(Kitco News) - Uranium is going bonkers for two reasons, said Resource Maven founder Gwen Preston. One is straight supply-demand, the other is what she calls “the East-West divide’.
In mid-January Preston spoke to Kitco Mining at the Metals Investors Forum Vancouver 2024.
Preston said the spot uranium market “is pretty dry”, with some utilities even having trouble sourcing it. The United States needs baseload power for its green future, and that has to come from nuclear energy, but the US doesn’t want to rely on Russian uranium feedstock.
“Over the last few years there's been a significant push from US government to become independent on nuclear,” she said. “That means supporting domestic uranium mining and recently a big announcement on supporting uranium processing into fuel because guess what? Russia controls that as well. And that's also really amping the market, because not only is there not enough supply, there's even less supply if you limit yourself to non-Russia Kazakhstan supply. So it's like a stranglehold and there's no quick answer to it.”
Preston said 2024 isn’t the year for copper because investors aren’t positioning for global growth. Nor is supply at the point where end users are unable to source the metal.
“We need to run out of copper, actually like have moments where people cannot buy the copper that they need,” said Preston. “And/or we need investors to start positioning for global growth. We need to get to a point where that's the driving investor push and when we get to those things, ideally both or one or the other, then copper is going to I think go pretty crazy.”
Preston sees silver as an industrial commodity and therefore on the same trajectory as copper.
“I think silver is going through a bit of a slosh right now,” she said. ‘Basically the available supply is sort of sloshing around and getting smaller, but like copper we still need to get to that point where investors are positioning for growth and they say ‘oh, silver is a big part of green growth and we don't have enough silver’, and/or we actually start to not have enough silver available for those photovoltaic cell build outs and I don't think we're there yet with either of those.”