You're misjudging the differences between uranium and gas. Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible.
This doesn't work with natural gas because they needed a lot of it and moving it around is capital intensive. The situations are completely different. The energy densities here are wildly dissimilar, and that matters a lot for the economic of building a stockpile.
> You're misjudging the differences between uranium and gas.
So do you.
> Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible.
See, that's the problem. One of the differences between natural gas and uranium is that (outside of CANDU reactors) you can't use the uranium "as is". To use uranium for pretty much anything useful, you need certain high-tech facilities. By production capacity, almost half of those facilities (according to [1], it's 46 percent) is in Russia.
The way things are, you can't build a stockpile if the expected value of uranium fuel production outside of Russia is lower than the expected value of uranium fuel consumption outside of Russia, which I believe is currently the case. As long as this remains to be a case, any stockpile will dwindle, not grow.
This doesn't work with natural gas because they needed a lot of it and moving it around is capital intensive. The situations are completely different. The energy densities here are wildly dissimilar, and that matters a lot for the economic of building a stockpile.