Sprott USA Chairman Rick Rule spoke with INN's Andrew Topf about fundamentals for a higher uranium price, and Rule characteristically provided profund commentary on the natural resources business.

"This industry needs amalgamation more than anything else," according to Rule. "There's too much G&A across the whole mining space and combining two companies together and getting rid of one set of duplicate G&A when the assets are both geographically focused like they are makes absolute sense."

On the topic of small mines, Rule commented, "The small mine thesis where you're going to use the cash flow to grow the company without dilution is very very seductive but it seldom works. The truth is in the mining business... Everything that can go wrong with a small mine can go wrong in a big mine, but only a big mine can make you big money. To take the risk that we take in fluctuating commodity markets, you need the potential of a world scale reward. I'm looking for people who are doing something on the basis of scale."

"The ability to be over 50 million pounds ... and to have grade," are key factors for Rule when investing in uranium projects. "We don't want the really large low grade deposits where the front end capital costs wreck the economics, and we don't want a small, high grade deposit, where you don't have sufficient scale to matter. We want something, if you will, just right... The Athabasca Basin is the Persian Gulf of Uranium."

Here's the full four minute clip:

Here's SteelsCorp's post on Rule's interview as well.