Energy analysis from Lisa Hess – New York money manager and Forbes columnist

Every once in a while I leave my computer screen and read materials written on “old dead trees” covered with shiny wax. In other words, I love to read magazines.

One of my weekly favorites is Forbes which has a rather annoying, flash and popup filled on line version. Somehow the advertisements in the hard copy are less irritating – besides, I can read it while kicked back in my favorite recliner or while eating breakfast at the kitchen table. For all of those reasons, I never read the publication on line and have never bothered to sign up for a free membership.

(Boy, that was a long way of saying I do not have a link for you, but if you want to find the article on line, I think you can.)

Anyway – the March 12 2007 edition (I love the way magazines anticipate future dates) has a column by Lisa Hess titled New Energy Plays. One paragraph jumped out at me:

At long last, uranium is getting recognized for what it always has been: the cleanest, most efficient energy source available. For too many years, the idea of building a new nuclear plant was anathema to much of the public, afraid of another Chernobyl. Now new reactors are on the drawing board, both here and abroad. They will take a decade to open. But already the price of uranium has risen from $56 per pound to $75.

Now, there are plenty of publications where you can read about investing in uranium stocks, and you can find plenty of speculators in the field that will talk a lot about the imbalances of supply and demand and the reasons why there is no ceiling on the price of the material or the price of the stocks in companies that mine it. (Be VERY cautious about buying into that line of thinking. The price of uranium is WAY above the cost of mining it in many excellent ore bodies, and there are plenty of smart mining companies that will convert that difference into new supply.)

However, it is a pretty recent phenomenon to find professional money managers like Ms. Hess wax so eloquent and make such unequivocal statements about the inherent superiority of uranium. Let’s repeat what she called it and leave it at that.

At long last, uranium is getting recognized for what it always has been: the cleanest, most efficient energy source available.

(Don’t get too upset, Kirk Sorensen, I am sure that Ms. Hess would have included thorium alongside uranium in that statement if she had a bit more technical knowledge on the topic.)