This article is plainly wrong. The exclusive driver in the recent spike in Uranium prices [1] is Niger. They had a coup on July 26th. They produce less than 5% of global production of uranium, but they were supplying more than 25% [2] of Europe's needs. Several days after the coup finished, they made it clear that the colonial style arrangements with France, which were driving dirt cheap uranium to Europe, were over. There continues to be yet another proxy war brewing in the region because of this.
Another 17% of the EU's uranium needs comes from Russia, and 27% from Kazakhstan (who in 2022 had an attempted color revolution). It's basically the oil wars, starting all over again. Definitely a good time to go long on uranium prices in any case. Oil prices prior to the 70s were as low as ~$10/barrel inflation adjusted, and uranium is far less plentiful.
Well, excepting oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon. There are also unclear environmental implications there. Uranium is only present in something like 3 parts per billion in saltwater. Extracting meaningful quantities there would be a tremendous undertaking.
You don't have to mine the oceans, there are massive uranium reserves all over the world [1]. The economics of extracting it of course depend on price, but it's not exactly a bulk material.
> they made it clear that the colonial style arrangements with France, which were driving dirt cheap uranium to Europe, were over.
France was overpaying the market rate during the past 10 years to keep good relationships with the previous leadership so no it's the opposite, it's the end of the more expensive uranium for Niger most likely.
The deals between France and Niger are not public, but Reuters was able to provide some citable data here (2015) [1] :
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"Reuters has reviewed documents which reveal that Areva’s mines pay no export duties on uranium, no taxes on materials and equipment used in mining operations, and a royalty of just 5.5 percent on the uranium they produce."
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Areva has been restructured and is now Orano. [2] Alongside the token level royalty rate and exemptions, they're undoubtedly also exploiting local labor. Niger is one of the poorest places in the world, with a nominal gdp/capita of $630 - about $50/month. There's a reason the streets were full of people rejoicing when the coup happened!
Not true, the customs data are public and we know the price per kg of each grams of uranium from each counties, the Niger was on the expansive side, you can look it up it's code NC8 is 28441090 on the douane website.
I'm not sure what that table is showing, but it's not what you are implying. Niger is France's plurality supplier, so them showing 5% is clearly measuring something else.
Beyond that, France is not importing from Niger in the nominal sense. A French state owned company, in Niger, mines the uranium, and then gives Niger a token royalty on profits. So if they claimed e.g. $100, you'd expect about $5.50 of that (unless Niger was able to negotiate a better deal since 2015) to go to Niger. So their "real" cost would be the $5.50 plus labor/supplies.
Basically Niger already dropped a lot as a source worldwide due to production costs.
Areva even has a mine with permits to exploit in Imouraren which they don't actually exploit because uranium prices are so low that it's not economical to keep the mine opened.
There's been talks to shut down all the remaining mines even before the coup.
Also the margins that were made don't necessarily depends on the price of the contract on the markets.
The contract with the Nigerien government can be considered OTC.
So people claims that it was fair is disingenuous.
Then again it's a negotiation so the other party is at fault too.
The issue is when one of the other party decides what their counterpart will be in advance, make some arrangements etc. That's not fair and that's what the article also talks about.
But anyway... This is known even in French circles, they don't hide it at all. Just a shame to have such a short-term, outdated vision.
You realize that i24news is also kind of a French media outlet? (it's part of Altice group, same as M6 or Libération and the CEO of the channel is French).
[1]: yes he has 5 different nationalities, but his familly arrived in France when he was a teen, studied in France, made a fortune in France, most of his empire are French companies, and so is his political network, so I'll count him as a fellow French, even if he also has the nationality from Saint Kitts and Nevis…
I wasn't talking about the CEO but the owner, Drahi.
It's still israeli owned.
Drahi is born in Africa.
And he isn't a French national anymore apparently.
Anyway, regardless.
I apologize for the confusion, i24news is broadcast in the USA thanks to a serie of buyouts, from Altice NV to create Altice USA and then another recent acquisition (Cablevision) to acquire broadcasting licenses etc... The details can be found.
I don't dispute the fact that there are links to France (obviously) but the point remains that it's a more global media than what you linked.
I will note that if you want unbiased raw information, you should rather link afp as every true journalist would tell you.
i24news is registered in Luxembourg... Fair enough.
I guess a company being registered in Ireland makes it Irish... Who really cares...
Depends how old you are, check out January 2011, $130 or so IIRC, more than 4x the current price ... and from my PoV that was after a legendary single day spike a few years earlier. Close of day averages make it look like a decent spike, hourly trading figures on tthe day were a crazy rollercoaster.
> Well, excepting oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon. There are also unclear environmental implications there. Uranium is only present in something like 3 parts per billion in saltwater. Extracting meaningful quantities there would be a tremendous undertaking.
Or just build breeders. There's plenty of thorium and it's dirt-cheap.
There's also plenty of depleted uranium and we don't know what to do with it anyway.
The problem is that there no simple “just build breeder reactors” plan. Breeder reactors are complex and have completely different safety concerns than regular reactors (mostly because the coolant cannot be water) so it's actually a lot of work to make one.
The worst problem facing breeders, I think, is fuel fabrication. France has developed a process that uses a high energy ball mill to “alloy” plutonium and uranium oxides to make very high quality fuel. The trouble is this also makes carcinogenic plutonium nano particles and protecting workers from them is problematic because workers need to pick up plutonium pellets up with gloves and stuff them in a tube.
The factory Karen Silkwood worked at made excellent quality fuel for the FFTF with something like the French process but had trouble controlling plutonium dust. The U.S. wanted to build a MOX fab with help from the French for destruction of weapons grade plutonium but construction was halted not long after studies shown that workers in French fuel fabs were getting lung cancer (at a low enough rate thar French and Russian regulators seem sanguine about it.)
uses might address the occupational safety problems plus the high capital costs that have affected breeders. If a breeder could replace the steam turbine with a supercritical CO2 or some other high temperature heat acceptor, capital costs could possibly be less than the LWR.
I wasn't aware of that issue, thanks. That's yet another example of what it takes to switch to a radically new tech.
(I'm not convinced with the assessment as being the “worst problem” though, as not using water as a coolant forces you to rethink nuclear safety from the ground up in a way that makes “controlling dust in the manufacturing process” sounds like an easy problem in comparison)
There is no risk of a steam explosion. The core shuts itself if it overheats so it has been demonstrated that reactivity insertions and loss of cooling can be resolved passively
There was fear in the early days that in a meltdown the core might become denser and produce a small nuclear explosion but after thinking through the problem for years and a lot of experience it seems the core disperses in a worst cast. Dangerous iodine isotopes dissolve in the coolant and are trapped in case of fuel damage. Potentially a fast reactor can capture almost all the tritium produced for use.
You can have a sodium fire but most sodium fires are pool fires which aren’t very dangerous. Fires happen all the time in industrial facilities, you detect them and put them out. They aren’t necessarily a big problem.
At this point we have a deep understanding of what can go wrong in a PWR or BWR, with part of this knowledge deriving from accidents (TMI and Fukuahima) and smaller incidents.
And we've developed a significant amount of mitigations and operators training to cope with these potential failures.
Doing the same thing for breeder isn't trivial at all.
I studied nuclear engineering ( before changing path in 2011 due to Fukushima) with one of my teacher having worked on SuperPhénix, and my wife is a nuclear engineer specializing in accident scenarios and operators training at EDF, so I'm actually pretty familiar with the topic.
> oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon
That is often repeated, but incorrect.
It would indeed multiply the price of uranium about 4 times, but the end result is that the price of electricity produced by the nuclear power plants would increase with less than 1 cent per kWh, and that's what matters. For comparison, the average retail price of electricity in the US is about 15 cents per kWh.
Here's the math, if you are curious: on average a PWR nuclear power plant produces 50 GW-day of electricity from one ton of enriched uranium, and you need about 10 tons of natural uranium to get that, so that's 5 GWd per ton of raw uranium. The current market price of uranium is $74/pound [1], or $163/kg. It is estimated that it would take $640/kg to extract uranium from sea water [2]. So, this is roughly $480/kg more expensive. 1 kg of Uranium results in 5 MWd or 120 MWh, so the increase in uranium price would result in $4 more for 1 MWh, or 0.4 cents per kWh.
Exactly, we can debate the pros and cons of nuclear all we want here but the reality is that the supposed shift in sentiment about nuclear power is way too recent to have had any impact whatsoever on actual world uranium consumption by nuclear plants.
Planning and building nuclear plants takes a very long time and the number of new plants built, constructed, and delivered because of this new sentiment remains at zero. At best there are now more discussions about maybe building some over the course of the next few decades. To say that these discussions are concluded would be very premature.
There's also a lot of talk about small reactors but they are still in the experimental/prototype stage where there are just not a whole lot of them online (zero or close to zero?, I don't actually know). And in addition, they would need relatively small amounts of uranium (by design, they are tiny compared to conventional reactors). So, to have an impact on world uranium demand there would have to be rather a lot of them and there just aren't right now. That will take a few decades if it starts happening at all. Economically these things aren't exactly a proven solution yet.
The easier and more obvious explanation is exactly as you say. And btw. especially the dependence on Russian enriched uranium could speed up the demise of some nuclear plants dependent on that. Running nuclear plants is expensive relative to renewables. And cost increases for businesses that are already struggling tend to have obvious consequences. Short term, there are more planned plant closures than there is new planned nuclear capacity in the US. Mostly that is because a lot of older plants are struggling economically and are reaching their planned end of life.
I'm saddened to see this BS as the top comment. The coup in Niger barely had a visible effect on Uranium price[1], and the Uranium price is on an upward trend since 2018[2].
[1] unlike the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year for instance, as the Uranium price rise in August (after the coup) has been almost equal to the one in July (before the coup).
What's your source for that, because the OP's graph shows a significant increase happening 1 month after the coup.
> This is also multi-factor.
Definitely, but I'm responding to someone claimed that “The exclusive driver in the recent spike in Uranium prices [1] is Niger”, which is literally the opposite of saying that it's multi-factor.
Uranium price will collapse with the rise of 4th gen nuclear power plants, which is meant to reduce waste and use it back to power the fission, making it dirt cheap since it's reusable and abundant
Note that this is an investment in companies at various stages of the nuclear pipeline, not directly a bet on uranium prices.
A company that mines uranium will probably do well if the price goes up, but not if the price goes up because their mine closed or got blocked for geopolitical reasons. A company that produces reactor components should tend to do worse if uranium prices rise, but in practice the demand for new reactors is driven by other factors.
If you want exposure to the price of uranium, you would do better with the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust [0]. The CME also lists uranium futures [1], but they don't seem to trade.
There was no meddling by the US. The people voted in a president who said he wanted close ties with Europe. After getting into power he changed and tried to get closer to Russia. The people protested against him and he fled to Russia.
> ...I stick to the facts, whether you like it or not
One needs also understand the facts, not just cite them.
All of the names you cited, Lukash, Lebedev, Ilyin were appointed by Yanukovich and indeed were working for his government.
That is Ilyin was attempting to deploy military units against the civilian protesters already being suppressed by AK-47 armed police forces.
No, the military did not try to stage a coup. It was russia-serving Yanukovich that was using every unlawful measures to stay in power, including the attempt to deploy the military units to suppress the Maidan civilian protesters.
As for the foreign interference, cherry-picking the references can't hide the outcome, as the Crimea and Donbas region were directly invaded by russian military and paramilitary units, following up with illegal annexation declaration.
Against the _armed_ nationalists who have seized weapons
People who were massacred were armed with Molotovs at best, there's actual video footage. Wish they had at least semi-auto weapons, this whole situation is a great argument for broad civilian gun ownership.
I never mentioned "staging a coup", further evidence that you are the one cherry-picking a narrative, this is revisionism
You have no idea what coup d'état means, do you?
What happened in that region prior to that doesn't matter now?
Another 17% of the EU's uranium needs comes from Russia, and 27% from Kazakhstan (who in 2022 had an attempted color revolution). It's basically the oil wars, starting all over again. Definitely a good time to go long on uranium prices in any case. Oil prices prior to the 70s were as low as ~$10/barrel inflation adjusted, and uranium is far less plentiful.
Well, excepting oceanic extraction which has vast supplies, but the extraction costs there would also send its price to the Moon. There are also unclear environmental implications there. Uranium is only present in something like 3 parts per billion in saltwater. Extracting meaningful quantities there would be a tremendous undertaking.
[1] - https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uranium
[2] - https://euratom-supply.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-10/ESA... (ctrl+f Niger)