uramin should benefit from this :-
Nuclear power plants must have uranium as fuel. There are no substitutes, so if they do not have uranium, their hugely expensive plant and equipment sit idle.
The cost of uranium relative to total operating costs, even at the current price of $72 per pound is very low. In fact, one Toronto-based analyst estimated that uranium would need to rise to $500 before it would begin to equate to the cost of fuel for natural gas driven power plants.
Uranium production from mines is currently meeting only about 60% of annual consumption to fuel existing 440 nuclear reactors around the world. As such, the stockpile of uranium that resulted from the disassembling of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union is rapidly drawing down.
There are no significant new supplies of uranium scheduled to come into production until 2010 or later, but by then there will be new nuclear power plants hungry for additional sources of uranium. Just this past week China announced that it is hiring General Electric to build four new nuclear power plants and Toshiba to build three. But there are dozens more power plants on the drawing boards in China and India and elsewhere, all of which demand more uranium.