Uranium's Price Has Roughly Tripled Since 2020
Mining concentration is moderate, but enrichment concentration is higher still, a genuinely rare case where the downstream stage is the bigger number.
Uranium’s price has climbed from roughly $32 per pound in 2021 to around $78 to $87 across 2024 and 2025, driven by a genuine nuclear power revival for clean baseload electricity and the power-hungry data centres covered on this material’s application-wise page.
Two concentration numbers, the downstream one is higher
Running the index on uranium’s real 2024 mine shares (Kazakhstan roughly 39%, Canada 24%, Namibia 12%, then Australia, Uzbekistan, Russia, China, and Niger) gives an HHI of roughly 2,345, moderately concentrated. Running the same calculation on enrichment capacity (Russia’s Rosatom 44%, Urenco 30%, China 14%, Orano 12%) gives roughly 3,176, genuinely higher, the rarer pattern in this series where the downstream processing stage is more concentrated than the mining stage by a meaningful margin, not just marginally, as with most of the two-stage materials covered elsewhere.
Why demand growth compounds this concentration
Nuclear power’s revival, covered on the application-wise page, is increasing demand against a supply base that is both enrichment-constrained and slow to expand, since new mining and enrichment capacity both take years to bring online, a real structural tightening similar in shape to copper’s demand-outpacing-supply story covered on copper’s economics page.
Sources: price history and production shares reference this project’s own published production and price data (World Nuclear Association); HHI is computed directly from that data; the 2,500 HHI threshold is the US Department of Justice/FTC Horizontal Merger Guidelines convention.