Uranium Metal Chain™
· ₹17,184.43/kg today
From mine to market: how Uranium moves through the global economy.
Data year: 2025 · Chain data last reviewed: 9 September 2026 · not a live feed — see methodology.
How Uranium Moves Through the Economy
Each stage below is a real, cited figure — click any stage for its full description and source.
Mining Mining / Extraction
Uranium ore is mined and milled on-site into uranium concentrate (U3O8, "yellowcake").
High confidenceSource: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (via MetalsCost Metal Reserves) (2025)
Conversion & Enrichment Processing / Refining
Yellowcake is converted to uranium hexafluoride gas and enriched to raise the concentration of the fissile U-235 isotope for reactor fuel.
Russia's Rosatom is estimated to hold around 40% of global uranium enrichment market share (estimates range 36-44% depending on the source), well ahead of Urenco (~30%), Orano (~14%) and China (~12%). Concentration: Moderate
Medium confidenceSource: RUSI, "Power Plays: Developments in Russian Enriched Uranium Trade" — view (2023)
Nuclear Power Generation Manufacturing / End Use
Enriched uranium is fabricated into fuel assemblies and used almost exclusively to generate electricity in nuclear power reactors.
Nuclear power generation accounts for over 99% of uranium demand, with the remainder used in research reactors and medical isotope production. Concentration: High
Medium confidenceSource: Cross-referenced from DOE/EIA and World Nuclear Association industry data (2024)
Secondary Supply (Reprocessing) Secondary Supply (Recycling)
Used fuel can be reprocessed to recover plutonium and uranium for mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel, an alternative to fresh-mined uranium rather than classic post-consumer recycling.
MOX (reprocessed) fuel is estimated to supply about 5% of new nuclear fuel used today. Concentration: Low
Medium confidenceSource: World Nuclear Association, "Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel" — view (2024)
Supply Chain at a Glance
Utilities Buy It Quietly, Years in Advance
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, which is why this metal is priced via benchmark assessments (UxC, TradeTech) instead.
Canada's Athabasca Basin
Canada's Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan hosts some of the highest-grade uranium deposits on Earth, run largely by Cameco — a genuinely major global producer among this site's 22 tracked countries, even as Kazakhstan (not tracked here) supplies a larger overall share of world output.
The Price Here Isn't the Reactor's Fuel Cost
The uranium price tracked on this page is for natural, unenriched U3O8 ("yellowcake") — not the finished reactor fuel. Turning it into usable fuel means converting it to uranium hexafluoride gas and then enriching it, raising the fraction of fissile U-235 from natural uranium's roughly 0.7% up to the 3–5% a reactor needs, at specialist enrichment plants that charge separately for that service in their own unit, the separative work unit (SWU). The uranium price shown here is only one part — not the whole — of what a utility actually spends to fuel a reactor.
Did You Know?
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Country-level production data for Uranium is not yet available on this page.
An estimated 5% — MOX (reprocessed) fuel is estimated to supply about 5% of new nuclear fuel used today.
The Uranium price in India today is ₹17,184.43 per kilogram as of October 16, 2026. See the live price and chart.
Metal Chain™ is an analytical framework developed by MetalsCost. Concentration figures and the current-bottleneck comparison are estimates derived from available public data and a documented methodology — they are not investment advice or a guaranteed forecast. See the methodology page for data sources and calculation details.
