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Not too many tears have been shed in Australia about the fact that uranium miners have struggled to turn a profit since the start of 2011.

Environmentalists tend to hate mining generally let alone the ugly duckling of nuclear uranium.

However it is expected to make a comeback after two and a half years in the doldrums and as host of the largest uranium reserves in the world and largest deposit at Olympic Dam, Australia will be a part of that.

Toro Energy won approval in April to build Australia's fifth uranium mine in Western Australia while a separate project, the Four Mile mine in South Australia was approved this month.

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This week's spot prices of about $35 a pound are arguably half the price needed to make a decent profit, but there is still a raft of junior miners exploring and trying to develop projects in Australia.

Toro's managing director Vanessa Guthrie said two major shifts have occurred and she can see Australia overtaking Kazakhstan and Canada as the world's largest producer.

The major political parties in Australia no longer oppose uranium mining.

Secondly, emerging economies led by China, India and Russia were providing new demand traditionally dominated by the US and France.

"While the market has been flatter and sluggish for longer than we would have loved, the fact is that on the horizon we can all see increasing demand and at some point in the next five years a crossover and shortage of supply," Dr Guthrie told AAP.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster led to Japan wiping out 12 per cent of global demand by shutting all of its reactors.

MineLife senior resources analyst Gavin Wendt says people should ignore the price.

The new demand from emerging economies would include governments that did not want to rely on any one energy source, such as coal, he said.

"Companies aren't prepared to invest in new projects because of where the uranium price is," Mr Wendt told AAP.

"That just creates an inevitable supply-demand squeeze because demand for uranium is continuing to increase."

The Chinese government plans to increase nuclear's proportion of their energy mix from two per cent today to 16 per cent by 2030.

India is similarly spending billions of dollars on energy security and plans to buy uranium from Australia, while Russia has nearly run out of enriched uranium from former Soviet warheads.

The risk is whether customers in Japan, China and South Korea decide they prefer natural gas.

In the meantime, Dr Guthrie must find an equity partner to help fund building its $269 million, 1.7 million pound a year mine, ideally to be up and running by the end of 2016.

Last month Canada's Mega Uranium took a $36.9 million, 28 per cent stake in Toro, which gave Toro a new resource and increased its resource base to 76 million tonnes.

Dr Guthrie says they will only go ahead if the uranium market recovers, but adds that a slowdown in the resources sector has been welcomed to bring down contractors' costs.

"It gives the other commodities a bit of an opportunity to get a look in on some of those mining services that are needed," she said.

This upside is bad news for nuclear power's opponents, a group of whom entered Toro's Perth office last year and poured yellow sand on the floor.

However Dr Guthrie said the nuclear power industry was one of the safest and highly regulated industries in the world.