Article in FT today: prices of UF6 and SWU surging faster than yellowcake. New supply is not coming online as nobody wants to invest without long term contracts and utilities don’t want to sign long term contracts yet.
https://www.ft.com/content/49b6bdf5-4e64-47e5-83ed-1d0384a76cf4
Still holding? There’s a new customer in town: Google signs advanced nuclear clean energy agreement with Kairos Power
Consumption will be small, but the hype will soar!
Holding and adding. I use physical uranium trusts as an alternative to gold as a store of value. Some adjacent stocks such as ASPI trade like crypto currencies. I’m not sure if the boom will come, but there’s definitely the potential for a hype cycle boom.
I assume, there’s no delivery option with Uranium like with gold, right?
Of course there is… And a really fast delivery too.
I think the biggest news that flew under the radar is that China signed a deal with Kazatomprom to buy uranium that accounts for more than 50% of their total book value!
Kazatomprom is responsible for about 25% of the world’s uranium production. I think at some point, nuclear operators are going to worry about security of supply of fuel.
If I remember well, uranium is not scarce physically but economically. Meaning that at current prices only a few producers globally can compete and make a profit. If prices go up, competitors will arise in other regions around the world which are ignored for now.
I don’t know if that has changed - but I remember reading that enrichment is very energy-heavy.
That’s right, Uranium ore is relatively plentiful, but due to various factors, the price of uranium has been too low for a long time causing miners to go out of business or shutdown part of their mining operations and meet their supply contracts by buying uranium on the spot market.
The price had to rise a lot to incentivize the restart of mining operations or a lot more to start new mining operations. The price not only had to recover, but buyers willing to sign long term contract to make mining viable.
The situation was already bad, but after the Fukushima incident, that was the final nail in the coffin, reactors were shutdown and inventories built up and mining operations were curtailed. This led to the current situation where the industry has been working through the various excesses e.g. inventory. When that happens, the price of uranium should go up as the spot price was way below the price to mine new uranium.
So the investment thesis was simple, wait for excess inventories to be used up and then buy uranium and profit when prices rise. The problem is one of timing as the market is very opaque and estimating the above ground uranium is difficult - being too early is no different than being wrong. Though many funds have been formed to capitalize on this idea, taking investor money and buying uranium and waiting for the price to recover.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a catalyst as governments saw reliance on Russian oil and gas as a vulnerability and nuclear as a way to diversify. Also, Russia controls a large part of the nuclear supply chain and the threat of this being cut off (and the need to maybe built a parallel one in case) is an additional catalyst. Energy demand via AI is adding to the hype.
With all these factors and the passage of time, it seems like the original investment idea is playing out.
Speaking of Uranium, I collect uranglas and vasaline glass, because it´s pretty and I like it.
Went to the Auer Dult in Munich this afternoon, there is always a nice little antique section and I was hunting for Uranglas and gramophone parts as usual
One stall had a set of four tea cups that I would not have paid more than 40 Euros at most, asking 120 Euros, a little stopper vase for 95, euros, nope and a little plain perfume bottle that my sources say is worth 25, it was going for 100 Euros.
Now back in my one room pokey hole under the roof I have been checking prices and it seems that Uranglas items have risen in price over 50% . You guys are investing in the wrong Uranium.
Part of the reason may be that no new Uranglas is being made (I assume?).
It is still being made, mainly in the Czech republic from a local uranium mine. But these are mostly pebbles and small baubles, the interesting stuff is from the 1900 till the 1920ies and the manufacture of cheap pressglass, some of these items from that time command really high prices under collectors.
I tend to go to the fleamarkets and hunt there with my small UV torch hidden in my hand. The reason being that as soon as the people behind the stall see the UV the price goes up exponentially.
It´s a bit of harmless fun, I found a nice Belgian sugar bowl with a lid and four sherry glasses over the last few years. It´s not a lot and I have a whole stack of trays and platters for two or five euros that look like Uranglas but are in fact greenish pressglas, but as they are from the 1910´s 20´s amd 30´s I dont mind.
You surprise me with the number of different hobbies that you have!
I have a couple of very pretty wine glasses made from uranium glass - picked up cheaply on Ricardo some years ago.
The glass is radioactive;https://www.lunasabrina.com/post/uranium-glass-explained-identification-and-insights.
None of my guests seems to want to drink out of them, but they are quite happy to taste wine in cellars in Ticino, which just shows how bad we all are at risk assessment.
I had a similar discussion with my daughter where I argued that the little alpha rays emitted wont penetrate the skin. Also they are behind glass in a showcase.
