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Metal used to power reactors faces shortages as demand for nuclear power rises

US and European energy companies are at growing risk from a uranium supply crunch as demand surges for nuclear power to fuel everything from household electricity to data centres, industry figures have warned.

The threat of future shortages comes as the world’s biggest producer of the metal used to power nuclear reactors, Kazakhstan, sells more to Russia and China while less is going to the US and Europe.

“Russian and Chinese players have been very keen to secure access to resources in central Asia and Africa, creating a very aggressive competitive environment,” said Benjamin Godwin at Prism Strategic Intelligence.

“We’re on a depletion curve that I don’t think many customers have realised,” said Cory Kos, vice-president of investor relations at Cameco, one of the world’s largest publicly traded uranium producers and the biggest western supplier based in Canada. The direction of travel “was more flows of material into China”.

Although there was a surplus of uranium following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, that glut has been gradually worked through, executives said. “As an industry, we’re living off borrowed time . . . inventory that’s running out has kept the supply chain going,” said one former executive.

Energy companies draw their power from a variety of sources, including oil, gas and renewables. However, as the world switches to cleaner energy, analysts expect increasing demand for nuclear power: the World Nuclear Association expects global uranium demand to double by 2040.

A host of nations including the US, UK and South Korea have pledged to triple global nuclear energy capacity by 2050, while technology groups are turning to the fuel for AI data centres.

China and Russia, which border Kazakhstan, are also seeking to substantially expand nuclear power domestically. Kazakhstan supplies about 40 per cent of the world’s mined uranium.

The US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) warned this month that China and Russia were “rapidly expanding their offtake of mined uranium from international partners”.

It added that there was a “disconnect” between efforts among western governments to secure the uranium supply chain, “including uranium mining”, and plans to expand the use of the fuel.

“Uranium production is a vulnerability that we’re not really paying attention to,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a director of CSIS.

According to company disclosures, roughly two-thirds of sales by Kazakhstan’s state owned mining group Kazatomprom went to buyers domiciled in Russia, China and the home market combined in 2023, compared with about one-third in 2021.

In comparison, only 28 per cent went to US, Canadian, French and UK buyers combined in 2023, down from 60 per cent in 2021. The numbers do not reflect the sales of all Kazakh uranium, some of which is sold by Kazatomprom’s joint venture partners.

Kazatomprom said it intended to keep its “sales diversified . . . our philosophy is not to put all our eggs in one basket”.

It also pointed out that a lower proportion of the company’s uranium went to China than it did before Kazatomprom went public in 2018.

Niger, although only responsible for about 5 per cent of global uranium production, is a major supplier to reactors in the EU. But it reduced supplies to Europe by a third in 2023 compared with 2021, according to data from Euratom.

The country did not export any uranium in 2024 after a military coup in July 2023 led to a government hostile to western mining companies.

French state-owned Orano was stripped of mining rights by Niger’s government last year. In 2023, Niger accounted for 16 per cent of Orano’s uranium resources.

The company is also running out of resources in Kazakhstan, where it has active mines, which are being depleted, according to Teva Meyer, a researcher at France’s Institute of International and Strategic Relations.

“Orano’s room for manoeuvre is very limited in Kazakhstan,” he said. It cannot increase its current output in the country, while other available mines are being bought by the Russians and Chinese, he added.

Orano declined to comment.

Some analysts said US energy groups would need to source more uranium this year. Berenberg analysts said in January that US utilities needed to “contract volumes for the medium term”.

“A supply shock has scope to still materially tighten uranium markets,” they said. “The narrative of a growing supply gap for uranium still rings true.”

Rockets, drones and flying taxis: airlines brace for crowded skies

Expected surge in traffic in flying vehicles will lead to airspace becoming the ‘Wild West’, say aviation experts

The world’s skies are becoming crowded, posing a risk to airlines as rockets, drones, and “flying taxis” in the near future begin to use airspace.

The huge number of new rockets — pioneered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX — is set to exacerbate the problem as the growing commercial space industry will share airspace used by tens of thousands of passenger planes. Meanwhile, drones and the expected emergence of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs), so-called flying taxis, are set to complicate the management of the lower levels of airspace through which planes take off and land.

The number of passenger planes is forecast to grow by a third to more than 36,000 aircraft by 2034, according to consultancy Oliver Wyman. By that point, they will be sharing the skies with more than 10,000 eVTOLs, according to Bain, and thousands of rocket launches.

Aviation experts believe the way airspace is managed will need to change.

“There are more users and more vehicles that want to use airspace . . . the way that we provide our services will probably need to change significantly,” said Eduardo Garcia, senior manager for future skies at Canso, the body that represents the air traffic management industry.

“It is a key topic, and it will not be easy. Ours is a safety critical industry,” he said.

The issues facing airlines were illustrated last month when Qantas delayed several flights between Australia and South Africa after the US government warned about the risk of SpaceX rocket parts re-entering the atmosphere in the southern Indian Ocean.

But Chris Quilty, co-chief executive of space business consultancy Quilty Space, said the Qantas delays could be the “tip of the iceberg” in a rapidly developing space industry.

It is not just rocket companies that are developing vehicles designed to return to earth. A host of start-ups are targeting manufacturing products such as pharmaceuticals in space, using the benefits of no gravity, all of which will need to be brought back down to earth.

“It is the wild west. The rate at which this is happening is starting to impact the aviation community,” he added.

The latest disruption of Qantas flights was by a “controlled re-entry”, where the booster section of a rocket returns to earth to land on an ocean barge or land-based launch pad.

But “uncontrolled re-entry” of space objects — essentially returning to earth without guidance — is a potentially greater risk.

In 2022, hundreds of flights were delayed when Spain’s airspace was partially closed because of concerns about the uncontrolled re-entry of the remains of a Chinese rocket.

While regulators increasingly require “end of life” deorbit plans for satellites and rockets to try to reduce space debris, there is no universal rule ensuring a controlled re-entry for all spacecraft into the earth’s atmosphere over remote regions.

Controlled re-entry is usually reserved for larger satellites or spacecraft, and requires extra propellant and advanced guidance systems, significantly adding to the cost and complexity of the mission.

Instead many operators take a passive approach to de-orbiting defunct satellites or rocket bodies, relying on the gravitational pull of the earth to draw the debris into the atmosphere where most of it will burn up.

Ken Quinn, a partner at law firm Clyde & Co and formerly chief counsel of the FAA and Flight Safety Federation, said: “The management of orbital debris is becoming a critical safety and air traffic control issue, which means it poses an increasing threat to commercial aviation and needs to be managed better.”

In a study published last month in the scientific journal Nature, academics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver found that while probability of space debris colliding with an aircraft is low, “the risk is rising due to the increase of both re-entries and flights”.

Authors Ewan Wright, Aaron Boley and Michael Byers said the failure to equip rockets with systems to ensure controlled re-entry in areas away from people and aircraft could lead to dire consequences. “Even a small piece of debris could be devastating to an aircraft,” the study says.

In the lower reaches of airspace, widely available small drones are causing headaches for airlines.

Perhaps most notably, London’s Gatwick airport was closed for 36 hours in December 2019 following reports of drone sightings, affecting about 140,000

But bigger battery-powered aircraft — carrying passengers and take off and land like a helicopter — are expected to break through and enter commercial use in the coming decade.

While the eVTOL industry has been perennially over-optimistic in forecasting when these aircraft will be certified to carry passengers, many companies are flying prototypes, and industry experts believe their emergence into a significant part of the travel network is only a matter of time.

A 2024 Bain study suggested commercial air taxi services could begin in the next two to three years, and then will take about a decade to “reach scale”.

All these flying taxis — which ultimately are not expected to have pilots — will need to be safely integrated into airspace below roughly 5,000 feet.

Regulators and air traffic management agencies in Europe and the US are racing to prepare for the new era, by knitting spacecraft and the flying taxis into the air traffic control network.

In London, Nats, the UK’s air traffic control company, has run simulations of eVTOLs carrying passengers on the 25-mile trip between Heathrow airport, to the west of London, and City airport, in the east, with stops offs at “vertiports” in the centre of the city.

Andy Sage, director of safety transformation at Nats, said: “The future promises a rapidly increasing number of diverse airspace users, both crewed and uncrewed, which we see being managed within a single, integrated traffic environment.”

The Nats test essentially treated the eVTOLs as though they were helicopters, which needed integrating into air traffic control.

Over time, as the technology is better understood, the disruption could be expected to decline.

The Federal Aviation Administration — the agency that regulates civil aviation — said it had cut airspace closures because of space vehicles travelling through an area from an average of “more than four hours” per launch to “more than two hours”.

But while small numbers could be handled by traditional air traffic control — likely operating in their own safe corridors of airspace — there could come a point where there are simply too many to handle.

The likely answer at that point, said Canso’s Garcia, will be automation. “There is a limit in the cognitive capacity that humans have to manage vehicles with different speeds and performances, and more crowded airspace,” he said. “We will need . . . more automation and artificial intelligence, helping and supporting the way we do things.”

The Chinese model is competitive with those of major U.S. AI developers on performance and pricing

Chinese company DeepSeek sent shock waves through Wall Street last month after unveiling a new AI model that was competitive against rival U.S. systems despite using less sophisticated chips and a fraction of the processing power.

DeepSeek is able to get more out of less because its latest R1 model relies more heavily on a process known as reinforcement learning, in which the model gets feedback from its actions using a reward system it creates and adapts for itself, according to a paper published by the company.

The model starts with an existing trove of text broken into unique words, word fragments and punctuation that can be strung back together in different ways. This “large language model” has more than 671 billion adjustable settings known as “parameters” that can be adjusted to determine how the model responds to prompts.

A model’s parameter count is one way to measure its size. Unlike traditional AI models, only a fraction of R1’s adjustable settings are active during any single operation. The reduction in active parameters drastically cuts down on the power and compute needed for processing, and allows the model to run on cheaper and less-sophisticated chips.

DeepSeek’s R1 model works by splitting into multiple networks that have different specialties, a method known as the “mixture of experts” approach. Certain prompts will call for different specialties, and to answer the prompt the model will only process the networks that it has taught itself are the most relevant.

In comparison, traditional AI models rely on enormous swaths of prelabeled data sets in a process known as supervised training. The prelabeling is done by humans and is expensive and time-consuming.

DeepSeek’s model is also distinguished in that it is open source, meaning it can be repurposed by developers outside the company.

The company’s R1 model ranks near the top of the leaderboard on Chatbot Arena, a platform run by University of California, Berkeley researchers that rates AI models.

For tasks such as math and coding, R1 performs better than most other models.

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Chatbot Arena’s data is crowdsourced from visitors who use its website to ask a question, get answers from two anonymous AI models and then rate which one is better. The site has tallied more than 2.5 million votes across some 200 models.

DeepSeek’s pricing for developers to access R1 is lower than that of many other models in its intelligence class, according to data compiled by AI benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis.

Makers of AI models charge users, such as businesses that want to integrate the technology into their products, based on the amount of data—or number of tokens, in industry terms—being sent back and forth between the two parties.

Poland, Germany and Spain express reluctance ahead of crisis meeting on how to respond to Trump’s peace talks

European countries clashed over sending troops to Ukraine as they began a crisis meeting intended to reach a consensus on how to respond to US President Donald Trump’s peace talks with Russia.

As leaders convened in Paris for the emergency meeting on Monday afternoon, Germany, Poland and Spain signalled reluctance to dispatch peacekeeping forces to the war-torn country, hours after Britain offered to put “boots on the ground”.

Monday’s meeting, which France hopes will also yield plans to help European countries boost defence spending, is hosted by President Emmanuel Macron and attended by six EU countries, the UK and officials from Nato and the EU.

Macron and Trump spoke just ahead of the Paris summit.

The US’s European allies are racing to respond to the president’s shock announcement of talks with Russia, which are set to begin in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.

France has proposed discussing a “reassurance force” that would be stationed behind, not on, a future ceasefire line in Ukraine, according to three officials briefed on the preparations for the meeting.

While UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has said he is “ready and willing . . . [to put] our own troops on the ground if necessary”, other countries are much more reluctant.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who faces nationwide elections on Sunday, maintained his long-standing caution on troop deployments, saying the debate was premature.

“The question now is how peace can be ensured without decisions being made over the heads of the Ukrainian people,” he said before the meeting.

“Nobody is currently considering sending troops to Ukraine,” said José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister. “Peace is still very far away and for one reason only: Vladimir Putin.”

He added that any discussion of troop deployments or peacekeepers would “have to consider for what mission, who will comprise it, under what flag, with what mandate”.

Although Poland has significantly increased defence spending since the war began and is usually relatively hawkish, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Warsaw was not prepared to send troops to Ukraine.

“But we will support, also in terms of logistics and political support, countries that will possibly want to provide such guarantees in the future,” Tusk added.

“If we, Europeans, fail to spend big on defence now, we will be forced to spend 10 times more if we don’t prevent a wider war,” he said.

Monday’s meeting was set to discuss funding of increased European defence spending and military capabilities, potentially through joint borrowing or what the French call other “innovative financing” methods.

Macron has long called for the EU to engage in common borrowing to reduce its reliance on US troops and weaponry, although Germany and the Netherlands have opposed such a move.

The dramatic shift in the US’s stance on Ukraine has forced European leaders’ positions to evolve rapidly.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday that she would propose capitals allow a temporary easing of the bloc’s rules on deficits for defence spending specifically, a plan that EU officials said had widespread support across the bloc.

Starmer has also committed to setting out a “pathway” for the UK’s defence spending to reach 2.5 per cent of GDP.

Speaking to journalists before travelling to Paris, the British prime minister said: “This isn’t just about the front line in Ukraine. It’s the front line of Europe and of the United Kingdom. It’s about our national security and I think that we need to do more.”

Japan’s $1.5bn bet on ultra-thin solar cells in challenge to China

Tokyo aims to disrupt Beijing’s dominance of renewables and reduce fossil fuel dependence

Japan is betting $1.5bn on a breakthrough in next-generation ultra-thin, light and bendy solar panels, subsidising the commercialisation of a technology that analysts say could disrupt China’s dominance of renewable energy and reduce Tokyo’s dependence on fossil fuels.

Perovskite cells are 20 times thinner than regular solar panels and could be plastered over stadiums, airports and office buildings, enabling mass adoption of solar in a mountainous country that lacks the open space needed for more conventional solar farms.

Officials in Tokyo have set an ambitious goal of installing enough cells to generate energy equivalent to 20 nuclear power plants by 2040, positioning the technology as essential for Japan to achieve its target for up to 50 per cent of its electricity to come from renewables.

With this in mind, the government is providing subsidies worth up to ¥157bn ($1bn) to Sekisui Chemical, the company at the forefront of efforts to develop perovskite solar film. That comes on top of ¥60bn of support for the technology’s earlier development, and more could be handed out through funds aiming to build green supply chains.

“Perovskite solar cells are a vital trump card to pursue simultaneously decarbonisation, economic growth and energy security,” said Sadanori Ito, the government official behind the plan. “We view it as an indispensable technology for the further spread of renewables in Japan.”

China produces 85 per cent of the world’s solar cells and 79 per cent of polysilicon, the material that goes into them. By contrast, perovskite cells’ main ingredient is iodine, for which Chile and Japan are the world’s top suppliers. This could help reduce risks to critical supply chains and energy infrastructure from overreliance on a single country, analysts said.

Given the cells will be at least three times more expensive to make than current technology in the early years of production and uncertainty about how much mass output will lower costs, initial demand is more likely to come from denser cities such as Tokyo, Taipei and Singapore.

Yana Hryshko, head of solar supply chain research at Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy, said Japan’s plans were “feasible”, noting that “it’s not secure in terms of energy security to buy from China”.

“But the only place capable of scaling up a particular technology and bringing down the cost is China,” she added.

Even so, Japan’s focus “is not only the right way, it’s the only way they have” to try to regain competitiveness and control of their supply chains, said Hryshko.

Perovskite solar cells are layers built out of chemical components, including a power-generating crystal structure, that are together only a millimetre thick and can absorb large amounts of light.

Because China has land for solar farms, its manufacturers focus on heavier forms of perovskite cells encased in glass or used in tandem with silicon solar panels, rather than the ultra-thin film type that Japan is focusing on.

“We feel a very strong threat from China’s speed and scale,” said Yusuke Sakurai, business development manager for Toshiba’s perovskite cells. “But because China is developing glass-type perovskite cells . . . I see it as a different market.”

Sekisui Chemical has set up a new company, with 1,000 employees after deploying its devices at its Osaka headquarters, bus stops outside Osaka station and Tokyo cruise terminal. Sekisui controls an 86 per cent stake in the new company, while the remaining 14 per cent is held by the government-owned Development Bank of Japan.

The plastics producer has solved the biggest technical bottleneck of avoiding moisture from seeping in by developing a special sealing resin. It plans to invest ¥310bn ($2bn) to produce 1 gigawatt of the cells by 2030 at a former Sharp factory, half of which will be covered by state subsidies. At this scale, it expects costs will be on par with traditional silicon solar cells.

More immediately, it is aiming to achieve stable production of film at 1 metre width, up from 30cm currently. It will start producing 100MW per year by 2027 to bring the cost to three or four times that of regular solar panels, according to Futoshi Kamiwaki, president of Sekisui Solar Film, the new company.

The other outstanding challenge is developing the materials to affix the panels on different types of walls, roofs and urban surfaces.

“If we can clear these two challenges, then we will be able to firmly enter into mass production,” said Kamiwaki, who is also eyeing export of the cells to the US and Europe. “In the domain of solar energy, this is the last chance to tackle China’s market dominance.”