Issue link: http://resourceworld.uberflip.com/i/832998
J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 1 7 www.resourceworld.com 9 coveries were made, they could probably be sold. With regards to whole suite of so-called battery metals – I think they're in a bit of a bubble right now. You have a bunch of teams exploring for them, but five years ago, couldn't have spelled 'lithium' or 'manganese' so it's very important if you're considering speculating in those busi- nesses, that you pay attention to the resumes of the teams exploring for them and find out whether or not in the last 20 years if they've had any success in that particular endeavour. The metal that is the most attractive to me of the suite that you've mentioned is cobalt. The difficulty with cobalt is that it occurs in really big economic quantities in two countries – Russia and the DRC. Most speculators are afraid of those countries. You will certainly have area plays; stories associated with cobalt in mafic and ultramafic complexes around the world, includ- ing Canada and Australia, but my experience has been that the concentrations of cobalt, particularly in Canada, are never large enough that Canadian companies can be low on the cost curve unless they're producing it as a by-product of nickel or some other ultramafic substances. What might be useful in the cobalt cycle, and I don't want to sound cynical, but I am, would be the teams use the cobalt story to do mafic and ultramafic exploration in places like the Canadian Shield in hopes that they can actually find nickel and copper. That would be very bullish indeed. RW: The newsletters I receive are now being cautiously opti- mistic on uranium prices. What is your present take on uranium and uranium stocks? RR: We had a melt up in the uranium stocks early this year that I think was very interesting and was indicative of market psychol- ogy. What happened in 2015 and 2016 was that we wore out the sellers of the junior uranium stocks. You will probably remember that when those stocks began to move up in price, they moved up on very very low volume. Ironically, once the junior uranium stocks had doubled, the volume picked up. In other words, as a consequence of price actions, the stocks were half as attractive but because they doubled, people piled in and then we wore them out. Two comments here: the first is that the uranium price of US $25 a lb is substantially less than the global cost of production. The industry is losing money on every pound it produces. The uranium price is going to have to go up for these juniors to have any chance of developing the projects. The sole determinant, in the near term, and by near term, I mean by two or three years, as to whether the uranium price goes up, is simply the pace of Japanese reactor restarts. If we begin to see an increasing pace of Japanese reactor restarts, the gain will truly and really be one. If we don't, we're going to have to shake out and disappoint another group of ura- nium speculators. The people who came into the uranium juniors in the first quarter of this year; we're going to have to disappoint them