2012 was the worst year ever for, page-11

Fluffy, I know you're a uranium bear. But there will come a point - and soon - whereby the low price of the commodity will be simply unsustainable. And it's no good working on an assumption that people will just not buy at higher prices - currently a lot of the spot price is due to faffing about by hedge funds and commodity speculators (on very low volumes too) rather than utility companies who actually need physical uranium. It's the dabblers in futures and derivatives who are setting the spot price.

PDN's report shows that their prices were significantly higher, although lower than the previous quarter.

However, lower prices means that producers will progressively find it less and less sustainable to keep producing - simple as that. And the utilities that actually use the stuff - and there are hundreds around the world - won't suddenly throw up their hands and say "to hell with it, we'll just stop buying".

As supply starts to diminish, whether due to the end of the megatons-to-megawatts program, or simply to producers insisting on long term contracts at better prices or simply mothballing operations, the producers won't operate at a loss for very long. That makes no sense.

So a bottom will be reached (and how much of this is due to manipulation of "paper uranium" by the speculators, who should never have been let into this field IMHO), some sideways movement will drag out for a while, but the utilities will have to start negotiating contracts at long term prices to get their raw materials.

Another positive - even though PDN currently doesn't sell to Japan (although it does sell to India already) will be when the Japanese reactors start coming back online. But that will be a sentiment boost for the sector as a whole.

What REALLY needs to happen - but won't - is for financial institutions to be banned from trading uranium derivatives like futures (they can't deliver on them anyway) or otherwise being involved in the uranium business at all. But where there's money to be made - even if it is by contrived futures - they will be in it.

Then there are a couple of utilities that are stockpiling supplies - that's OK, but those stockpiles will run down.

Thank goodness the hedge funds and commodity speculators are not allowed to buy physical uranium (the IAEA would have a fit if they tried), so all these derivatives are purely contrived means of just creaming money off a commodity, and controlling the commodity's price.

This particular dam just HAS to break sometime - and that sometime isn't too far away, I suspect. The 450-odd nuclear power utilities around the world (with more coming online) NEED their uranium. And a regular, reliable supply. After all, in the overall scheme of things, the cost of the uranium to those utilities is a tiny fraction of the cost of the nuclear plant. And they know it - they're just taking advantage of the lower prices they can find at the moment. But if you check the actual transactions on the SPOT market each week, they are very few (often none, sometimes 1 or 2) and most of those are "financial institutions". The speculators.

Nope, despite your constant bearish posts (and most REAL uranium is NOT sold at spot price, as we have discussed before), I think this is one market that may well go skywards in a hurry once the dam bursts between supply and demand.