Uranium is actually quite common; it's cheap because it's an extremely controlled market (who are you going to sell it to?) with fairly limited demand (it doesn't take that much uranium to run a power plant or make a nuke, a cube about a meter per side can run a reactor for a year). Because it's so cheap, it's not substantially prospected so there is a good chance there are large reserves that can be exploited if we go looking for them.

And, if it comes down to it, we can pull near-unlimited quantities from seawater at $200-1000 per kg (~10x current pricing). The costs of nuclear power generation are almost entirely capital costs and insurance, the fuel costs are practically a rounding error, so this does not substantially change the costs of nuclear power generation.

https://www.newsdeeply.com/oceans/articles/2018/06/28/the-nu...

So, uranium will probably never be super valuable. Strategically important, and nice to have in a conveniently accessible form, but not economically valuable.

Eye-balling the numbers, you'd pick up less than a factor of 5. I encourage you to look at the details and report back. You should also correct for the natural resources that Norway has the Australia lacks, like fish (almost 10% of Norway's exports inclusive of oil!).

Energy is about 50% of Norway's exports, and minerals + energy is about 60% of Australia's exports. These are extractive industries that are structurally similar.

Norway exports about $50 billion USD / year. Australia exports about $120 billion USD / year.

This is probably why the Australian is comparing the situation with Norway.

https://www.minister.industry.gov.au/ministers/frydenberg/sp...

https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/production-and-exports/expo...

I'm aware that comparison he's trying to draw, but the comparison has to be fair. First, most obviously, Australia has almost 5 times the population of Norway! Second, if we're going to start increasing the scope of exports we're including, to make a fair comparison we should include minerals in Norway's total (not just Australia's), and we should really include other resources that Norway has that Australia doesn't (rather than just picking a category where Australia has larger exports). What are the numbers in this case?

Again, I think this works out to a per capita endowment of that is still much, much larger for Norway, but you'd actually have to do a bit of work to check.

Compare respective sovereign wealth funds: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/24/h...

IMO you're on a hiding to nothing trying to support your position that the comparison isn't valid. The economic export situation is structurally quite similar between Norway and Australia, and the difference in how they've handled it is vast, far greater than any multiple in population.

Huh? No one disputes that the countries handle things differently. But if you want to say that one way of handling things is better, and the only evidence you give are better outcomes, then inputs ought to be similar. But if one country has 30 times or 3 times the input (corresponding to oil or most natural resources, respectively), then this is a very poor comparison unless you do a lot more work to correct for it.

Here's a simple way of looking at it: Norway has converted its resources into a $1 trillion pot of funds, while Australia has, to a first approximation and over a longer time frame, zero or less (the country runs a budget deficit). So it doesn't really matter if the input is 3 or 30 times bigger if the function converting it into output is broken.

Australia doesn't have ocean access and fishing industries?

Fish makes up just 0.13% of Australian exports

https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/aus/

Next time, consider looking the number up yourself and reporting back rather than just asking the question and so forcing me to look up the answer for you (or else look like I'm ignoring the issue).

Fish being a minor part of Australian exports is a claim with absolutely no relationship to whether or not Australia has fish. You claimed it didn't, and that is not credible.

In context, my claim was clearly that Australia did not have access to fishing resources that had economic effects that were remotely comparable to its total exports.

To OP really between coal and LNG alone dalore is making a fair comparison.