Many answers to the problems of our world, some of which are fundamentally different, are currently being discussed. In the forefront is the question of what the energy supply of the future should look like. The dispute is not only about which drives should be used in the future and how much energy will be required, but above all about how this huge amount of energy can be generated.
As fundamentally different as the individual answers are, there is still one thing that almost all the drafts have in common, which is that many extremely important aspects are completely unclear and the entire planning is therefore based on a lot of hope and even more wishful thinking.
Of particular concern is that many of the raw materials needed are not available in the required quantities, and it is currently not clear where these raw materials are supposed to come from. And even if you know where you could mine the required raw material, you completely forget that the development of large mining projects is extremely time-consuming and capital-intensive.
Many countries are building new nuclear power plants, but uranium is already extremely scarce
This not only applies to the important key raw materials of the energy transition such as lithium, nickel, manganese, copper and silver, but also to a raw material that is very easily forgotten in Germany: uranium. Well, we Germans have said goodbye to nuclear power and thus to the need to always have enough uranium fuel rods available. But the rest of the world doesn’t have it.
It continues to rely massively on nuclear power and even a country like Sweden, which also said goodbye to nuclear energy years ago, now wants to build new nuclear plants again. The future will show whether Germany will one day follow this example. But no matter whether with or without Germany: The uranium market will soon be very tight.
Already today, a supply of about 140 million pounds of triuranium octoxide (U3O8), a demand for 190 million pounds U3O8 across from. This enormous deficit is also due to the fact that the uranium price has been so low in the last decade that the development of new uranium deposits has no longer been worthwhile.
On the uranium market, one can therefore study very well what happens in the long term when the prices for a raw material permanently fall below its production costs. But the lack of sufficient uranium is currently not even the only bottleneck. Another bottleneck arises from the fact that Russia enriches a good 45 percent of global uranium production and is now no longer a supplier for many Western countries due to the sanctions.