2011 Uranium Market Trends

In 2011, the uranium mining industry experienced a number of important events which had an impact on uranium prices and equity market volatility.

Germany, Italy and Switzerland have made policy decisions concerning nuclear energy which are not positive for the industry; however, these three countries joint represent a relatively small proportion of global demand for uranium totaling just about 5.8 percent of annual requirements. Following up with key points on the stipulate and supply arguments Mr. Khaliqi underscored “Germany’s stance to decommission all nuclear plants has also prompted other European nations to evaluation their policies. On the supply side, the biggest news story or catalyst in my view which will have substance impact on medium to long term prices is BHP’s (NYSE:BHP) planned expansion of Olympic dam. The expansion at Olympic Dam will considerably lift the mine’s annual production of uranium from 4ktpa to 19ktpa, adding major amounts of uranium to global supply.

Another key increase this year was the feasibility study of the Husab uranium project, a $1.7 billion uranium undertaking on the western coast of Namibia. Earlier in this month, Extract Resources Limited (ASX:EXT) was offered $2.2 billion by China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp (CGNPC) designed for its Husab uranium project. This is of importance as the Husab project is the largest in-situ, and maximum grade, granite-hosted uranium deposit in Namibia. It is as well the fifth-largest uranium-only deposit in the world.

The Australian uranium exploration and mining companies may have seen enhanced regulatory conditions, as Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, appeared intent to vary the current policy which did not allow uranium sales to India. India’s new rules to provide liability limitations for uranium producers and equipment suppliers in the case of a grave accident at Indian nuclear power plants saw a positive ending for all uranium producers.Earlier this month, the Nunatsiavut Assembly in Eastern Canada, lifted a suspension on uranium mining on Inuit land in Labrador after three years.

Global Scarcity of Uranium Looms

Challenges in source funds for new mining projects, interruptions in together new and ongoing mine production, as well as the end of the Highly Enriched Uranium agreement are near-perfect ingredients for a lack of uranium in the very near future, a top producer warns.

Tim Gitzel, Chief Executive Officer of Cameco Corp., the world's largest uranium producer, said the problem lies additional on the way investors and producers make their calculations."They take every likely project, think it's going to operate to excellence and add it up and say 'there's lots of supply,'" Gitzel said. "It's easier said than complete.

Gitzel argued that investors, traders, analysts and critics focus too much on a "post-Fukushima attitude.""People don't focus so a large amount on the supply side," he said.Prices of uranium, a radioactive heavy metal used as an plentiful source of nuclear energy, have tumbled 24 per cent since the March 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan so as to caused a partial meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant.The crisis at Fukushima led nations to pause and re-evaluate accessible as well as future nuclear programs. Germany, for one, announced it will finish its nuclear reactors by 2022.

India exploring for uranium mining assets abroad

India was exploring chance to own uranium mining assets overseas and also looking forward to have enduring contract for the supply of uranium to run its nuclear plants, a senior official said today.

"After the opening of the International Civil Nuclear Cooperation, chance to own assets as well as opportunity to enter long-term contract for supply of uranium mines has opened up.It is our policy to look for those chance and we are exploring such opportunities," Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) Director R K Sinha told reporters on the sidelines of the 22nd National Annual Conference of Indian Nuclear Society (INS) here.

Reacting to a query, he said "We are operating in safe protected reactors. The nuclear plants in Rajasthan are operation on fuel material which has been imported. Previously we have the advantage of getting fuel supply including for Tarapur nuclear power plant."

A low-carbon, safer and more abundant energy source than uranium

THORIUM is a radioactive chemical element that could, in theory, be used to produce large quantities of low-carbon electricity in future decades compare with the uranium that powers nuclear plants, thorium is additional abundant and broadly distributed in the Earth's crust.

It also offers various safety reimbursement over uranium: it is not prone to runaway chain reactions that can lead to nuclear disasters; its waste goods remain dangerous for a much shorter period; and its by-products aren't useful for creation nuclear weapons in addition, thorium reactors could theoretically be used to burn up the hazardous plutonium store in existing nuclear waste stockpiles.

There are various different ways that thorium can be used to make energy the plant being developed in India uses solid thorium fuel in water-cooled reactors like to those found in today's uranium-based power plants a completely different approach being explore in China and the US is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR or ''lifter'') this expertise was developed to prototype stage by the American government in the 1960s but was then shelve in favour of uranium, possibly since it didn't go hand-in-hand with weapons production.

Uranium miner seeks $70m in fresh funds

IT IS not the best of times for a uranium producer to be patter the market for fresh funding but that is what ASX-listed African uranium producer Paladin Energy is doing, in search of up to $70 million from an institutional placement of shares.

The funds are needed to strengthen the group's balance sheet to "ensure the company is well placed to meet all future commitment and pursue recognized growth options"" it was not inspiring stuff from a company whose share price has been trashed because investor confidence in uranium stocks was undermined by the incomplete meltdown at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant in March.

Expansion at the group's Langer Heinrich mine in Namibia and the improvement of the Kayelekera mine in Malawi have also cause some headaches, fundamental to the group's 74 per cent share price fall.

Electrified Bacterial Filaments Remove Uranium from Groundwater

Earlier this year, Lovley published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology performance that the pili on G. sulfurreducens are a type of 'nanowire', since they conduct electricity the pili help to power the bacterium by transferring electrons shaped during the cell's metabolism to external acceptors such as iron the fact that pili can as well reduce a metal such as uranium "provides further evidence for long-range electron transfer along the pili", he says.

The research should help to improve bioremediation the use of biological organisms to eliminate pollutants from soil and water such as clean-up of the a lot of sites contaminated by uranium processing during the cold war, "Current methods to arouse the growth of these bacteria in the environment are pretty crude and empirical," says Lovley, "This new mechanism resolve allow us to better predict how uranium can be depleted."

Reguera is most excited about the possibility of "getting away beginning the bugs" and making non-living devices based on nanowires, "This would let to work in sites where bacteria cannot live," she says, such as the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, which be devastated by a tsunami earlier this year.

Nuclear energy’s growth lacklustre: IAEA chief

Despite mounting public outcry over security of nuclear plants, India’s trust in the nuclear energy option is official now. But by its own admission, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had said late last year that the development of the nuclear energy globally had been lacklustre. A few months before the Japan shock, in his yearly report submitted in September last year to the Board of Governors, General Conference, IAEA director general Yukiya Amano admit to the rather lacklustre presentation of nuclear energy globally. He said, “The split of nuclear energy grew from just below 0.5% in 1970 to above 7% in the 1990s and declined to 5.7% by 2008.”

Further, he pointed out, “Over the past two years the payment of nuclear generation to world electricity manufacture has declined from 15% to less than 14%, mainly due to a rise in total electricity generation worldwide without an amplify of nuclear generation.” The IAEA director general’s report further evidenced the lack of any particular growth pattern in usage of nuclear energy worldwide. “In western Europe, nuclear produce electricity accounts for almost 27% of total electricity. In North America and Eastern Europe, it just about 18%, whereas in Africa and Latin America it is 2.1% and 2.4%, respectively. In the Far East, nuclear energy accounts for 10% of electricity making; in the Middle East and South Asia it accounts for 1%,” he conceded.

On the critical issue of training and human development, the reports admit to shortage of experienced personnel to man nuclear energy plants. It predictable that in 2009 all nuclear power plants in operation worldwide continued to employ more than 250,000 people. “About three quarters of all reactors in process today are over 20 years old, and one quarter is over 30 years old. The generation that make and operate these plants has either before retired or will soon. Many of the organizations that are licensed to function these plants also have projects underway or under thought to build new units, and are facing shortages of knowledgeable personnel and loss of knowledge as they look to replace retiring staff for their existing fleet while at the similar time staffing new projects,” the report cautioned.

Uranium Energy Says Quake response Means World Shortfall

Uranium Energy Corp. (UEC), a U.S. miner and processor of the nuclear fuel, said global supply will fall short as exploration investment is shortened following the Japanese nuclear crisis. The Global X Uranium ETF (URA), which track uranium-mining companies, has fallen 21 percent since March 10, the day before Japan’s strongest earthquake on proof and a tsunami triggered explosions and radiation leaks at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. Australian uranium miner Mantra Resources Ltd. last month decided to a 12 percent cut in the capture offer from Russia’s state-owned Rosatom Corp. because of the crisis.

Annual uranium use surpass production by 50 million pounds following the damage done to Fukushima, said Amir Adnani, chief executive officer of Corpus Cristi, Texas-based Uranium Energy. “Because of Fukushima, because of the reaction, the knee- jerk reaction, the expansion is not going to occur at an adequate pace to fill the current deficit and meet growing demand,” Adnani said in an April 13 phone interview from London. Uranium Energy rose 6 cents, or 1.5 percent, to $4.09 as of 4:15 p.m. in American Stock Exchange trade. The shares have drooping 13 percent since the earthquake.

Still, Adnani said he doesn’t expect a negative impact on Uranium Energy because its Palangana mine in Texas started production in late November. “Everything we had to do to start production was finished before Fukushima and what seems currently to be a tougher environment,” he said. The price of U3O8, the deal form of uranium, declined 14 percent since the earthquake to $57.50 a pound, according to data from MF Global Holdings Ltd. Nuclear power offer for about 20 percent of U.S. electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

S. Africa May require to Build Five Nuclear Plants for $35 Billion

South Africa may require to build five nuclear power plants by 2030 at a cost of more than $35 billion as Africa’s biggest economy struggle to get together energy demand, said Rob Adam, chief executive officer of the country’s state owned Nuclear Energy Corp. Construction of the first plant should preferably start in 2013, Adam said in an interview in Johannesburg today. Plants could be located in the Western and Eastern Cape province. “The country will require to build about five Koeberg-sized stations,” he said.

Koeberg, which in progress operating in 1984, is the nation’s only nuclear plant and produce about 6 percent of its electricity. South Africa is battling an electricity deficiency after the government suspended the expansion plans of state owned usefulness Eskom Holdings Ltd. while it try and failed to convince private companies to build power plants. That resulted in a five day shutdown of the majority mines in the country, which is the world’s biggest platinum manufacturer, in early 2008.

In December of that year, South Africa halt plans to build a second, 120 billion rand ($17 billion) nuclear plant as the global financial disaster tightened credit markets. South Africa will whole laws next year to permit private companies to spend in planned nuclear plants, Chris Forlee, deputy director general of the Department of Public Enterprises, said on Oct. 26. Toshiba Corp.’s Westinghouse Electric Co. and Areva SA, the world’s biggest supplier of reactors, vied for the canceled order.

Uranium’s reserves to be over by 2050

Energy experts warn that a sharp shortage of uranium is going to hit the nuclear energy industry. Dr Yogi Goswami, co-director of the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of Florida warns that “the confirmed reserves of uranium will last less than 30 years.” Current nuclear plants use around 67,000 tonnes of high-grade uranium per year. With present uranium deposit in the planet having been predictable at 4-5 million tones, this means the present resources would last 42 years. But if there is going to be a stepping up of nuclear energy plants, as seem to be the case, then the likelihood is that that the time distance is going to be considerably reduced. Dr Goswami who is the discoverer of the a new thermodynamic cycle for solar thermal power now called the Goswami Thermodynamic cycle, says, “by 2050, all confirmed and undiscovered reserves of uranium will be over.”

“Other choice for producing uranium will be available. For example, three parts per billion of sea water is uranium but the costs of improving this uranium are so high that it is unlikely to prove an unviable option,” he said. Dr Goswami agreed that atomic fuel was boundless if a government went in for breeder reactors. But from the 400 nuclear reactors being used in the world, “I do not know of a single government using them at present.” Dr Goswami also articulated his scepticism at the thermal breeder reactor technology based on thorium. At present, India is the only country currently pursues this because of its substantial thorium reserves.

His views were second by Dr Lee Stefankos, a professor of electrical engineering and director of the dirt free Energy Research Centre at the University of South Florida. Dr Stefanakos, who has been transport out research in the areas of solar thermal energy change, photovoltaic systems and hydrogen. Dr Stefankos also feel that nuclear energy is not one of the major producers of energy. With the shrinking uranium reserves, Dr Stefankos believes solar energy provide a safer and in the long run, a much cheaper different. An Indian scientist pointed out, “India is investing thousands of crores in increasing a nuclear energy program even though they were warn that high grade uranium is as much a dwindling reserve as are coal and gas resources.