RE: Has Dines dumped his luv for uranium
No, I don't think Dines has given up on uranium plays...at least not in the long run.
In the short run, U plays are "dead money", but looking further out,as the world and particularly China, rapidly builds new nuclear plants, the demand for the the "fuel" will come on big time.
But as Dines subscribers are looking how they can make money say over the next 12 months or so, it does him little good to tout U plays at the moment.
But this should change. Every time I see articles on hybrids and electric cars I ask myself how are we going to get the electricity to power all the new vehicles. Let alone the question of how do we transport the "juice" via antiquated "grids" that most countries have in place today.
The quick answer is we can't. Not today. A lot more infrastructure needs to be put into place. In terms of 1.) generation capacity and 2.) transmission of the generated product, i.e. 'the grid."
As the developing world industrializes, demand for electricity will soar. Even in the US, from 2007 levels, projected electricity demand increases by 36 percent in the high growth case to 5,323 billion kilowatt hours compared with an increase of 16 percent in the low growth case in 2030.
To generate the future electricity we need, nuclear power is going to be a very important factor in getting us to a low carbon future. (And so will natural gas, which is about half as dirty as coal.)
That's because nuclear can be a "baseload" source of power. Most renewable can't given their intermittent nature. It's really hard to foresee a future world without the incredible energy density nuclear power provides.
China alone plans to increase its installed nuclear power capacity almost 10-fold to 86GW by 2020. China currently has 11 nuclear reactors. Work on a further 24 reactors is now underway, with 22 GW of nuclear power capacity under construction as of last year.
There are currently 436 reactors in operation around the world producing 371,927 MWe of energy (representing around 16% of the world’s power), requiring approximately 170.0 million lbs of U308 per annum. In a January 5, 2009 update, the World Nuclear Association (WNA) identified 41 reactors under construction and another 374 reactors under consideration (108 planned and 266 proposed).
In the long term, fundamentals in the uranium market appear extremely positive. And given that some future sources of uranium are in doubt (read: cigar lake), it's hard not to see a significantly higher U price.
But nuclear plants don't come on line over night. It will take some time for this future demand to really develop. But as the world currently only "mines" some 60% of the uranium it needs for existing reactors, where will all fuel come from all the new ones as they come on line. Above ground, secondary sources may be drying up. We know that Russia has been supplying the US with uranium, but that agreement ends in 2013.
It does the world little good to move to hybrid and/or electric cars in a bid to lower CO2 emissions if those same cars demand ever greater quantities of electricity....which will come from coal fired generators.
We could actually create more emission problems in providing the "fuel" for these cars than we save in replacing the hydrocarbons they currently use.
Dirty coal by far is currently the world's leading source of electrical generation. And electrical generation is the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions; transportation is second.
And nuclear, while not a renewable fuel per se, is a non-emitting source of power.
So yeah, long term, I would say uranium's future is quite bright.