Uranium and nuclear fuel prices

Uranium is $89.68/lb on the spot indicator and $96.5/lb long-term as of 2026-08. But uranium is only about half of what fuel costs, and the price a utility actually paid is often nothing like the headline, because uranium does not trade on an exchange at all.

Current indicators

• Uranium: Cameco's published industry average, calculated from UxC and TradeTech data.
• Conversion: North American indicator, month-end August 2026.
• Enrichment: Spot SWU at $200 is historically extreme. For comparison, US operators paid an average of $108.70/SWU across their actual contract portfolios in 2025.
• Fabrication: Indicative. Fabrication is priced per contract against a specific assembly design and is not quoted as a market indicator, so this figure is an order-of-magnitude placeholder used only to complete the cost stack. Treat it as the least reliable number on this page.

What a reactor's fuel actually costs

The headline uranium price is not the fuel price. A utility buys uranium, pays someone to convert it, pays someone else to enrich it, and pays a third party to fabricate assemblies. Enrichment is the second-largest line and is frequently left out of commentary entirely.

A large PWR loads roughly 25 to 30 tonnes of fuel at each refuelling, so this works out to the order of $100 million per core load, against fuel costs for a comparable gas plant that run to that much every few weeks. Fuel is a small fraction of the cost of nuclear electricity; capital is nearly all of it. That asymmetry is why a doubling of the uranium price barely moves the cost of nuclear power, and why nuclear operators are far less exposed to fuel markets than gas generators.

Forty years of price

Labelled turning points rather than a continuous series, the free indicators support monthly points, and the paywalled weekly series is not reproduced here.

$7.1 2000-12, Post-Cold-War trough

Downblended Soviet weapons uranium was flooding the market under Megatons to Megawatts, and secondary supply crushed the price below the cost of mining almost anywhere.

$125 2007-05, The 2007 spike

A flood at Cigar Lake and a collapse at Rabbit Lake removed expected supply at the same time as hedge funds entered the physical market. The price rose roughly seventeen-fold in six years.

$66.5 2011-03, Before Fukushima

The accident took 50 reactors offline in Japan alone and ended a decade of demand growth overnight.

$18 2016-11, The long bottom

Below the production cost of most of the world's mines. Cameco suspended McArthur River, the best orebody on earth, and Honeywell idled the only US conversion plant.

$100.25 2024-01, Recovery

Restrictions on Russian supply, reactor life extensions, data-centre demand and the restart of idled capacity pushed the price above $100 for the first time since 2007.

$89.68 2026-08, Current

Long-term contract price at $96.50 sits above spot, which is unusual and signals expected tightness.

Why the price is so volatile

Uranium demand is almost perfectly inelastic in the short run. A reactor that has been built will be fuelled almost regardless of price, because fuel is a small share of its operating cost and the alternative is leaving a multi-billion-dollar asset idle. Supply, meanwhile, takes a decade to respond: a new mine needs permits, capital and construction long before it produces anything.

Inelastic demand plus slow supply gives you a market that does very little for years and then moves violently. The 2007 spike and the post-Fukushima collapse are the same mechanism running in opposite directions. It is also why the industry contracts long-term, and why the only US conversion plant could sit idle for six years without anyone building a replacement.