If uranium demand were ever to boom in the way iron ore has over the past decade, Australia would be well placed to cash in.
With the world's largest known uranium resource and enough mining to be the world's third biggest producer of the nuclear fuel, Australia is a significant player in the uranium industry. 
But that industry remains small compared with gold, copper and coal, and it has endured a severe downturn over the past four years.
Uranium became fashionable in investment circles between 2004 and 2008 as awareness of climate change led many to speculate that nuclear power could be a large-scale, centralised source of electricity free of carbon emissions.
That notion led uranium prices to briefly rise as high as $US130($177) a pound in 2007, before the trend was interrupted by two extraordinary events: the global financial crisis in 2008 and the Japanese tsunami of   March 2011, which sparked a partial nuclear meltdown at a power station in Fukushima province.
The Fukushima tragedy revived fears about the safety of nuclear power and prompted Japan to "temporarily" turn off its 50 nuclear reactors and other nations such as Germany to announce plans to gradually phase out nuclear power.
Those changes dramatically reduced demand for uranium and prices have been badly depressed ever since. The benchmark price has spent the past couple of years between $US25 a pound and $US40 a pound, and uranium was fetching $US35 a pound last week.
The weak prices have forced many marginal mines around the world to close which, combined with older mines reaching the end of their working lives, has reduced the number of operating uranium mines in Australia in recent years.
Uranium is now being produced at just three Australian sites: BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, the Rio Tinto-dominated Ranger lease in the Northern Territory, and the Four Mile mine in South Australia, run by Quasar and Alliance Resources.
Mining at Ranger has stopped and the company is gradually working through the remaining stockpiles, while Olympic Dam is focused on copper and treats uranium as a byproduct.
"The continued weak uranium prices are having an impact on future supply potential over the long term. In the current low-price environment it is difficult to justify the economics of projects, which is leading to deferrals or even cancellations," said Tim Gitzel, chief executive of the world's second largest uranium producer Cameco.
Optimists say the lack of new mines will eventually create a shortage of uranium and stimulate the next uranium price boom, which Vimy Resources' managing director Mike Young believes will be like "iron ore on steroids".
For that to happen, Japan would need to restart some, if not all of its nuclear reactors and China's plan to triple nuclear power capacity by 2020 would need to happen.