Nuclear power’s comeback hinges on a looming uranium crunch by 2040

The world is falling back in love with nuclear power, and that romance has a voracious appetite. A comprehensive review published in BMC Environmental Science argues that the global nuclear renaissance, driven by decarbonisation targets, energy-security anxieties and the arrival of small modular reactors, could push annual reactor-related uranium demand from roughly 70,000 tonnes today to between 130,000 and 150,000 tonnes by 2040, with high-growth scenarios exceeding 200,000 tonnes. The study, authored by Cebastien Joel Guembou Shouop of Cameroon’s Radiological Safety and Nuclear Security Authority, synthesises demand projections from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Nuclear Association, and concludes that the physical resource base is large enough to cope. The problem, it warns, is not how much uranium exists in the ground but whether mining, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication can scale up fast enough to deliver it.

The arithmetic of the fuel cycle explains why demand rises so steeply. A single 1-gigawatt light-water reactor consumes approximately 200 to 250 tonnes of natural uranium per year, depending on burn-up and fuel management strategies. Every new large reactor added to the grid therefore locks in decades of fuel purchases, and the current construction pipeline spans continents. Egypt is building four VVER-1200 units at El Dabaa. Bangladesh is completing the two-unit Rooppur plant. The United Arab Emirates’ four-unit Barakah complex, producing around 5.6 gigawatts, is now fully operational. Poland is advancing a Westinghouse-led AP1000 programme, Hungary is continuing Paks-II, the Czech Republic has begun early small modular reactor work with Rolls-Royce at Temelín, and Vietnam, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina and Brazil are all expanding or reviving nuclear programmes. South Africa, operator of the continent’s only commercial reactors at Koeberg, is planning new capacity and life extensions.

Two technological trends will shape how this demand materialises. The first is the small modular reactor, or SMR, which promises factory fabrication, lower capital entry barriers and flexible siting. Most SMR concepts still burn low-enriched uranium, so their roll-out would add to, rather than substitute for, conventional uranium demand, while geographically dispersing fuel offtake contracts into many smaller and more frequent agreements. The review treats SMR uptake as a sensitivity rather than a certainty, noting that deployment depends on licensing timelines, the transition from first-of-a-kind to nth-of-a-kind manufacturing, supply-chain maturity and financing competitiveness. Cost reductions are possible but not guaranteed, and the pace of dispersal remains scenario-dependent.

The second trend is the rise of high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, enriched to between 5 and 20 percent uranium-235, which many advanced reactors and SMRs require to achieve higher burn-up and more compact cores. The review identifies HALEU production as a pivotal bottleneck: meeting projected demand will require significant investment in conversion and enrichment capacity, and the fuel form brings new logistical, regulatory and non-proliferation challenges. A related analysis cited in the study, published in Science in 2024, highlighted the weapons-relevant concerns surrounding HALEU, underscoring why its supply chain will attract intense safeguards scrutiny. Meanwhile, centrifuge technology has already displaced energy-hungry gaseous diffusion for enrichment, and laser-based concepts under pilot study could reshape future capital, regulatory and safeguard frameworks.

Fast reactors and closed fuel cycles offer a longer-term hedge. Fast-spectrum systems operating in a closed cycle can extract many-fold more energy from the same uranium inventory, converting depleted uranium stocks and recycled actinides into fissile material and reducing long-lived radiotoxic waste. If widely deployed later this century, they could substantially lower fresh-uranium mining needs. But the review is careful to treat fast reactors as a separate long-term sensitivity, since commercial deployment faces formidable technical, economic, proliferation-safeguard and institutional hurdles. Fusion, by contrast, is dismissed as a near-term offset: because it relies on the deuterium-tritium cycle rather than uranium, it sits outside the front-end fuel cycle entirely, and authoritative assessments, including the IAEA’s World Fusion Outlook, indicate it is unlikely to materially affect reactor-related uranium demand within the next two decades given the ITER-to-DEMO timeline and unresolved tritium-breeding challenges.

The market picture that emerges is one of tightening supply. Primary mine production has historically ranged between roughly 55,000 and 65,000 tonnes per year, well below the projected requirements of the 2030s and 2040s. Utilities have historically bridged this gap with secondary supply, including commercial inventories, civil stockpiles and re-enrichment of tails, but those buffers are finite. The joint NEA and IAEA Red Book reports identified recoverable resources exceeding 7.9 million tonnes, yet stresses that timely investment in exploration, permitting and processing is needed to prevent shortfalls. New mines typically require many years to move from exploration through permitting to construction, and under-investment in exploration since the 2010s has limited near-term flexibility. The commercial consequence is already visible: utilities are signing longer-term supply contracts rather than chasing spot-market bargains.

Geopolitics adds a further layer of fragility. Many newcomer nuclear programmes are vendor-financed with bundled fuel-supply contracts that channel demand into the vendor’s national fuel cycle. Russia currently controls around 46 percent of global enrichment capacity and roughly 20 percent of conversion capacity, alongside substantial upstream mining interests through joint ventures. The review suggests that scenarios should assume 30 to 50 percent of incremental uranium demand from vendor-financed builds will be met through the vendor’s home-country fuel cycle unless diversification or counter-contracts are negotiated, a structural dependency that recent analyses of European reliance on Russian nuclear fuel services have made uncomfortably concrete.

On the supply side, the review emphasises that uranium deposits are extraordinarily heterogeneous, and that geology dictates both extraction technology and environmental footprint. Canada’s Athabasca Basin hosts the world’s highest-grade ores, at McArthur River and Cigar Lake, where uranium concentrations can exceed 10 to 15 percent, orders of magnitude above typical global deposits, allowing large recoveries from small volumes of rock using specialised freeze-wall and water-jet underground methods. Kazakhstan, Namibia and Australia, by contrast, mine lower-grade but volumetrically vast deposits. Sandstone-hosted roll-front deposits are amenable to in-situ recovery, in which permeable ore horizons are leached underground, avoiding surface disturbance and tailings but imposing strict hydrogeological restoration requirements. Large low-grade open-pit operations such as Husab and Rössing in Namibia, and polymetallic mines like Olympic Dam in Australia, where uranium is a co-product of copper-gold mineralisation, illustrate the economic diversity of the resource base. Because mining energy intensity, water demand and tailings production scale inversely with ore grade, the choice of deposit and method carries direct sustainability consequences.

Exploration technology is also evolving rapidly. Modern campaigns combine classical geological mapping with airborne gamma-ray spectrometry, magnetics, gravity and electromagnetic surveys, followed by radon sampling, borehole logging and confirmatory drilling under IAEA protocols. Machine learning is increasingly used to assimilate radiometric, geochemical and structural datasets into probabilistic mineral-potential maps, improving target ranking, though the review cautions that robust training data, transparent feature selection and geological validation remain prerequisites for reliability. Non-destructive assay techniques such as neutron resonance transmission analysis, which can identify and quantify uranium and other actinides isotope-specifically, support fuel-cycle inventory verification in line with IAEA safeguards practice. A further unconventional option is recovering uranium as a by-product from phosphate rock used in fertiliser production; under favourable conditions this could supply on the order of 10 to 20 percent of global reactor-related demand, with modular recovery plants capable of delivering 4,000 to 8,000 tonnes per year within a few years of commissioning, though scale-up beyond that remains speculative and hinges on fertiliser economics rather than uranium prices alone.

The review’s bottom line is that the nuclear resurgence is fundamentally underpinned by a uranium renaissance. The resource base is judged adequate through mid-century, but only if exploration, mining, conversion, enrichment and HALEU production receive timely investment under strict regulatory oversight, with occupational doses managed under ALARA principles and transparent community engagement. Advances in in-situ recovery, ore-grade modelling and hydrometallurgical processing will be key to minimising environmental impact, while innovation across conversion, enrichment, fabrication and reprocessing will redefine the efficiency and circularity of the fuel cycle. Whether the world’s newly announced reactors get their fuel, in other words, depends less on geology than on decisions being made now about capital, technology and governance, across a supply chain that has spent a decade running on standby.

Subject of Research: Projected global uranium demand trajectories and front-end nuclear fuel-cycle technologies in a renuclearising world

Article Title: Uranium at the nexus of energy security and sustainable development in a renuclearised world: demand trajectories and technological pathways

Article References: Guembou Shouop, C. J. (2026). Uranium at the nexus of energy security and sustainable development in a renuclearised world: demand trajectories and technological pathways. BMC Environmental Science, 3(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-025-00045-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-025-00045-3

Keywords: uranium, nuclear energy, nuclear renaissance, small modular reactors, HALEU, fuel cycle, uranium mining, in-situ recovery, energy security, enrichment, fast reactors, sustainable mining