Part 1 of 2 Parts
     The World Nuclear Fuel Conference 2022 was just held in London. Recent geopolitical events have not yet impacted the global uranium market according to speakers from uranium suppliers. They agreed that the longer-term future of the uranium market is uncertain.
     Treva Klingbiel is the president of TradeTech. He said, “We face an unprecedented time ahead of us. We face both incredible challenges and opportunities given where we are in the marketplace, both with the need for new nuclear and the expectations and realization that we need it and we face a supply deficit. And also on top of that, we have outsized geopolitical events that are really overshadowing and can impact much of the nuclear fuel cycle.”
     Tim Gitzel is the president and CEO of Cameco. He noted that the nuclear disaster in 2011 in Fukushima, Japan “changed our lives.” He mentioned that Cameco was continuing to produce uranium even in the face of a drop in demand. “It took Cameco five years to realize we got to do something different than we had been doing and so, with our partners, we decided to pull back on some production and shut Rabbit Lake down. We shut Wyoming down, we shut Nebraska down and we pulled back on McArthur River. The last 60 days has been unbelievable. We are still trying to figure it out.”
     Nicolas Maes is the CEO of Orano Mining. He pointed out that from the supply and demand perspective, the fundamentals had not really changed. He said, “The consumption by reactors hasn’t changed. And it’s not because the financial community came and played on our market.” He went on to say that the geopolitical tensioins have come at a time when production has been reduced. He added that “We obviously have in mind what is happening at the moment in Ukraine, but geopolitics have been there in our market on a much larger scale and have been for a while.”
      Maes went on to discuss how nuclear fuel is a very small part of the overall financial equation in tensions between countries. He said that it is not likely that geopolitical tensions between nations will lead to sanctions being taken with respect to the nuclear market “because of the small impact on financial markets. The worldwide market for uranium is worth about USD9 billion annually, which is equivalent to a few days of sales for the top oil companies. It is a relatively small market.” 
      Askar Batyrbayev is the Chief Commercial Officer of NAC Kazatomprom JSC. He said that “We all want to see the same actions on the market. We would like it to be stable, predictable and reliable for all market participants.”  He mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic brought many uncertainties and challenges for Kazakhstan’s uranium industry. In addition to those problems, the country faced civil unrest in January of this year. “But we came out of that situation very rapidly. All operations were sustained and were reliable, so nothing has changed, which now added with events in Ukraine, the market was already becoming very tight and it is hard to predict where it can go, how much more uranium we will need, what sort of restrictions will be there.”
      When he as asked about his concerns over security of supply and Russian involvement in Kazakh uranium projects, Batyrbayev said that Rosatom has so far been excluded from any sanctions. “In terms of that, there have been no disruptions in operations. We have five joint ventures with the Rosatom group. All of them are operating normally.” However, he said that Kazatomprom is taking measures to deal with the possibility of future sanctions that could impact production.
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