Thorium: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Thorium comes from monazite, a by-product of rare earth and mineral sands mining, including India's beach sands. There is no fuel market yet, so most is stored. Its value depends on future thorium reactors, especially India's three-stage nuclear programme.
No public price Thorium has no public monthly price series: No commercial fuel market yet; no public monthly price series.What its price moves with
Monazite contains rare earths and thorium together. When rare earths are extracted, thorium is left behind as a slightly radioactive residue that must be stored, so supply grows with rare earth processing regardless of thorium demand.
No public price for rare earths, so the link is explained in words only.Thorium can breed fissile uranium in a reactor, offering an alternative to uranium fuel. While uranium remains plentiful and fuel is a small part of reactor costs, utilities have little reason to invest in thorium fuel cycles.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Monazite is separated from beach and mineral sands along with zircon, ilmenite and rutile. Expansion of zircon and titanium mineral production therefore brings more monazite and thorium, even though nobody mines those sands for thorium.
No public price for zirconium, so the link is explained in words only.Ilmenite and rutile from mineral sands feed titanium dioxide pigment plants, and monazite is a minor co-product. Mineral sands operations on India's coasts, for example, recover these minerals together, so pigment demand indirectly sets how much monazite is separated.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.India plans thorium-based reactors for the final stage of its nuclear programme, and other countries are testing molten salt designs. Success here would turn stored thorium into a valuable fuel, but large-scale demand is still years away.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.