Where does uranium come from? Uranium is the backbone of nuclear power and comes from a surprisingly concentrated set of regions. While deposits exist on every continent, commercial-scale mining is dominated by just a handful of countries with large sedimentary basins and sandstone-hosted ores that can be extracted cheaply.

Today, nearly 60,000tonnes of uranium are produced annually, with most of it originating from Central Asia, North America and southern Africa.

The global uranium supply gap: Reactors worldwide are consuming more uranium each year than miners produce, forcing utilities to draw from stockpiles and secondary sources, like old weapons material, reprocessing and inventories). After a decade of underinvestment and low prices, mining has lagged demand, setting up the tightest market in more than 15 years.

Geopolitically, uranium mining is shaped by a small group of players, particularly the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Kazakhstan alone supplies roughly 40% of the world’s uranium, giving the region an outsized influence on price formation and long-term contract security. Western utilities have spent the last two years trying to diversify away from CIS material, especially following the Ukraine-Russia war.

Top global producers

• Kazakhstan: The world’s uranium powerhouse, supplying roughly 40% of global output through extensive low-cost in-situ recovery operations.
• Canada: Contributes some of the highest-grade uranium on Earth, with the Athabasca Basin serving as the backbone of Western nuclear fuel supply.
• Namibia: Africa’s leading uranium producer, anchored by massive, long-life open-pit operations like Rossing and Husab.

How production has evolved: Global production today sits around 60,000 tonnes per year, down from the ~75,000 tonnes mined annually a decade ago. That reflects years of low prices, shuttered mines and strategic supply discipline from major producers like Kazatomprom and Cameco. Only recently, spurred by rising reactor builds and a bullish outlook, have producers started bringing mothballed capacity back online. Orennia forecasts small modular reactors adding meaningful power supply to the grid starting in the mid-2030s.