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Uranium prices reach highest level since February 2024
The end-of-January spot price for uranium was $94.28 per pound, according to uranium fuel provider Cameco. That was the highest spot price posted by the company since the $95.00 per pound it listed at the end of February 2024. Spot prices during 2025 ranged from a low of $64.23 per pound at the end of March to a high of $82.63 per pound at the end of September.
David Blanchet, Bruno Fontaine
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 177 | Number 3 | July 2014 | Pages 260-274
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-59
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The current design studies on sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs) are breaking with the past since they are guided by a new set of design criteria arising from the objectives of Generation IV reactors. The new safety requirements lead to designing reactors with breakeven breeding cores because in terms of reactivity control, they minimize the need to limit the consequences of an inadvertent control rod withdrawal event. Furthermore, as the reactivity control needs are low, a breakeven core enables the use of absorbing materials with reduced efficiency (natural boron, hafnium, etc.), which may be less costly than enriched boron. However, control rods designed with low absorbing materials may present the disadvantage of a nonnegligible loss of efficiency due to their consumption under irradiation. This paper presents a methodology to accurately calculate and to analyze the impact of this consumption on reactivity control.