Posted on 11/22/2009 9:13:58 PM PST by bruinbirdman
It's a little-known - and slightly ironic - fact that when Lehman Brothers exploded last year it did so as the proud owner of 500,000 pounds of yellowcake uranium: enough to make a nuclear bomb.
Uranium’s appeal was as a maturing commodity, one reaching the stage where it had become attractive not just to countries with military ambitions but also to energy traders with one eye on the growing global demand for new reactors.
Less than a decade ago, nuclear was a dead industry. The US, Germany, the UK, Russia and even the atomic bandleader France had no intention of building more plants. Since the end of the Cold War, the word was non-proliferation, while disasters at Chernobyl in Belarus and Three Mile Island in the US did nothing to promote nuclear as a safe fuel. Very few bothered to go digging in uranium-rich areas from Kazakhstan to Mongolia and the price of uranium hovered around $7 (£4.70) per pound in 2002.
At that time, the market was dominated purely by long-term contracts for physical delivery between miners and the nuclear power industry or governments.
But between 2003 and 2007, as Asian countries from China to India started looking into new nuclear plants, prices rose by 17 times.
The extraordinary bull run, fuelled by a new global enthusiasm for nuclear energy, ultimately ended in misery for Lehman and other investment banks dabbling in the energy market as the bubble burst.
But might now be the time to pile back into the toxic commodity as even more countries prepare to declare a return to nuclear energy?
Even the firmest national sceptics, such as Germany, appear to have been won over in recent months by the environmental argument for nuclear’s low-carbon generation ahead of next month’s Copenhagen climate change conference.
The world
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
No, they haven't been won over. It's because their Green power crapola have been a colossal failure and they can't afford it any longer. They have to go back to what works and can't bring themselves to go all the way back to coal, the Russians have them by the throat with natural gas. But nuclear is good anyway. But don't think they like it one bit they just don't have another choice. It's cold there much of the year. LOL
One of the big problems with the Green Energy plants (solar, wind) is exactly the same as Nuclear; nobody wants it in their backyard.
They both also require huge swaths of open land to generate more than minuscule amounts of electricity.
But unlike nuclear they are not reliable 24/7 sources of power. The wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine.
Other than fossil fuels and nuclear only minor producers like hydro and geothermal can give you reliable generation on day to day bases. All of the hydro sites are already in production (not to mention that the Green Movement would block any attempt to license a new site). As for geothermal generation unless you want to drill holes in the ground several miles deep most of the available sites are also in production.
It's because their Green power crapola have been a colossal failure and they can't afford it any longer. They have to go back to what works and can't bring themselves to go all the way back to coal, the Russians have them by the throat with natural gas.
Given the technological expansion of US natural gas reserves, I wonder if Russia actually is the only place Europe can get NG in the immediate future.
Yup. You don't even hear that Spain abandoned gov't subsidies for Green a couple of years ago because of the rat hole.
However, Spanish Eco-companies are leaders in the field, outside Spain, heh, heh.
yitbos
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