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Table of Contents
Here are the 20-second highlights:
Uranium’s biggest trade of the week never printed on an exchange. Two prime ministers signed it in Melbourne with no volume, no price and no timeline attached. The omissions are the design, and what they price is below.
India’s largest power utility has bids due July 16 for uranium mines in four countries, yet the treaty its government just received feeds the fleet India already runs, and most of the fleet it plans to build cannot burn the molecule.
Canada’s new CAN$2bn minerals accelerator made its first investment, and the structure (a royalty-style instrument plus state offtake rights over three metals China restricted in 2023 and 2024) says more about where allied policy is heading than the CAN$400M headline does.
The same week Macquarie called copper’s rally ‘ahead of reality’ on a record ~652,200 t COMEX stockpile, the metal’s largest producer in Chile confirmed output at a 28-year low under ~US$25bn of debt. Both screens are accurate.
In The Tape: an oil supermajor paid US$225M for a minority stake and offtake rights over up to a quarter of a Chilean lithium project that has not cleared its permits.
The thinnest node in the Western fuel cycle sits two steps downstream of everything Melbourne signed, and the allied fixes are dated 2028 to 2032. One reactor family skips that node entirely. Do you know which one it is?
Illustration of India’s Rajasthan Atomic Power Project (RAPP) units 7 & 8
The Uranium comeback
It all starts in Melbourne.
On July 9, Anthony Albanese (Australia’s Prime Minister) and Narendra Modi (India’s Prime Minister) signed the administrative arrangement that finally operationalizes the 2014 India-Australia civil nuclear agreement, permitting long-term Australian uranium exports for 'exclusively peaceful purposes' under IAEA safeguards.
No volume, price, or delivery schedule was disclosed.
The uranium clause traveled inside a wider package: a defence and technology partnership, supply-chain commitments, and a space-tracking terminal on the Cocos Keeling Islands.
The demand behind it is what’s important for the CMJ Community.
India is targeting 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047, from roughly 8 GW today, with the SHANTI Act opening the sector to private capital. That’s a ~13% CAGR.
In contrast, Australia holds the largest known uranium resource base in the world, ~28% by common counts. A decade-old stalemate over non-proliferation ended the moment the demand became strategic enough.
But India is not waiting for the treaty to fill the ‘fuel channel’. NTPC (India’s largest state-owned power producer, >90GW/year) issued a tender for consultants to identify uranium mine assets in Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan and South Africa, with bids due July 16. The utility expects to carry ~30 GW of the 2047 target, and it is integrating upstream before most of that fleet has a final investment decision.
The sequencing answers the risk question from the highlights: when a state utility buys the mine, fuel-price risk moves off the market and onto the balance sheet the state stands behind, which is to say onto the ratepayer and the sovereign.
Now watch the other bloc run the same play. On July 10, at the close of President Nandi-Ndaitwah's state visit to Beijing, China and Namibia signed eight documents, including a green-minerals cooperation agreement and an economic-partnership framework.
The joint statement commits both sides to develop uranium, lithium and rare earths, with emphasis on local processing and technology transfer, the exact terms CW26 described the 'neutrals' extracting.
The dependency is already deep: uranium was ~85% of the US$1.3bn in Namibian goods China bought last year, and Chinese firms hold ~US$4.2bn of investment in the country, nearly all of it in metals.
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