All mineral commodity markets tend to be cyclical, ie, prices rise and fall substantially over the years, but with these fluctuations superimposed on long-term trend decline in real prices, as technological progress takes place at mines. In the uranium market, however, high prices in the late 1970s gave way to depressed prices in the whole of the period of the 1980s and 1990s, with spot prices below the cost of production for all but the lowest cost mines. In 1996 spot prices briefly recovered to the point where many mines could produce profitably, but they then declined again and only started to recover strongly late in 2003.

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