What if Niger sells its seized uranium to Russia?
Niger defying ICSID and selling its seized yellowcake to Russia locks European utilities out of a key supply source — the move is uranium spot and European reactor-fuel anxiety higher, plus a Rosatom-dependence premium; the broad VIX +7.7%/Nasdaq -4.2% cascade vastly overstates the macro hit of a single yellowcake stockpile. Rhymes with the 2023 Niger coup that threatened Orano supply and lifted uranium, and Russia's enrichment leverage post-2022. Forward angle: Niger is ~5% of mined uranium and a major EU/French (Orano) source, so the transmission is a Europe-specific fuel-security scramble and accelerated Russian-enrichment de-risking — trade uranium and EU utility fuel risk, not equity beta.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Niger defies the ICSID injunction and sells its seized 1,000-tonne yellowcake stockpile to Russia, locking out European utilities. :: The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.