By Greg Peel

Either something has to give shortly or perhaps the spot uranium market will fade in importance once more as a price indicator, as was the case before the big uranium bubble of the mid noughties. Prior to the bubble the uranium spot market drew little attention given a long stretch of relatively low and stable uranium prices post the Chernobyl disaster. But the China super-cycle changed all that, and suddenly speculators saw a lagging commodity price and a spot market ready to be exploited.

In today's post-Fukushima world however, speculators are looking a bit twice bitten and three times shy (twice being the bursting of the bubble and then the tsunami). Commodity funds appear less interested in including uranium in their baskets, and China appears about the only source of global growth in longer term uranium demand for the time being. Yet that is to forget that operating reactors still need fuel, and right now utilities are queuing up to secure future supply while prices remain near post-Fukushima lows.