Nuclear: no uranium shortages in prospect!

What quantity of natural uranium is currently being consumed worldwide and what are the forecasts between now and 2050? 

Christian Polak: Currently, 60,000 metric tons of uranium are consumed every year worldwide. For forecasts of consumption in the years to come, 2050 has been chosen as the horizon by the World Nuclear Association, as, at the present time, it is the date which allows us to make the reliable forecasts with regard to the existing and planned nuclear fleet. So looking to the horizon of 2050, it is estimated that annual needs will be 100,000 metric tons. An increase which is explained by strong development in nuclear, pretty much all around the globe. 

By 2050, Uranium demand will double

Will there be enough uranium resources to meet this growing need? 

C.P.: Of course! According to 2022 data from the IAEA which publishes an inventory of global uranium mining resources in its red book every two years, there were to date 8 million metric tons of resources which are “reasonably assured” resources and “could potentially be economically exploited”. And that is only an estimation at a given time T! Uranium is present in abundance on Earth and there are still resources out there to be discovered. The largest deposits today, those of the Athabasca Basin in Canada or Olympic Dam in Australia, were not even known to exist sixty years ago! With the recovery in prices in 2005-2006 and more recently since 2021-2022, more and more exploration licenses have been granted allowing new discoveries    to be made. Today, the "poorest" uranium mines in operation contain 350 g of uranium per metric ton of ore. It is estimated that the Earth's crust contains around 2 g/metric ton.  There are thus still promising prospects of yields from being able to find many more deposits of much lower grade in the Earth's crust! If we continue to explore, uranium will continue to be found, but that will of course require considerable financial resources which are only justified if the demand is there… 

Is it going to be necessary to constantly keep innovating to take exploration further? 

C.P.: Yes, it is going to be necessary to explore deposits which are deeper and deeper underground, in more remote locations, of poorer grade and more complex to exploit. For example, in Canada, 30 years ago, it was necessary to go down to 150/200 meters to find the ore. Today, we are having to go down to depths of 1,000 meters. The deposits are smaller and hard to access, and, from an economic point of view, do not justify recourse to traditional open-pit  or underground mining methods. So we have to innovate. Orano is a pioneer in the field. In partnership with Denison Mines (a Canadian company), we have developed SABRE (Surface Access Borehole Resource Extraction) technology which allows us to extract small volumes of uranium by drilling boreholes from the surface and bringing the ore back up to the surface in the form of sludge thanks to the injection of water at high pressure. This innovative technique makes it economically viable to mine deposits which are rich and small in size which it would not be possible to mine using traditional methods due to the investments necessary to operate an open-pit or underground mine.

We are preparing to start mining pockets of ore covered by our McClean Lake license with this method (SABRE) as of next year.   

In terms of looking for deposits  , innovation is also a key part of the solution with increasingly sensitive sensors coupled with powerful IT systems allowing our geologists to be more effective at detecting and interpreting signals such as electrical, magnetic, gravimetric and radioactivity data. Orano is counting on an increase in exploration budgets coupled with innovative techniques to grow its portfolio of uranium Reserves and Resources over the next ten years.

And, over the longer term, what are the exploration prospects?  

C.P.: For the second half of the century, it is estimated that a considerable share of uranium production will come from non-traditional ore and resources as a co- or by-product such as IOCG (Iron Oxide Copper Gold – or deposits containing iron, copper, gold and uranium), black schists (very common geological formations which often contain metals such as nickel, potassium, cobalt, copper and uranium at low grades) or phosphates. Uranium may also be obtained from metasomatic deposits (very extensive masses of rock where the mineral content is the result of an intense washing with saline solutions containing uranium in small quantities) or alternatively small mines located close to each other and organized into districts with a central plant to minimize costs  . This will require us to keep on innovating and rethink economic models. 

But in any case, I would say once again that there are plenty of uranium resources out there! And also we should not forget that today only 0.7% of natural uranium is used by nuclear fission: that corresponds to the isotope 235. The rest, the largest share, is accounted for by isotope 238 (depleted uranium) which France currently keeps in storage on the Orano Bessines sur Gartempe site in the Haute Vienne and will be able to be used in fourth-generation reactors. So it's fair to say that there are still some very promising prospects in terms of resources and plenty to keep nuclear energy being produced for a long time to come!