From Bloomberg Opinion, November 27:
Climate change will continue to spur demand for the metal while traders are betting on the growing risk of geopolitical disruptions to supply.
Uranium offers a perfect distillation of a world that is heating up and a world order that is breaking down. Plus a market eager to capitalize on both.
The metal at the heart of zero-carbon reactors and zero-civilization warheads has so far this year beat every member of the Bloomberg Commodity Index, except orange juice. That jars with the sinking prospects of a US nuclear renaissance, just dealt another blow by the collapse of the leading small modular reactor project that was being developed by NuScale Power Corp. Along with the setbacks nuclear power has suffered in Europe, notably Germany’s mass shutdown, it seems puzzling that uranium prices have jumped from about $30 a pound in the summer of 2021 to more than $80 today, the highest since 2008.
While output from nuclear power plants fell by 4% in 2022, it remained close to the level it has fluctuated around since the early 2000s. Moreover, two-thirds of last year’s drop related to an unusual number of outages in France. In the US, modular reactors may remain aspirational but a new conventional reactor, long delayed, has opened in Georgia, with another due to start up soon. Meanwhile, California’s Diablo Canyon plant looks set to get a reprieve from closure. And existing nuclear plants now benefit from what amounts to a soft price-floor in the form of credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. Elsewhere, China’s rapid expansion of nuclear capacity continues and Japan has restarted some reactors closed after the Fukushima accident in 2011....
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