The uranium market is facing a critical supply shortage amid rising prices, despite the perception of abundant supply. A decade of low demand and market complacency led to a collapse in pricing and a significant drawdown of inventories, with utilities relying on long-term contracts rather than spot markets. However, these contracts have not spurred sufficient new production. Production costs—especially in Kazakhstan—have soared due to currency depreciation and reduced output, making it economically unviable to maintain past levels. The fuel cycle remains bottlenecked at the mining and enrichment stages, with only a fraction of global capacity in the West. Enrichment facilities, historically operating in underfeed mode during downturns, now face overfeed demands as capacity tightens, further increasing uranium demand. Geopolitical shifts, such as the U.S. ban on Russian-enriched uranium, add uncertainty but do not resolve the core issue of insufficient economically viable supply. With new mines taking decades to develop and current supply unable to meet future nuclear expansion needs, the market may face a supply crunch in the 2030s unless significant investment and policy changes accelerate new capacity. The opacity of pricing and the dominance of long-term contracts create misaligned incentives, where buyers believe supply is secure when it is not. Ultimately, the energy transition’s success depends on building a resilient, diversified, and geographically balanced uranium supply chain.
LATITUDE MEDIA COVERING THE NEW FRONTIERS OF THE ENERGY TRANSITION
I'm Shail Khan. I lead early-stage investments at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst.
So at the end of September, the long-term uranium price was $96.50 a pound. That's a record
above the previous high of $95 that was set in 2007 and 2008 at the peak of the last uranium
bubble. And I should note, as you will hear soon, those numbers are imperfect. Nonetheless,
we don't really see a scramble amongst ultimate buyers. They seem to feel that as long as they
lock in supply for the 2030s, uranium will be there, as our guest today states. But will the
uranium be there? Well, first of all, uranium isn't just one market. It's a supply chain. There's
mining, conversion, enrichment, fabrication. There are geopolitics involved. Too many of those links
run through Russia.
Kazakhstan and China. We have a ban on Russian-enriched uranium that is coming in 2028.
So the question isn't just whether there's enough uranium in the ground. It's whether the mines are
coming online quickly enough, whether we can rebuild the fuel supply chain that has sort of
withered through a decade of low prices, and whether we can do so fast enough to fuel the
new reactors that we're now promising to build. Mike Alkin is the founder and CIO of Satcham Cove
Partners. We walk through the uranium supply chain link by link.
bottlenecks, the geopolitics, and the pricing. He's coming up next.
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Mike, welcome.
Thank you, Shiel. Pleasure to be here.
All right, let's talk uranium. Let's start by having you, I guess,
walk through the value chain for uranium as it exists today from soup to nuts.
Sure. So it's, Shiel, it's called the nuclear fuel cycle is what the industry refers to it as. So
it's upstream, which would be the nuclear fuel cycle. So it's upstream, which would
be uranium mining, where they pull it out of the ground in a few different methods, gets processed
into something they call yellow cake, which is like a powder. And then that gets processed downstream
in a few different stages that takes a couple of years to do on average. They take yellow cake,
which is a powder form, and that in and of itself, it can't enrich anything. So for nuclear power,
it needs to be enriched. It comes out of the ground. It's just 0.7% fissile material.
So it's got to be enriched up to 3% to 5% for nuclear power. If you're making a bomb,
it's got to go up to 90%, which can take a very long time. But so they pass it along to what's
called the conversion part of the cycle. And there they're turning that yellow cake into a gas called
uranium hexafluoride. And so from there, it then gets sent on to an enrichment plant. And enrichment's
in the news a lot. When you hear about the Iran war, it's all about enrichment levels. And so
from there, what they're trying to do is they take that gas and they spin it through centrifuges
that spin at the speed of sound. And they're trying to get the enrichment levels, like I said,
up to 3% to 5%. And then from there, they then pass it downstream even further
to a fabrication facility where they form it into pellets. And then those pellets are then
put into tubes for layperson's terms. And then that gets into a reactor.
That whole process is 18 to 24 months, depending on availability of capacity.
And is the market pretty divided up amongst those stages? Or are there vertically integrated players
who go all the way from mining to fabrication? Yeah, fabulous question. So the market is,
and we can talk about the opaqueness of the market, but the market is really bifurcated,
not only along geopolitical lines and geographies. For example, 70% of nuclear power
is contaminated by uranium hexafluoride. And so the market is really bifurcated,
and we can talk about the opaqueness of the market, but the market is really bifurcated,
in the West. Yet 70% of the supply of uranium comes from the East. And along the lines of
conversion and enrichment, you also see that where we go to enrichment, which is where the
magic happens, if you will, 41, 42% of that is in Russia. And then you've got a little bit more in
China, and then you start to break it over into the West. But those are state-owned players that
the West is competing against. In the West, the enrichment capacity for uranium hexafluoride is
owned by private companies, or the state, in the case of France, through EDF, through a company
called Orano. I should say not through EDF, but it's Orano, which is a state-owned company.
And then you have a Dutch-English-German consortium that is owned by the state with
a couple of small utilities in Germany called Urenco, and that's a big enricher in the West,
but again, not public. So it's a big enricher in the West, but again, not public. So it's a
very bifurcated geopolitically, geographically, and also by ownership type. As you go further
upstream on the uranium side, Kazatomprom, which is the state-owned entity of Kazakhstan,
Kazakhstan produces 41% of all uranium in the world. And then of that, about half of that comes
from Kazatomprom, the state-owned entity, which is 75% owned by the Sovereign Wealth Fund. And then
you get to Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan could produce 8% to 10% of uranium. And then you start to get
to Russia, which is another mid to high single digits, sometimes low double digits on uranium.
China produces a low double digits as you start to get into China itself, which has very little
indigenous uranium. But in Namibia, they have significant production capabilities. So the
Eastern influences have a significant amount of uranium production versus the West, as I said
earlier, with 70% to 30%. And then we think historically, have there been, I mean, is this
a market that has seen fairly stable pricing and supply and demand? Is this a market that sees big
spikes and big crashes? Like what does the market look like historically? So most of the time,
it's in a bear market, if you will. And so if you go back to the 1940s, when they started
producing uranium and you looked at today, there's been a lot more uranium produced than there has
been consumed. But those inventories have been worked off through that period of time. And so
that lengthy period of time, and the reason I mentioned it's been more of a bear market than
not is you've had a couple of incidents. In 1976, you had Three Mile Island. Then we had Chernobyl
in the 80s. And then in 2011, you had Fukushima. And each time you've had a meltdown where, and
we'll talk about the safety of nuclear power with all of those, all that you've heard, you've had
very little deaths per terawatt hour is the safest form of electricity generation. But psychologically,
it's a lingering effect. So after each one of those, you tend to see demand start to, whatever
the plans were, demand starts to pull back, supply works its way into the market, and it depresses
prices. So to give your audience a sense of where pricing has come from, if you think about the
1990s and 2000s, the price of uranium was hovering $7, $8, $9 per pound. That's how it sold,
per pound of uranium. And so it was sitting there for quite some time. And then in the early,
starting in 2000, it started to go up. And then in the early 2000s, it started to go up. And then
it started to work its way up to $8 and $9 and $10 and $11 and $12. By the early 2000 aughts,
it started to get into the teens and 20s. Because even though a lot of it is state-owned, you still
have to deal with the Western producers who need an economic incentive to produce this stuff,
because the East can't produce it all. So it started to climb into the 20s and 30s.
And then there were some new mines scheduled to come online around 2005, 2006, 2007. You had some
supply looked like it was becoming delayed. And for context, the price of uranium went to $137
a pound. And so you had this massive boom up. Now, interestingly, what winds up happening in
this market, because it is so opaque, there's no real electronic price. It's not like gold or
copper where you can see this thing trading in real time. It's really done through the cover
of darkness. And the spot price is reported once per day at 2.45 PM Eastern time. And it's the
midpoint of a bit in the ass that price reporters go around and do surveys on. The long-term
contracting, which is the vast majority, up to 80% of all uranium sold is done under long-term
contracts, that price is reported once per month. And that price that's reported is really not where
the market is trading, and we could get further into that. But so you had that big boom. So over
the period of 2000 through 2007, prices went from high single digits up to $137 a pound.
And then it started to settle in. And the reason it went from, it probably went from 50 to 137
from 05, 06, 07, as there was a big mine coming online. The mine flooded, and people got nervous.
So who are the people when I say that? Those are nuclear fuel buyers. Almost all uranium
that's consumed, almost all, is consumed by nuclear power plants that generate electricity.
And because there's no substitute for uranium, it's not like you,
you're a utility, and you have a coal plant and a gas plant. And if, and depending on economics,
you could ramp one up and shut one down. You can't, if there is no substitute for uranium
in a nuclear power plant. So because of that, security of supply becomes paramount. And
therefore, those purchases are done under very long-term contracts. They could be 5, 10, 12
years or longer, because it takes so long, and it takes a couple of years to order. So that,
that's how you tend to see it. As those contracts are, they'll, they'll ebb and flow. But because
security of supply is paramount, and because the cost of uranium is de minimis versus the operating
cost of a reactor, for instance, the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle, which is what we talked
about, mining, conversion, enrichment, fabrication, that could be 20 to 25% of the operating cost.
Uranium of that could be,
35, 40%. So now you're talking, let's say high singles, low double digits to cost to operate the
plant is the uranium itself. Now, if I'm running a gas-fired power plant or a coal plant, those
costs could be 80 to 90%. So the feedstock itself, uranium, is much, is, is, is a much smaller cost.
There is no substitute. So security of supply becomes paramount. But what winds up happening
with that, since most uranium is purchased under long-term contracts, what winds up happening is,
a recency bias and a complacency seeps into the market. And if, if you live in the nuclear fuel
cycle, like, like I do, what you often will hear is, well, the uranium ferry always delivers
uranium. Now that's, pricing has gone from a low of, of $17 in November of 16 to well over $100
today. And the psychology of the nuclear fuel buyer, despite prices up 5X on them, that they're
paying is still like, ah, there's plenty of uranium out there. And it's really,
it's really driven by the opaqueness of the market and the recency biases that are in the market.
And the fact that security of supply covers them for most of their needs.
Yeah, I guess.
Most of the time.
Two questions that arise for me. The, the first one being, you know, given the structure of the
market, like if I'm a, if I'm a nuclear power plant operator, I have pretty good visibility
into my fuel requirements. I'm going to be operating at close to a hundred percent capacity
factor. I know what I'm going to need. And as you said, the only thing that really matters to me is
why it's not necessarily pricing. Why is there a spot market at all? Why don't I just entirely
contract forward at all of my requirement capacity?
It's a fabulous, it's a fabulous question. So if we look at the composition of the, of the spot
market, you're probably looking at 55, 60, 65%, depending on the year, are physical traders.
Um, and so those traders will, what they tend to do is they, they will get, uh, and some of the
Japanese trading houses, some of the banks will do it. And some one-off random, uh, traders will,
will come into the market. You're starting to see actually some of the big oil and gas traders come
into the market, some of the mammoth ones. Um, uh, you've seen Mercuria enter the market recently,
which is enormous. Um, but they will, so what they do is they will tend to, they might help
have helped start finance a mine, a small development mine, and they might get some
offtake, um, or the Uzbeks or the Kazakhs or Olympic dam, which is owned by BHP down in
South Australia, a monster copper mine. One of the by-products is, is copper. So they
may take some of their, you know, they produce seven, eight, nine, 10 million pounds a year.
And the market that's too, let's round up 200 million pounds and demand growing, you know,
mid single digits, um, to contextualize Olympic dam. And they may take that and just put it into
the spot market. Um, if it doesn't have a committed home, let's say with utility and cause it's such
a small portion of what they produce. And it's not that big a portion of the market. They're not,
you know, they can't be bothered. They might just sell it. No, no traders will take it. And so that
occurs for the 20% of the market, 25% of the market. That is the spot market. More than half
of that are these traders and they're trading back and forth for a dollar. Uh, I mean, a dollar a
pound, 50 cents a pound, trying to get what they can get now, but because the spot price, and you
asked such a great question about why even have it because the spot price is the only one that's
reported daily. And again, it's not electronic, right? It's, it's a, it's a quiet market. It's
And so if we then look at who else trades the uranium, well, some of the over time, what's
happened is Cameco, for example, the largest Western uranium miner, uh, for context, they'll
produce 20 ish, 24, 22 to 24 million pounds a year in that, in that market. Um, they're a behemoth
and what they do, they might sell 30 to 32 million pounds a year. And so why did they do that?
Because they're keeping a bid in the market. And so they'll oversell their contract,
but there's, because there's such illiquidity in the market that they're in there buying
there, they're, they're in there buying in the market and some other producers who might have
some production problems will be in the market. So that could be 15 to 20% of the market. Uh,
and then that last 15% or so historically are, uh, other financials that are in there,
just trying to, uh, uh, poke around or utilities. Now a utility typically doesn't buy in a spot
market because it takes them a couple of years. So if they're buying in the spot market today,
they, they really have a problem because they can't get that processed anyway.
So why have a spot market? It's really just because there are some financial creatures that
are in there looking to close an arbitrage once in a while. Some of them help finance mines and
their, their, their reward is to get offtake and trade back and forth. Uh, but even the bigger
Japanese trading houses, these are not big businesses for them because the market itself
isn't that big. Um, and so really we're,
the real price discovery occurs is in the contract market. Now the contract market though,
is very, um, can provide a lot of misdirection. And if one really doesn't focus on the nuances
of it. So if, if we say 80% of the market is a contract market, the price that gets reported
each month is what's called the, uh, base escalated. The, the term price is what they'll
call. Now that is, um, the way the price reporters will define that it's the lowest
offer they could find on a contract. So if we characterize that 70% or 80% of the, uh, if 80%
of the market's long-term contracts, 70% of that is, is in, uh, not that. So a smaller portion,
25, 30% of that market is, is base escalated where a utility will go to a producer and you
tend to see it in bear market for pricing. A utility goes and says, we would like a five-year
contract, make up the, the, the tenor. We'd like a five-year contract for a million pounds a year.
Uh, and we're going to pay the, the long-term quoted price today, base escalated. So it might
be 3% a year and it technically gets delivered in the third year onward. That's, that's a base
escalated price. And so the price reporters of which there are two big ones that will report
that price. Now, if we take that vast majority of the pounds that are sold are not sold that way,
what they, so that occurs, that base escalated typically
occurs through a request, uh, might occur through a request for a proposal. So constellation or
Duke might send out to the market. We need a five-year contract for 1 million pounds per year.
And then a number of producers might put in and bid on that. And let's say, pick a number,
it's $90 per pound. Uh, it's it, well, today's court at 97. Uh, but, but let's say Duke or
constellation contracted at $102 a pound or $103 a pound.
Why? Because they didn't want to go down, uh, in, let's say to a smaller developer that might've
been offering a lower price. Geographically, they might've had limitations. If the price
was struck at 102 or 103 or $105 per pound, but there was an offer on that contract at 97,
somebody bid $97, that price, that's what they report. That's like you selling a million dollar
home and somebody offered you 800 and it gets reported at 800. It's not what happened.
So you have a, a, a minority portion of the market that is sold under these base escalated
contracts, a small portion of it. And the price reporting on that is done in a manner that's
odd at best where, where the market really occurs is bilaterally negotiated. That's off market is
the term. It's just, it's not put out to RFP. And, and by the way, fuel buyers, nuclear fuel
buyers, they're nuclear engineers. They're not traders. These are not folks trading coal and
that are commercial creatures.
The economic. incentive to a nuclear power plant buyer is not buy low, sell high. It's don't run out of fuel.
That keeps your job and keep our plants running safely. So as a result, there's not an economic
incentive to call bottoms. And so where the contract really occurs is, hey, we're going to
call you. We're not going to put out an RFP into the market. The fuel buyers are savvy enough to
know if they put an RFP in the market, they're going to get small developers who need a contract
win who might come in and set the bar low. So they're constantly, and the fuel buyers did that
through 21 and 22 and 23 as prices were going. The way they can do that is get that desperate
little developer who probably has no chance of producing uranium, but they'll give the old
college try. And yet that, because they come in lower than what the bigger producers will come in
at, they know the price reporters will set that price low. Now that's in a buyer's market.
Now you're in a seller's market and the opposite is happening.
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So let me take a step back for a second. I mean, you mentioned that like the buyer's attitude
right now, even at prices that are up 5x and over 100 bucks a pound,
is like, there's enough uranium. Is there enough uranium?
No.
And so just for background, I mean, I've 30 years in the hedge fund business and
looking at deeply out of favor industries. And in 2016, one of the industries I started looking at,
managing my own money after the firm I was at, the partner was, we moved, they turned into a
family office. And one of the industries that I started looking at was uranium. And I started
going to nuclear power plants. And I started going to
nuclear power conferences. And nobody was there. Wall Street was not there. The industry prices
had collapsed 95%. The equities were down 95%. If you look for a model from the sell side,
from a Goldman or anyone, they hadn't had a model in years. So it was abandoned. And when you started
talking to those fuel buyers at these conferences and said, hey, I'm learning about the nuclear
industry, they'd say, you're wasting your time. Pricing is 15, 17, I mean, 17, 18, $20. It's going
to 10. It's going to five.
Well, I spent the next, shortcut it, I spent the next two years building a model of every reactor
on the planet and every mine on the planet. And the reality was at 17, 18, $19, once those
contracts expired, the price of uranium to extract it out of the ground back then was,
you had to be well over 50 bucks a pound. And so I knew the math was not right. And so
what wound up happening over the last several years, there's a number that we look at,
there's a number that we look at, there's a number that we look at, there's a number that we look at,
and so if the industry consumes 200 million pounds a year, it was 175 when I started looking at it,
it's going up to 200. Are they contracting at that same rate? Because if they're not,
they're drawing down inventories. Well, when you look at the amount of inventory that has
been drawn down over the last decade, it's been a staggering amount. And so the recency biases
of people who were trading off of prior years contracts in a market that we're
pricing had got, had collapsed. They just always believed that uranium would be there.
Well, here we are fast forward over the last decade, the replacement rate of contracting
is about 55%. So for every pound a utility consumes, they're replacing about a little
bit more than half of that. So therefore you're not testing the economic viability
of the uranium production complex in the world, yet prices have still risen.
From, from the high teens to over a hundred dollars per pound. And that's without stressing
the market, stressing the supply, because the supply that they believe is always there
isn't economically viable. There is a difference. Now to put something in context, Shiel,
Kazatomprom, the state-owned entity, is the largest in the world. Kazakhstan itself produces
41%. And through a series of JVs with Russia, China, the Canadians, the French,
they produce half of it with those JVs and half for themselves. They came public 2018, 2019,
and they put out a very thorough 700 plus page prospectus. They are by far the lowest
cost producer in the world. And in that prospectus, they looked out going out through
2040 and their all in sustaining cost of production was in the mid teens then.
And they said, by the time we get to the mid twenties, you look at 2025, it was going to be
$13, $14 a pound. And, and, and they were using a Tenge of 340 Tenge to the dollar. Now they cost
in Tenge and sell in dollars. So a weakening Tenge helps their profitability. Well, fast forward to
2025, and here we are in early 26, the cost to produce that same pound is not $13, $14, it's 40.
And on a, on a constant currency basis, because the Tenge had weakened so much, it's $55.
So their costs have gone absolutely parabolic and the price of uranium has risen, but not nearly as
much as, as, as what to offset the rise. So you've seen production curtailments over the years.
You've seen curtailments come. Why? Because the Kazakhs realized we don't need to produce like
the Soviets, old Soviet style. You're losing money, produce more. Well, what they do is they've
cut back production quite a bit as you've seen production cuts across the entire complex. So
you asked the question, is there enough uranium? There is not enough economically viable uranium.
That horse has left the barn. The utilities waited too long to incentivize new production. So over
the past, since 2011, when Fukushima happened and all this excess supply hit the market because
demand had weakened, well, that was 15 years ago. And so inventories have been sucked down.
The recency bias is that what's always there, the uranium ferry will deliver uranium. Well,
as they've gone in,
and tested the economic viability of production capacity at only half the clip of replacing what
they're using, prices have gone up five X. And so they're, they're hoping beyond hope that new
mines will come online. And there are new mines coming online that still doesn't cover them.
Is your view then that the bottleneck, the reason there isn't enough uranium, it's,
it's upstream, it's mining. It's not that there is insufficient conversion or, or enrichment
capacity.
So one of the things you'll hear, it's a really good question. If you,
one of the narratives you'll hear is, well, conversion is a bottleneck and enrichment is
a bottleneck and there's enough, price is the great elixir, right? So right now, if you think
about this, this, this whole fuel cycle, there's, there's one product and that's uranium. Everything
is a service that in converting it is a service, enriching it is a service, fabricating it is a
service. Now, so when we look at there's the price of conversion has gone from $4 per kilogram
to $60 per kilogram that has incentivized new capacity to come online. There is still more
capacity that's needed, but that's, that's the flick of the switch that is signing long-term
contracts. Cameco and others could bring enrichment and Metropolis, which is a Honeywell spin out
owned by Solstice at Metropolis, Illinois. They could bring it on.
price will do that.
that. And in a few years, you'll have the equipment and you can build that productive
capacity. Same thing with enrichment. Enrichment went from $35 per separative work unit up to $200.
Well, that incentivized capacity is coming online. Urenco or Rano, they're bringing capacity online.
It's coming in 2030, 2031. A uranium mine from discovery to production can take 20 to 25 years.
And if you look at where these things are built, the big scale ones, not the ones. This is the
world of junior. A lot of it is junior mining. These are small, tiny companies that are running
around saying, look at me, we have the lowest cost in the world. No, you don't. What you'll
see right now, if you read many of the decks that are out there from a lot of these, they'll say,
we have $40 costs. Well, the world's lowest cost uranium miner now has $40 costs. You don't have
$40 costs. So, as you're thinking about a uranium mine, you're thinking about a uranium mine, you're
the bottleneck is going to be, there are inventories around the world, but as prices
rise, inventories become dearer. They don't become more mobile. And so, there's one other element
that makes the ability in the fuel cycle to add up to 20% more uranium than is actually needed.
It could be a little bit more.
Where demand will, it will create demand, and that's in the enrichment process. There's
something called underfeeding, which is, without getting into the nuances and bore people to death,
the way that centrifuges spin, if there's too much productive capacity, if you think about an apple
press, if I had an apple press and I didn't have, and I wanted to make a gallon of apple juice,
think about a centrifuge that way. So, I would throw a bushel of apples in, and I would do what
I'm doing, and I'd get a gallon.
If I had no other order coming behind me, I could keep that press spinning, and I could probably get
a gallon in it. And if I kept squeezing those apples, get a gallon and a quart, gallon and a
pint. But I would have more. Well, when there's not enough enrichment demand, those centrifuges
are spinning. They can't be shut down once they get turned on. So, there's very little cost to
produce. Electricity is about 5% of the cost of. Production. So, when they have excess capacity, like they did during a downturn after Fukushima,
they take the enriched, they take the uranium that's spinning, they make enough for the order
for the utility, and then whatever they can extract for themselves, they keep and they sell
into the market. And that's called underfeeding. And that's a nuance of the enrichment portion of
it. Now, conversely, if you didn't have enough. You didn't have enough enrichment capacity, and there was a demand on that capacity, well,
what you could do is add more apples to that apple press if you needed an hour and a quarter,
but you didn't have. You couldn't run it for the full amount of time. You needed to run it less
time because there was so much demand and you had to keep churning. You would put in more uranium.
Well, where you are in the cycle right now is you've gone from uranium underfeeding,
and at one point in time, Shale, the amount of enrichment that was being underfed,
the underfeeding of uranium, the amount of uranium being produced in a down market,
in a bear market, was the equivalent of the world's largest uranium mine. There was an
extra 20 million pounds of uranium being produced at the uranium enrichment plants that was being
sold into the market. It was almost pure margin for the enrichers. Well, here we are, fast forward
to where there's not enough enrichment capacity right now. You're getting to the point where
it's close to them needing to over. Overfeed those centrifuges. You're not there yet, but you can pencil it out and see it that
they're going to need to rush out and buy more uranium on limited capacity. So what does that do?
That puts an extra buyer of uranium into the market. Now, they can add up to 15%, 20% extract
more uranium, but that's going to put even more of a demand on the uranium itself.
Let me ask you, though, about, I guess, as a final question,
about the geopolitics a little bit, which you alluded to, but we haven't really talked to you
directly. I mean, I know there's a ban coming on Russian imports of enriched uranium into the U.S.
How important is that?
That's important. I mean, what it does is, right now, the Russians are having. So they send in
enriched uranium. We send them back U-308 feed. We've sent hardly any back recently, only a little
bit. People tend to think, for example, oh, the war might end with Ukraine. The Russians are going
to send a lot of uranium. They're going to send a lot of uranium. They're going to send a lot of
uranium in. The Russians don't have enough uranium because they have two needs for it. One
is they have their own reactor fleet in Russia, and then they have an export where they build
reactors, right, across the Belt and Road, and they build them, and they help finance them,
they help operate them, and they feed uranium, and they supply the uranium to them. There's not
enough uranium for them, so they need uranium. Now, they sell enriched uranium, but they don't
have enough uranium to the United States, okay? So if the Russian ban went away, psychologically,
people would say, oh, okay, well, the Russians are going to flood the market. They're not going
to flood the market with uranium because they don't have enough uranium. So there would be
enriched uranium, and with that said, well, enriched prices have already gone up. Contracts
are being signed, and that will do what it's going to do. So I mean, Congress passed it.
It's signed. The ban is for 28, and that's. It is what it is. So we're focused on the U-308 portion of it, understanding,
does Russia have enough uranium itself for the enrichment? Well, they're scrambling to get
uranium for it. Now, they also can underfeed their centrifuges, which they do, but it's a
challenge for them. All right, Mike, this was super informative. Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
Mike Elkin is the founder and CIO of Satcham Cove Partners. This show is a production of
Latitude Media. You can head over to LatitudeMedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode
was produced by Max Savage-Levinson, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey
edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. All of our
episodes are on YouTube. You can subscribe to LatitudeMedia.com for episodes of this
show and Open Circuit. You can find the audio version of the show anywhere you get your
podcasts. I'm Shail Khan, and this is. I'm Shail Khan, and this is.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Uranium pricing has surged from $17 to over $100 per pound, driven by market opacity and recency bias, despite a lack of actual supply expansion.
The global uranium supply chain is highly bifurcated geographically and politically, with 70% of supply from the East (Kazakhstan, Russia, China) and enrichment capacity concentrated in Russia (41–42%).
Long-term contracts dominate uranium trading (80% of sales), with spot markets serving only a small fraction of demand and primarily being used for arbitrage or off-take by producers.
Key players like Kazatomprom, the world’s largest uranium producer, have seen production costs rise from $13–14 to $40–$55 per pound due to currency devaluation and supply curtailments.
Enrichment capacity is constrained, and underfeeding during downturns historically created surplus uranium, now shifting to overfeeding as demand rises, increasing uranium demand.
Geopolitical risks, including a U.S. ban on Russian-enriched uranium (effective 2028), threaten supply stability but do not indicate a flood of uranium, as Russia lacks sufficient domestic supply.
New mines take 20–25 years to come online, and current production levels are insufficient to meet projected demand from new nuclear reactors.
The market's long-term viability hinges on incentivizing new mining and enrichment capacity through stable pricing, not just price volatility or supply assurances.
Summary:
The uranium market is facing a critical supply shortage amid rising prices, despite the perception of abundant supply. A decade of low demand and market complacency led to a collapse in pricing and a significant drawdown of inventories, with utilities relying on long-term contracts rather than spot markets. However, these contracts have not spurred sufficient new production.
Production costs—especially in Kazakhstan—have soared due to currency depreciation and reduced output, making it economically unviable to maintain past levels. The fuel cycle remains bottlenecked at the mining and enrichment stages, with only a fraction of global capacity in the West. Enrichment facilities, historically operating in underfeed mode during downturns, now face overfeed demands as capacity tightens, further increasing uranium demand.
S. ban on Russian-enriched uranium, add uncertainty but do not resolve the core issue of insufficient economically viable supply. With new mines taking decades to develop and current supply unable to meet future nuclear expansion needs, the market may face a supply crunch in the 2030s unless significant investment and policy changes accelerate new capacity.
The opacity of pricing and the dominance of long-term contracts create misaligned incentives, where buyers believe supply is secure when it is not. Ultimately, the energy transition’s success depends on building a resilient, diversified, and geographically balanced uranium supply chain.
FAQs
As of the end of September, the long-term uranium price reached $96.50 per pound, a record high above the previous peak of $95 set in 2007–2008. Prices have risen significantly from the low single digits in the 1990s to over $100 today, driven by supply constraints and demand for nuclear power.
No, there is not enough economically viable uranium supply. Despite rising prices, many producers, especially in Kazakhstan, have cut back on production due to high costs, and new mines are not coming online fast enough to meet projected demand for new reactors.
The uranium fuel cycle includes mining (to produce yellow cake), conversion (to uranium hexafluoride), enrichment (to increase fissile material to 3–5%), and fabrication (into fuel pellets) before being used in reactors. The entire process takes 18 to 24 months.
The market lacks real-time electronic pricing and relies on daily spot surveys and monthly contract reports. Most transactions occur through long-term contracts, and spot trading is limited, with prices often influenced by recency bias rather than actual supply and demand.
Geopolitical issues, especially Russia’s role in enrichment and Kazakhstan’s state-owned mining, create supply chain vulnerabilities. A U.S. ban on Russian-enriched uranium imports (effective 2028) will disrupt supply and increase reliance on alternative enrichment facilities.
Enrichment is a key bottleneck where prices have risen sharply—from $35 to over $200 per separative work unit—driving investment in new capacity. Enrichment facilities like Urenco and Orano are expanding, but supply is still insufficient to meet growing demand.
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