By Andrew Nelson

The spot uranium market crawled along last week, with a handful of trades and a fairly small amount of product changing hands. The market seemingly remains poised between sellers unwilling to play the discount game any longer and buyers that just don't have a desperate need for supply.

Industry consultant TradeTech reported just five deals last week, with 500,000 pounds of uranium finding new homes. Traders and utilities were the buyers for the most part, with TradeTech noting that prospective new buyers continue to trickle in to hunt for bargains.

The big issue is that current market supply is enough to cover what sparse demand there is. And sellers, sick of offering sub-economic or close-to-it prices, are increasingly unwilling to move any lower. TradeTech reports this theme played out clearly all last week, with the transactions that were closed being booked at, or very near, spot.

This dynamic continues to keep buyers on the fence and sellers at home, given the slowly increasing demand that is being seen is still very price sensitive.

That meant the stubborn sellers prevailed last week, with TradeTech's Weekly U3O8 Spot Price Indicator finishing last week at US$40.75 per pound, up $0.15 from the prior week's value.

Analysts at Macquarie had a bit to say about the uranium market last week, noting Kazakhstan, the world's largest producer of uranium, lifted output in 2012 to 20,900t from 19,450t. This adds up to around 37% of global output. What's more, the nation's state-owned miner Kazatomprom reported a few weeks back that the 1Q saw a further 7% production increase year on year.

At the same time Cameco's much anticipated Cigar Lake project in Canada