Say you run the fuel desk at an American utility. An investor asks what you think of the spot price, and you look at him like a tourist. Your bonus depends on one thing: every reactor gets its fuel on time. If one runs short, nobody remembers what you saved per pound. This summer, desks like yours paid a record price to lock in uranium. If you own uranium stocks, your shares went the other way. The last time buyers paid this much... It took a flood. On October 22, 2006, water broke through a rock wall 465 metres under northern Saskatchewan. It filled the richest uranium mine ever found. Cigar Lake was built to supply a tenth of the world’s uranium, and it took almost eight years to produce its first pound. Utilities had spent the 1990s running down inventories and feeding reactors on dismantled Soviet warheads. Now the mine that was going to refill them was a lake. Spot ran from $56 to $136 in eight months. The contract price set a record of $95 that stood for nineteen years. The contract price passed $95 in June and reached $96.50 in August. And no mine flooded this time.