Niamey (Niger) (AFP) – Prospects for the world’s nuclear industry have been boosted by the war in Ukraine and mounting hostility towards climate-wrecking fossil fuels — but Niger, one of the world’s biggest sources of uranium, has yet to feel the improvement.
The deeply impoverished landlocked Sahel state is a major supplier of uranium to the European Union, accounting for a fifth of its supplies, and is especially important to France, its former colonial power. But its mining industry is in the doldrums.
“Over the past few years, the uranium industry worldwide has been marked by a trend of continuously falling prices,” Mining Minister Yacouba Hadizatou Ousseini told AFP in an interview.
She blamed “pressure from ecologists” after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, but also the emergence of “particularly rich deposits” of uranium in Canada for depressing the market.
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