Too much sampling, radiometric anamolies, calcrete deposits which need extremely complex metallurgy to extract (eg PDN), uranium price is unsustainable, the hidden costs and dilution of mining andf metallurgy, complete misunderstanding of uranium and mining terminology by the speculative punter, price increases in recent months way above real in situ value even when assuming the Uranium price to be well over $100, punting on the word rather then the fundamental, emotional decision making, the listing of IPOs with absolutely no chance of ever mining, odds now favouring, at an increasing rate, that Howard will lose office, the ASX at historic high levels, state laws, changes in technology, alternative energy and fuels, global demand over emphasised and exaggerated....
The current valuations of so many are just insane.
Anyone read the Red Book from the Nuclear Power Agency? As the only government-sponsored publication tracking world trends and developments in uranium resources, production and demand, the Red Book is an authoritative source of statistics and information. It is the recognised world reference on uranium and is based on official information received from 43 countries.
The most complete record of the uranium industry to be published to date concludes that uranium supply will remain adequate to meet demand. Forty Years of Uranium Resources, Production and Demand in Perspective, published today by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), draws on the twenty editions of Uranium Resources Production and Demand (also known as the "Red Book") released since 1965. * In the retrospective, information from the Red Book has been supplemented by previously unavailable data, making it the most complete publicly available record of the industry.
One feature of the new study is that it tracks worldwide exploration expenditures for uranium since 1945. The analysis in this retrospective shows that exploration expenditures have closely paralleled uranium market prices. A combination of military requirements and expanding civil use pushed uranium prices to their historical peak in 1976. Prices steadily declined after 1976 as the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactor accidents slowed the growth of nuclear power, and the end of the Cold War in 1989 released new secondary sources of uranium for power generation from military inventories. Following suit, uranium exploration expenditures peaked in 1979 and were in decline until 2000. Since then, higher prices for uranium have encouraged exploration expenditures and it can be expected that this will result in the discovery of new sources of uranium.
This finding is further supported by the comparison of annual reactor-related requirements to reported resources, which shows a reserves ratio that has steadily averaged about 45 over the past twenty years, despite steadily increasing requirements and a lengthy period of reduced exploration.
Forty Years of Uranium Resources, Production and Demand in Perspective also examines the evolution of the time to bring resources into production after discovery for different mining methods and provides information on reactor-related uranium requirements, installed nuclear capacity, natural and enriched uranium inventories, unconventional uranium resources, thorium resources, mine start-up and closure histories, and environmental aspects of uranium mining and processing. In addition, it offers a full range of analyses and histories of exploration, resources and production for the major uranium-producing countries since 1965.
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