Uranium Price History 1968–2026: Every Cycle, Charted

60-second answer: Uranium's price history is a story of violent booms and long, grinding busts. Over roughly half a century it ran up in the 1970s, collapsed into a two-decade bear market fed by secondary supply, spiked to an all-time peak near $137/lb in mid-2007, slid, then cratered further after Fukushima in 2011 to lows near $18/lb. It bottomed, base-built through the late 2010s, ripped higher during the 2021 Sprott squeeze, and rallied to multi-year highs in 2023–2024. The levels below are historical benchmarks kept approximate; for where the market sits today, see the live spot price. This is not investment advice.

Almost no free resource shows the full arc of uranium prices. The specialist services that publish the spot price sell it behind expensive subscriptions and rarely surface deep history. This page fills that gap. It walks every major cycle since the late 1960s, built on public and banked price series, so you can see how today's market rhymes with the past — and why uranium is famous for moving in extremes.

The cycles at a glance

Numbers are historical benchmarks, deliberately rounded. Uranium has no public exchange, so any single-day "price" is a weekly consensus estimate — read how the spot price is set for why the tape looks the way it does.

The 1970s run: from cheap fuel to a cartel spike

For most of the 1960s uranium was cheap and plentiful, a byproduct of Cold War military demand tapering into civilian reactor fuel. That changed in the 1970s. A wave of reactor orders, the 1973 oil shock lifting all energy prices, and the activity of an international producers' cartel drove the price up several-fold. From single-digit dollars per pound early in the decade, uranium climbed to a peak north of $40/lb by the late 1970s — an enormous move in real terms.

That peak sowed the seeds of the bust. High prices pulled forward mine development and utility buying, while nuclear's growth expectations began to sour.

The long bear market: two decades of secondary supply

The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island chilled US reactor orders, and by the mid-1980s the pipeline of new plants had thinned dramatically. Just as demand growth stalled, supply arrived from unexpected places. The defining feature of the 1980s and 1990s bear market was secondary supply — uranium that reaches the market from stockpiles and reprocessing rather than fresh mining.

The single biggest source was the Megatons to Megawatts program, under which highly enriched uranium from dismantled Russian warheads was down-blended into reactor fuel. Running from 1993 to 2013, it supplied a large slice of world reactor demand for two decades and capped prices hard. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, spot uranium had drifted to lows around $7–10/lb — below the cost of production for many mines, which is why so many closed.

This long famine matters for understanding today: when a commodity trades below its incentive price for twenty years, almost no one builds new supply. The stage was set for a violent recovery.

2003–2007: the great bull run to ~$137/lb

The recovery, when it came, was spectacular. Chinese demand growth, a "nuclear renaissance" narrative, and a shrinking secondary-supply cushion turned sentiment. Then in October 2006, the flooding of Cameco's flagship Cigar Lake project — one of the world's richest undeveloped deposits — removed a huge chunk of expected future supply overnight. Speculative funds piled into the thin spot market.

The result was one of the sharpest commodity moves on record. From roughly $10/lb in 2003, uranium ran to an all-time peak near $137/lb in June 2007 — a more than ten-fold rise. It remains the reference high for the entire market. That 2007 uranium price is the number every subsequent cycle is measured against.

Like all manias, it overshot. Once the fund buying exhausted itself, the price rolled over well before the 2008 financial crisis added a second leg down.

Post-2007 slide and Fukushima

By 2010 uranium had unwound most of the spike, settling into the $40–65/lb range as the market digested the excess. A tentative recovery was building into early 2011 — and then, on 11 March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi disaster followed Japan's Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

The impact on demand was immediate and severe. Japan shut its entire reactor fleet for safety review; Germany announced a nuclear phase-out; and expansion plans elsewhere were paused. A market that had been tightening flipped to structural oversupply. Uranium ground lower for five years, reaching a cyclical bottom near $18/lb in late 2016 — the lowest in more than a decade. Miners bled cash, and by 2017–2018 major producers were forced to act.

2017–2020: production cuts and base-building

The bottom was made not by demand but by supply discipline. Cameco idled its huge McArthur River mine, and Kazatomprom — the world's largest producer — cut planned output. Those cuts pulled real pounds off the market and stopped the bleeding. Prices stopped falling and traded sideways in a low range, firming slowly through 2019 and 2020. It was the classic base-building phase that precedes a new bull leg: quiet, unglamorous, and largely ignored.

2021: the Sprott squeeze

The catalyst that broke the range arrived in mid-2021. The Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SPUT) launched with a mandate to buy and hold physical uranium, and it used an at-the-market equity program to raise cash and sweep up spot pounds continuously. In a market as thin as uranium's, that persistent, price-insensitive buying forced the spot price sharply higher over a few months. Watch the trust's holdings and flows on the Sprott tracker.

It was the first time a financial vehicle, rather than utility contracting, drove the cycle — a structural change worth understanding alongside the ordinary spot-versus-term dynamics of the market.

2023–2024: rally to multi-year highs

Momentum built again in 2023 and accelerated into early 2024. Utilities that had under-contracted for years faced a tightening supply-and-demand picture, reactor life extensions and restarts firmed demand, and the risk of a ban on Russian enrichment services (later legislated in the US) added urgency to securing Western supply. Spot uranium pushed to multi-year highs — the strongest levels since the aftermath of the 2007 peak — before consolidating.

Where it sits now

Uranium enters 2026 trading at structurally higher levels than the 2016–2020 doldrums, with the bull case resting on a persistent supply deficit and the bear case on demand disappointment or a secondary-supply surprise. We don't print a live figure here — that number moves daily and comes from paid assessments we don't republish. For the current price and how it's derived, see the spot price page, and for the forward drivers read the investment thesis.

Frequently asked questions

What is the highest uranium price ever? The all-time peak was reached in June 2007, at approximately $137 per pound of U₃O₈. It came at the top of the 2003–2007 speculative bull run and remains the reference high for the market.

What was the lowest uranium price? In the modern era, the cyclical low after Fukushima came in late 2016 near $18/lb. Going back further, the late-1990s bear market saw spot drift to roughly $7–10/lb, below the cost of production for many mines.

Why did the uranium price crash after 2007 and again after 2011? The 2007 spike was a speculative overshoot that unwound naturally, then got a second leg down from the 2008 financial crisis. The 2011 crash was driven by Fukushima, which shut Japan's reactor fleet and flipped the market into years of oversupply.

What caused the 2021 uranium price spike? The launch of the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, which continuously bought and held physical pounds. In uranium's thin spot market, that price-insensitive buying squeezed the price sharply higher.

Where can I see the current uranium price? On the spot price page, which uses a public on-chain oracle cross-checked against a physical uranium trust — not a paywalled assessment.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.