In his State of the Union address, President Obama made a point to mention nuclear power as a important source of energy for the world. Next year’s proposed budget will include billions in federal guarantees for new plants.  So with all this focus on nuclear energy, it begs the question...where is all the uranium going to come from? 

In the past Australia and Canada have been major suppliers of uranium, but a surprising country has pulled ahead in the uranium race.  Kazakhstan is now producing one fifth of the world’s supply.  Smaller African countries are also gaining attention now for their capacity and potential as uranium suppliers. The Central African Republic, Niger, and Namibia are some of the promising candidates.

Africa has looser regulations on the mining so those countries look particularly attractive to western investors. It could be immensely profitable for these poorer countries as the price for uranium has been steadily rising of late. 

 Another surprising source of uranium that cannot be overlooked is the United States and Russia, in the form of decommissioned nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War.

There are plans to build new reactors that will get substantially more power out of the same amount of uranium, stretching the supply. Although uranium is about as common as zinc or tin on the earth, it is difficult to find mining sites with large quantites of high quality uranium that allow the extraction to be cost-effective. Even seawater contains trace amounts of uranium, but right now we certainly can't use it. 

Lest the environmentalists despair, there are a variety of new technologies being developed that will be able to destroy nuclear waste and turn it into more energy.  Once again, the trick to that is making it economical, but with some research and development it can be done, and with much more ease than it would take to extract uranium from seawater. 

Nuclear power has been avoided for many years because of the host of problems it carries with it but for the first time, we have a real chance at solving those problems and giving the people of the world a cleaner source of energy.