It's hard to hold for speculators (they need to be government authorised to hold it and need somewhere safe to store it, or pay for storage by 3rd parties) but miners and utillities sit on loads of it.
I've been looking to get back into uranium at the levels that I used to hold but I'm not seeing Sprott buying up on the market as the fundamental catalyst to pull the trigger. This is not much different to the Reddit Wall St Bets crowd piling in to gamma squeeze AMC or Gamestop. U3O8 is an illiquid market, unlike most commodities, and it's being pushed up mainly by one player at the moment. Sprott aren't buying because anything has changed in the sector, they're just pushing the price up for a punt. If Sprott were a consumer of uranium then that would be a different story. But shenanigans from pure speculators like this always emerge in broader market bubbles.
What I was hoping to see was Japan restarting their nukes much more quickly than they have been post-Fukushima. Despite having 54 reactors pre-Fukushima and more than a decade since the meltdown there only nine (or 10?) reactors are back online. Even with announcements of a few big restarts earlier this year nothing really happened to the price of uranium or the miners. The market didn't care about that, much to my disappointment. See:
https://www.reuters.com/article/japan-nuclear-operations-idUSL4N2OS07H
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00967/
I was also hoping to see modular reactors available by now. The US and Western Europe has given up on nuke construction. Projects ALWAYS come in over time and over budget and there is a move to firm up cheap solar and wind with big batteries by governments globally. Modular reactors would solve the problem of nuke contruction cost blowouts but, alas, they seem as far away as they ever have been and I just don't know why.
Sprott is just manipulating an illiquid commodity price and with a high hold cost they'll be lucky if they don't get caught out by a market downturn at any stage now (keep your eyes on Evergrande - this could be the Chinese Lehman Brothers moment). It's clear that the broader market is in an extreme bubble and that one of many catalysts could pop. Not a good time for speculative punting. But maybe Sprott can keep propping the price up by buying more? Who knows, but if they try then old miners come out of care and maintenance and new ones come online and the market gets flooded with uranium again and the lessons of supply and demand get taught the hard way to a new generation of uranium investors.
(20min delay)