Noble Group, which counts China’s sovereign wealth fund as a shareholder, plans to expand into supplies of nuclear fuel to meet rising demand from China and India, its executive chairman said.

The company bought a 5.1% stake in USEC Inc., a U.S. provider of enriched uranium producing 50% of the fuel in the world, Tobias Brown said in an interview in Singapore today. Of all the nuclear plants being built, about half are in China, he said.

 

“We are looking carefully at the provision of nuclear fuel to Asia,” said Brown, 47. “There’s no doubt that one cornerstone of energy production in Asia will be the use of nuclear power generation.”

 

China’s demand for uranium may rise to 20,000 metric tons a year by 2020, more than a third of the 50,572 tons mined globally last year, according to the World Nuclear Association. India’s needs will grow 10-fold to 8,000 tons as it quadruples nuclear-power capacity to 20 gigawatts, according to Jagdeep Ghai, finance director at state-owned Nuclear Power Corp.

 

Noble is keen to secure a share in the provision of processed fuel as opposed to mined raw uranium because the barriers of entry to uranium enrichment is steep, Brown said.

 

USEC has U.S. regulatory clearance to sell enriched uranium to mainland China, the New York Times said in a report in June.