Tight supply of uranium could interfere with global plans for a boost in nuclear generation capacity growth, the World Nuclear Association has warned.
According to the industry body, global uranium demand is set to increase by over 30% to 86,000 tons over the next four years, further rising to 150,000 tons by 2040, the Financial Times reported.
While demand rises, however, supply will be shrinking, with output from existing mines set to fall by half in the decade between 2030 and 2040. Based on that, the World Nuclear Association said.
“As existing mines face a depletion of resources in the next decade, the need for new primary uranium supply becomes even more pressing,” the association warned. “Considerable exploration, innovative mining techniques, efficient permitting, and timely investment will be required.”
The World Nuclear Association’s warning echoes an earlier one, made by the International Energy Agency in April. In a report on nuclear energy, the IEA said the sector was enjoying renewed interest but that supply of its key ingredient was getting increasingly tight, because new nuclear power plants were being built faster than uranium mining was expanding.
“More than 70 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity is under construction globally, one of the highest levels in the last 30 years, and more than 40 countries around the world have plans to expand nuclear’s role in their energy systems,” the IEA’s Fatih Birol said at the time.
The World Nuclear Association, for its part, reported that global nuclear generation capacity was on track to increase twofold to 746 GW by 2040. A lot of that new generation capacity will be in China. Meanwhile, starting a new uranium mine takes between 10 and 20 years, which would create a gap between demand and supply for the nuclear fuel.
“The whole ecosystem needs to be in equilibrium, and it’s not,” the chief executive of Energy Fuels, a U.S. uranium miner, said. “There are clouds on the horizon.”
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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