| ISSUE 031 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION |
| Everyone is counting reactors. Submarine programs, power reactor restarts, small modular designs: the unit count has its own line at every energy conference. Hafnium does not appear on it. The metal is a byproduct of zirconium separation, and the USGS, in its Mineral Commodity Summaries published February 6, 2026, lists world primary hafnium production data as “not available.” |
| The leading use of hafnium metal is in superalloys, according to the same USGS report. Turbine blades for jet engines, military and commercial, consume the largest share. Plasma cutting tips take the next portion; the semiconductor industry uses hafnium oxide as a gate dielectric. |
| Two American plants perform the separation: ATI Specialty Alloys and Components in Albany, Oregon, and Western Zirconium in Ogden, Utah, per the USGS. Framatome operates a third at Jarrie, France. The average price of unwrought hafnium rose from $781 per kilogram in 2021 to $3,800 in 2025, according to USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026. |
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| PLATE · Cordite propellant, 1915 |
| In 1915 Britain lacked the fabrication capacity to stamp shell cases and machine fuses for the Western Front. The binding constraint was propellant. Cordite, the standard propellant of both the Army and the Royal Navy, required acetone as its manufacturing solvent. Pre-war British acetone came almost entirely from the destructive distillation of wood, a process requiring roughly 100 tons of wood per ton of acetone, and Britain imported the bulk of it from the United States, as the Royal Society of Chemistry has documented. |
| By 1915 acetone was in such short supply that the Royal Society of Chemistry records it might well have imperilled the ability of both the army and navy to function effectively. The government created the Ministry of Munitions in May 1915 with Lloyd George as its first minister, as the US Naval Institute recounted in December 2024. What the press called the Shell Scandal was a propellant chemistry problem: fabrication lacked capacity, but without acetone the cordite lines stood idle. |
| The Ministry built the missing chemistry at industrial scale. HM Factory Gretna, constructed on 9,000 acres on the Scottish border, produced approximately 800 tonnes of cordite per week at peak output. |
| PLATE · ATI Specialty Alloys and Components (Wah Chang), Albany, Oregon | |||
| ATI Specialty Alloys and Components in Albany, Oregon, is one of two American facilities that separate hafnium from zirconium by solvent extraction. On June 11, 2026, ATI announced a five-year strategic material supply agreement with BWX Technologies supporting the US Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program through fiscal year 2030. ATI CEO Kimberly A. Fields stated in the announcement: “For more than 40 years, ATI has delivered advanced materials that enable naval systems built by BWXT to operate with unmatched performance, reliability, and protection.” | |||
| The second American separation plant is Western Zirconium in Ogden, Utah, operated by Westinghouse Electric on a 1,100-acre site established in 1978. In November 2023 Framatome announced investment in new separative capacity at Jarrie, France. The Albany site comprises 180 buildings on 110 acres and has operated since 1956, when the Atomic Energy Commission contracted Wah Chang to run the Bureau of Mines zirconium plant there. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
