URANIUM continues to stand out as a bright light amid the gloom of the resources sector.

Energy Resources of Australia announced a 191 per cent jump in profit to a record $221.8 million last year.

The Rio Tinto subsidiary also announced that reserves at its Ranger mine in the Northern Territory had increased 128 per cent to 115,000 tonnes of uranium oxide, largely as a result of lowering the cut-off grade.

Reserves at Jabiluka increased to 67,700 tonnes of uranium oxide.

ERA, which produces about 10 per cent of the world's uranium, continued to build its stockpiles of ore inventory throughout last year, with mining rates exceeding processing rates.

ERA chief executive Rob Atkinson said the results pointed to a stronger performance as ERA continued to put more "higher performing contracts" in price to replace older, lower priced deals.

"ERA has been putting contracts in place throughout the cycle," Mr Atkinson said.

"As older legacy contracts roll off and are replaced by higher performing contracts, ERA will see a strengthening of the realised price."

In 2008, the averaged realised price rose 30 per cent to $US32.53 a pound. The spot price on December 31 was $US52.50 a pound, down from $US89.50 at the same time in 2007.

Mr Atkinson said the uranium market remained "more robust than other mineral commodities" amid forecasts of tight supply and rising demand.

Fat Prophets analyst Gavin Wendt said the result was in line with expectations. "It's a very strong result with a tremendous improvement on 2007," Mr Wendt said.

"The numbers were helped by the fact that there was a large amount of product delivered in the fourth quarter of 2008 when the Australian dollar was low, so that has helped things along a little bit."

ERA shares closed up 35c at $19.35.