Fabrication: The Unique Factor in the Fuel Cycle – 2010 Report
A Global Review and Analysis of the Fuel Fabrication Markets
The Ux Consulting Company (UxC) is pleased to present the 2010 Fabrication Market Outlook (FMO), which is the fourth annual edition in this series. This year’s report builds upon the significant enhancements made in our 2009 edition as part of our continuing efforts to enhance information exchange and understanding in the global nuclear fuel fabrication marketplace.
UxC and its consultant, Joel Gingold, with over forty years experience in the fuel fabrication industry, have prepared a comprehensive and up-to-date report addressing the commercial, economic, institutional, and technical aspects of this sector. Fabrication differs greatly from other steps in the fuel cycle. Its high technical content, need for regulatory approval, and the restriction of fuel assemblies to specific reactors require a unique approach to its analysis.
To those with little knowledge of fuel fabrication and its markets, this report can serve as a primer providing a solid background and understanding of how its markets function. To those knowledgeable in the fundamentals, it offers analyses of a variety of its aspects based on several decades of participation. To those who are actively involved in the industry, it supplies additional insights to assist in the improvement of existing nuclear fuel programs and in the development of new ones.
What’s New in the 2010 FMO?
This year’s Essay focuses on the question of security of fabrication supply, a topic that has gotten little attention in the industry despite the substantial discussion that has taken place regarding security of natural and enriched uranium supplies.
The analysis of utility contracting issues has been expanded to include the subject of bundling, i.e., including supplies of natural and/or enriched uranium from the same supplier in fabrication contracts. Renewed interest in bundling has prompted its inclusion in the 2010 FMO.
This year’s fuel fabrication demand projection is, once again, based on UxC’s internal requirements forecasting model (URM), which, beginning with UxC’s own proprietary forecasts for nuclear power growth, calculates demand on a reactor-by-reactor, cycle-by-cycle basis. The model has been refined and improved over the past year and, we believe, produces more accurate forecasts than in prior years.
As in the past, the focus of the report is fuel for Light Water Reactors (LWRs), i.e., Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) and Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs); but we also include a discussion of fuel fabrication for pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs), gas cooled reactors in the UK (Magnox, AGR), and light water cooled, graphite moderated reactors (LGR) in Russia (e.g. RBMK designed reactors).
In addition to updating our supply and demand data to 2030, our 2010 report includes specific year-by-year fabrication price forecasts to 2030, including explanations of how fabrication prices are initially formulated.
Chapters in the 2010 FMO include:
- Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Market Primer
- Essay: (In)Security of Supply – What About Fabrication?
- Reactor Developments and Fabrication Demand Outlook
- Utility Procurement Approaches and Contracting Issues
- The World’s Nuclear Fuel Fabricators
- Supply and Demand Analysis
- Global and Regional Market Analysis
- Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Prices
- Non-LWR Fabrication Markets
Please see our product flier and table of contents
in Adobe Acrobat PDF  format.
|