Uranium mining companies hoping to increase production in the United States are putting on a brave front amid volatile prices, a punishing stock market and wary investors.

Despite the fact that demand for uranium to fuel nuclear power plants is expected to increase in the coming years, the spot price is still hovering at around $50 a pound. That is down from a post-Fukushima price of $60, after the Japan nuclear crisis began with an earthquake in March, and a pre-Japanese-tsunami high of $73. It was those higher prices that, at least in part, led several companies to seek increased uranium extraction around the United States.

"Activity in the sector has definitively slowed down," Amir Adnani, CEO of Corpus Christi, Texas-based Uranium Energy Corp., said in an interview. "Uranium exploration and mining has become a tougher business. That's made it tougher for uranium companies to be able to raise money."

UEC is currently mining at its Palangana in-situ recovery (ISR) facility in the south Texas uranium belt. The ISR process involves pumping solution underground to dissolve the uranium and then sucking it out through wells. The company is also looking to restart operations at other nearby sites in the near term. Down the road, UEC is keen on expanding in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.

However, even with Adnani's aggressive efforts, the company's stock price has yet to recover from the Japanese disaster. UEC (AMEX: UEC) was trading at around $3.41 this morning, slightly lower than the post-Fukushima price of $3.86. Other companies looking at U.S. growth are in a similar situation.

Jonathan Hinze, international operations vice president at Ux Consulting Co., which keeps track of uranium spot prices, said nobody can deny the nuclear industry has taken a hit.

"We dropped our total reactor forecast through 2020 by about 10 percent from pre-Fukushima to post-Fukushima," Hinze said in an interview. "That doesn't mean we're not looking at growth."

Uranium mining boosters are keen to point out that the roughly 60 nuclear reactors under construction before the tsunami are still moving forward, even as some countries, particularly Germany, are looking to turn their backs on nuclear power. Most of the new reactors are in countries like China, India and Russia.

"There's still growth in the demand for uranium," Hinze said. "The market did not tank after Fukushima. The price has dropped but it's still over $50. We're still at a reasonably good price."

He estimates the yearly global uranium demand at around 180 million to 185 million pounds and expects it to grow to 230 million to 235 million pounds by 2020. In the United States, Adnani points out the annual demand is roughly 55 million pounds while domestic production hovers around 4 million pounds with many supplies coming from foreign countries.

Analysts expect the supply picture to become more bleak in 2013 with the end of a program that supplies uranium for power plants from Russian nuclear warhead material. Hinze said it will amount to a loss of about 24 million pounds of uranium a year.

"There just isn't enough development," Adnani said. "How are U.S. utilities going to meet their uranium requirements?"

In April, Powertech Uranium Corp. announced that it was putting a proposed uranium mining project on hold at least in part because of post-Fukushima market conditions (Greenwire, April 28).

In contrast, last month Uranerz Energy Corp. announced it would begin construction on its Nichols Ranch uranium project after securing a key license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Company CEO Glenn Catchpole said the market is not as good as he'd like it to be but still good enough to proceed (Greenwire, July 21).

"This is making each company internally look carefully at what Fukushima means going down the road, listening to the experts and looking at projections," Catchpole said in an interview. "In our case, we're still comfortable from what we read and what we hear ... that we are still full speed ahead."

Analysts and industry insiders are predicting uranium prices to rise, albeit probably not as high as recent peaks. And while U.S. mining efforts are largely moving forward, Hinze said major mining will continue to happen abroad in countries like Kazakhstan, Australia, Namibia and even parts of Canada with large deposits that can be produced economically.

"It's going to be hit or miss," Hinze said about U.S. projects. "There are a lot of efforts. Some are going to be priced out of the market."

And Adnani touted his cost-effective operations, particularly because of the ISR method.

"There's nothing wrong with growing production that's costing you $15 per pound to operate," he said. "I think the second half of the year, the fall season coming up, will tell us a lot more. I really think uranium prices in the next year or two have only one place to go and that's higher."

Still, he laments the events in Japan and the effect they are still having on the global nuclear industry.

"It created such a negative cloud over the industry that caused this disruption at a time when this industry should not have slowed down, should not have been disrupted," Adnani said.