestic production. The U.S. plans to award two billion seven hundred million dollars in contracts for HALEU production, subject to approval of Congress in coming years.
     General Matter currently has no infrastructure to make uranium fuel. It will face stiff competition from other companies who do have experience and facilities in the uranium industry.
    The other companies receiving U.S. support are: Urenco USA, a European firm with operations in New Mexico; Orano USA, based in Maryland with global headquarters in France; and Centrus Energy’s subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating.
     Critics of the use of HALEU have claimed that the level of its enrichment means it is a nuclear weapons proliferation risk, and they recommend limiting its enrichment to ten to twelve percent. Nolan said his company will look to regulators to determine the level of desired enrichment.
     Nolan said he hopes that nuclear fission energy production “should and will be” an important part of Trump’s efforts to expand sources of baseload electricity.
     Nolan worked at SpaceX from 2003 to 2007. He added that his company’s planned HALEU production will share SpaceX’s focus on developing new technology and cutting costs.
     Nolan said that “SpaceX combined people from Silicon Valley in the software startup industry with the aerospace industry, and converged these two skill sets. We’re doing something similar, where we have deep experience on the team from the fuel cycle in the nuclear space, and are combining it with experience from the technology industry to rethink the problem and come at it from a new direction.”

General Matter