  For more than 40 years, the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD countries and
the International Atomic Energy Administration of the United Nations have
published a biannual document with the title "Uranium Resources, Production and
Demand". This book, known as the "Red Book", summarizes data about the actual
and near future nuclear energy situation and presents the accumulated worldwide
knowledge about the existing and expected uranium resources. These data are
widely believed to provide an accurate and solid basis for future decisions
about nuclear energy. Unfortunately, as it is demonstrated in this paper, they
do not.
  The conventional worldwide uranium resources are estimated by the authors of
the Red Book as 5.5 million tons. Out of these, 3.3 million tons are assigned
to the reasonable assured category and 2.2 million tons are associated with the
not yet discovered but assumed to exist inferred resources. Our analysis shows
that neither the 3.3 million tons of "assured" resources nor the 2.2 million
tons of inferred resources are justified by the Red Book data and that the
actual known exploitable resources are probably much smaller.
  Despite many shortcomings of the uranium resource data, some interesting and
valuable information can be extracted from the Red Book. Perhaps most
importantly, the Red Book resource data can be used to test the
"economic-geological hypothesis", which claims for example that a doubling of
uranium price will increase the amount exploitable uranium resources by an even
larger factor. The relations between the uranium resources claimed for the
different resource categories and their associated cost estimates are found to
be in clear contradiction with this hypothesis.
