3. Uranium market: structures and trends

Before describing this market, let's recall that uranium ore must undergo several transformations to become a nuclear fuel. These essentially involve processing and refining at the extraction site, transport of the resulting product, which is a uranium concentrate containing around 70% uranium in the form of U ₃ O ₈ (often called Yellow Cake ), conversion into uranium hexafluoride for enrichment, enrichment, fuel fabrication. All these operations are described in detail in articles [BN 3 580] to