Melissa Shaw reports that Mike Alkin expects late 2017 uranium production cuts announced by Cameco and state-owned Kazatomprom have a “dramatic” impact on the market. According to Alkin, the market is already in deficit and is filled with secondary supply, “so this just exacerbates that downward pressure on supply.” In terms of demand, Alkin said there are 440 reactors operating around the world, with 16 new reactors expected to come online this year. “Nuclear power is a growth industry, and I don’t think a lot of people realize that. It’s a 3-percent grower, it’s base load, it’s clean. So the demand story for nuclear is pretty good, pretty solid.” {and is has been so for years].
Alkin described the new administration as being “very friendly” towards nuclear power, pointing out that U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry signed a secretarial determination earlier in the year “to reduce the amount of secondary supply sold into the market.” He also mentioned that recently Energy Fuels and Ur-Energy jointly filed a Section 232 petition with the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the amount of uranium imports coming into the market.
“They want something done about that. The U.S. consumes 50 million pounds a year of uranium. It only produces 2.9 million pounds. So we import 95 percent, 40 percent comes from Russia and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The US is in a perilous energy security situation,” Alkin said. It remains difficult to predict when the uranium market will take off, but Alkin said utilities have 30 percent of their demand uncovered by 2020. “It takes them two years to order. We’re in 2018 now. I think this year the rubber has to hit the road for them,” he concluded.
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