Noble to expand into supplies of nuclear fuel

NOBLE Group Ltd, which counts China's sovereign wealth fund as a shareholder, plans to expand into supplies of nuclear fuel to meet rising demand from China and India, its executive chairman said.

The company bought a 5.1 per cent stake in USEC Inc, a US provider of enriched uranium producing 50 per cent of the fuel in the world, Tobias Brown said in Singapore yesterday. Of all the nuclear plants being built, about half are in China, he said. 'We are looking carefully at the provision of nuclear fuel to Asia,' he noted. 'There's no doubt that one cornerstone of energy production in Asia will be the use of nuclear power generation.'

China's demand for uranium may rise to 20,000 metric tonnes a year by 2020, more than a third of the 50,572 tonnes mined globally last year, according to the World Nuclear Association. India's needs will grow 10-fold to 8,000 tonnes as it quadruples nuclear-power capacity to 20 gigawatts, according to Jagdeep Ghai, finance director at state-owned Nuclear Power Corp. -- Bloomberg