Commodities | Aug 18 2015
By Greg Peel
It’s been a very, very long time coming. So long that the event which would save the global uranium industry, as was assumed some years ago, passed largely without fanfare. Japan’s Kyushu Electric Power Co has managed to jump over an exhaustive array of regulatory and political hurdles, and finally the company’s Sendai unit one nuclear reactor is up and running once more.
It’s been four years and five months since Japan’s nuclear reactors were idled following the Fukushima disaster.
Kyushu Power’s Sendai unit two is expected to be similarly restarted in October. Attention now turns to whether there might be a rush to restart other Japanese reactors given there are currently 23, at 14 separate plants, under consideration. While Japan’s nuclear regulator may now have settled on a safety framework that pre-empts all disastrous possibilities, reactor restarts remain subject to local politics and the will of local residents at or near reactor sites.
Japan’s national government is on side but prefecture and local governments still have veto power.
If the first Japanese restart is a momentous occasion for the global uranium industry, there was no indication of such emanating from the uranium sport market last week. One thing Japanese power companies have not done in the last four years is dump all of their reactor stockpiles. Restarts do not imply a rush to buy fresh material.
Industry consultant TradeTech reports five transactions in the spot market last week totalling 700,000lbs of U3O8 equivalent. TradeTech’s weekly spot price indicator has risen US25c to US$36.25/lb.
Two transactions were concluded in the term uranium market, involving delivery of a total of 2mlbs. TradeTech’s term price indicators remain unchanged at US$38.25/lb (mid) and US$45.00/lb (long).
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