Two Companies, Not One Official Price
UxC and TradeTech, both US-based, are competitors rather than a joint venture. Each independently surveys the market and publishes its own weekly uranium (U3O8) spot price indicator — unlike gold's single LBMA benchmark, uranium genuinely has more than one "official" number, depending on whose report you read.
Why Uranium Skipped the Exchange Model Entirely
Nuclear utilities have historically bought uranium through confidential, long-term bilateral contracts negotiated directly with miners, rather than an open spot market. The volume that trades visibly enough to build a public exchange around has always stayed relatively small.
A Thin Market That Moves Loudly
Because so little uranium changes hands on the visible spot market relative to the much deeper long-term contract market, a handful of large trades in a given week can swing the published price noticeably — one of the more volatile benchmark prices on this list, despite uranium's overall long-term price stability.
Utilities Watch It Anyway
Even though most uranium never actually trades at the published spot price, utilities, miners and investors all watch UxC and TradeTech's numbers closely as the best available real-time read on the market — and increasingly as a reference point in newer supply contracts as nuclear demand has revived alongside global decarbonisation.
Contracts & Products Traded
Neither UxC nor TradeTech lists a contract of any kind — no futures, no order book, no delivery specification. Each publishes a weekly U3O8 (yellowcake) spot price indicator plus a separate long-term price indicator reflecting the multi-year term contracts that actually move most of the world's uranium, built from confidential surveys of real offers and completed deals reported by producers, utilities, traders and brokers. Both firms also publish conversion and enrichment (SWU) price indicators, covering stages of the nuclear fuel cycle beyond raw uranium that none of the metal exchanges on this list touch at all.
Role in Global Price Discovery
Because uranium has no futures exchange comparable to COMEX or LME, utilities and miners negotiating long-term supply contracts lean on UxC and TradeTech's published indicators as the closest thing the market has to an official price, even though the deals themselves are struck privately rather than exchange-settled. With so little uranium changing hands on the visible spot market, a handful of trades in a given week can swing the number noticeably — real price discovery happening on a genuinely thin dataset. In the site's 24-hour relay, these two firms are the sole reference point for the nuclear fuel sector, since no exchange anywhere lists a uranium contract.
A single mid-sized uranium trade — a few hundred thousand pounds of U3O8 — can be large enough relative to the thin spot market to visibly move the weekly published price, something that would barely register as a rounding error in COMEX gold.
Sources
- UxC founded 1994, headquartered in Roswell, Georgia — UxC Corporate Background (1994)
- TradeTech headquartered in Colorado, USA — TradeTech / uranium.info contact information (2024)
- Both firms publish weekly U3O8 spot price indicators — TradeTech Weekly Uranium Spot Price Indicator (2024)
