Japan warning over volcano near nuclear power plant

That is because without the electricity generated from Japan’s 43 nuclear reactors, the nation has resorted to expensive imported sources of fuel such as coal, natural gas, and oil. Many of them are going to be in China and India.

Uranium futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange have climbed 18 percent in the past year to $36 a pound, while the benchmark price for steelmaking coal has fallen 23 percent to $93 a metric ton and gold futures have dropped 14 percent.

Cameco’s “underlying commodity price isn’t falling off a cliff like it is for all these other producers”, David Sadowski, an analyst at Raymond James Financial Inc.in Vancouver, said in a phone interview. An eruption might also pose significant risk to operations at Sendai nuclear power plant, which was restarted earlier this week after a hiatus of four and a half years.

“Japan’s big business association is under the strong influence of the nuclear power lobby, and it has long demanded that the government restart the plants as soon as possible”, said Koichi Nakano, a professor of Japanese politics at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Uranium has advanced as nuclear utilities increased purchases of so-called long-term supplies, according to data from Cameco. More nuclear will cut that share back down.

With its nuclear gasoline recycling program nonetheless stalled and plutonium stockpiles triggering worldwide considerations, Japan is beneath strain to make use of as a lot of the stockpiles as potential in its reactors.

It will be interesting to see if this psychological boost for the nuclear market provides some support for uranium prices. The last time that happened, Cameco was trading at almost $40 a share.

The No. 1 reactor, which reached criticality, a self-sustained nuclear fission chain reaction, late Tuesday night, has an output capacity of 890,000 kilowatts, which can meet electricity demand from about 300,000 average households. “It’s liquid, well known and is in the kind of places where you probably want to be” – Canada, Kazakhstan, the U.S. and Australia.

After the disaster, Japan overhauled its nuclear regulatory structure.