Justin Huhn: Electricity Demand Growth For Decades With AI? Uranium Supply Deficits Until $100/lb?
Summary
Market Outlook: The demand for electricity is expected to grow significantly due to advancements in AI, data centers, and technology, with nuclear power playing a crucial role in meeting this demand.
Uranium Supply: There is a projected uranium supply deficit, with prices potentially rising to $100/lb as demand outpaces supply, particularly driven by China's nuclear expansion.
Nuclear Energy Growth: Nuclear power is experiencing a resurgence, with countries like China rapidly building reactors and the US extending the life of existing plants, despite bureaucratic hurdles.
Investment Opportunities: Companies like Cameco are benefiting from increased uranium demand, with stock prices rising significantly; however, new mining projects require higher uranium prices to be viable.
Technological Impact: The growth of AI and data centers is driving electricity demand, with tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft investing in nuclear power to secure stable energy sources for future needs.
Challenges and Risks: The US faces challenges in uranium enrichment and supply, with potential strategic stockpiles being considered to mitigate reliance on imports.
Long-term Trends: The nuclear and uranium sectors are poised for long-term growth, driven by technological advancements and increasing global electricity demand.
Transcript
Hi everyone, this is Jason Ber of Wall Street for Main Street. Welcome back for another Wall Street for Main Street podcast interview. We're recording this interview on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025. The Kamico shares, which is one of the top uranium producers, they hit $85 a share, I think in the last day or two, just up enormously over the last four or five years. Today's special guest is a returning guest. He was covering uranium and uranium mining companies during the the heights of the bare market. He launched his newsletter, the uranium insider. I mean there was like just nasty trolling uh from lots of people there like why are you gonna say anything nice about uranium and kamo kazataprom nuclear power nuclear power is dead because of Fukushima Germany shutting down their nuclear power plants the United Kingdom shutting them all down and now here we are what Justin like four or five years later and things seem very very different compared to the heights of the bare market >> it's definitely been a wild swing in in sentiment around nuclear since I first started looking at the sector which was you know 2017 2018 and we launched the newsletter in 2019 and had at that point still a little bit of let's call it contrarian optimism uh from the investing side of things but the picture for the growth of nuclear wasn't extremely robust like it is now. It was still, I believe, at that time an expected 1 to 2% compound annual growth. And you know, the the sector was so hated back then that it was a surprise to anybody who'd looked into it for a moment to see that it actually still was somewhat slightly growing. But, you know, fast forward to today and we're expecting a 4 to 6% compound annual growth rate for nuclear going out to 2040 and beyond. and the active operating nuclear fleet of the world with very few exceptions has been extremely derisked by the growth in electricity demand. That's not happening absolutely everywhere but in most developed countries and developing countries electricity demand is just going you know up and to the right in a way that we haven't seen in the west in in 20 to 25 years. So the US >> especially the US and China because it seems like they're in a what a technology arms race with five or six key technologies. A lot of it's based on artificial intelligence software data centers but then that's also going to be applying to future technologies that integrate those things with like humanoid robots and drones and quantum computing. So the uh electricity demand growth, we're seeing this right now here in the US like the consumer price index. I think the fastest growing thing in the consumer price index is electricity prices and electricity demand right now here in the US. >> Wow. That's that's not not shocking whatsoever. Um electricity growth uh the demand growth is is truly remarkable right now. And like you said, a lot of that's being driven by not only AI but actual, you know, data centers that are simply storing information that both of those elements are growing extremely fast. And that's in addition to you know the growth of in adoption of electric vehicles which that is slowing down a bit but still growing you know electrifying everything electrifying heat electrifying cooking some of the big cities have been mandating this over the last years. So a growth across the board in demand for electricity has been very very d-risking to this particular investment and to you know to any sort of operational electricity producing assets in in in the states here even coal plants are are being derisked somewhat. they're not being shut down as aggressively as in past years. And it's it's very good. I don't I still don't know whether or not the United States is going to get uh get over the line in terms of building new large nuclear reactors. I believe that we will, but we're not modeling for that. And actually, for this investing thesis, we don't need it. The entire fleet in the US is going to be life extended, and practically every reactor has already received an additional 20-year life extension beyond that initial 40-year license. The only exception is Diablo Canyon, California, which has received the license to extend from the NRC, but still working through the bureaucratic channels to get that extended. I believe they will have to extend that one. Looks looks very good for nuclear right now, Jason, across the board. >> Now, just uh and again, this is Justin Yun of Uranium Insider. I was, you know, talking about how we launched the newsletter. Pretty good timing at the heights of the bare market and some of his accomplishments with Kamico stock, which is up over, I think, 10x. I was t writing about extensive articles about Kamico and about them in the uranium miners in in uh in the pandemic 2020 2022. Now, now Justin, in terms of like the uh nuclear power plants in the United States, we've I'm sure my listeners have seen the headlines from a lot of the technology companies, pretty much all of them. So, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, uh pretty much all of them, uh with Stargate AI project, are they able to make these large investments for billions of dollars and get like extensions to where like at the nuclear power plants to where the the existing nuclear power plant, they have permits to expand, say add more cones. Are they able to do that or or is that not allowed right now? >> So, a lot of a lot of the current operating nuclear reactors in the United States, the location where they're where they're operating are already licensed to build further units of of any licensed design. And so, so that's probably the most likely locations where if we see new reactors, whether they're small or large, in the United States, will be at existing nuclear power plant sites. and uh and many of these utilities for their you know in in conjunction with applying for and or receiving license extensions from the NRC a lot of utilities have signed power purchase agreements and and many of these have been with with the big tech companies that you know obviously the the one that's you know most in most people's purview is the is the three-mile island restart and the 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft but there's been a few others um The Palisades, for example, the Palisades restart also has been derisked with with uh multi-deade power purchase agreements, not with big tech companies, but with with the power uh distributors in Michigan. So, yeah, um it is possible absolutely it's not necessarily a small ask to to build an additional reactor at an existing site. That's still a costly uh costly expense and still a lot of utilities are a little bit gunshy due to the cost overruns and time overruns that Vogle experienced in Georgia. But they're all moving in that direction. They most of the utilities in the US do want to build new nuclear. Most of them want that to be small. Not because they couldn't use more electricity, but simply they believe that, you know, in a higher interest rate environment that it's if you can get anything done faster, you derisk the the financing for that project. But almost all of them do not want to build first of a kind. So we're seeing first of a kind start to be built with Terapowers Natrium. X Energy's XC100 is in early stages. The BWX uh excuse me, the Gi Hitachi BWRx300, the first of a kind is being built at Darlington in Ontario. Once we get these first ones built and we can get a better idea around budgeting, then I think we're going to see much more adoption and further units being um first construction in the US. >> Well, those are pilot plants, right? So, those aren't able they're not going to be able to handle the electricity demands for say a small city or even like a metro area. Well, in this case, the NRAM is going to be the full size. The I off the top of my head, 315 megawatts, if I recall correctly, and the BWRX300 is going to be a full size. Now, there's a number of quote unquote advanced reactors that are pilot projects that are being constructed at the Idaho National Labs. So, um in that case, you're correct. But in these demonstration projects and the first of a kind with the with Gi Hitachi's um unit, those are full-sized as far as their designs are concerned. >> Yeah. And the the hot stock everyone's talking about what is Ollo and Ollo's pre-revenue. They haven't even built a pipeline yet. So they have no cash flow. So those shares have just gone like as a speculation. Congratulations to the listeners who did that. But there's like insane insider selling. I think one of the insiders sold like 30 or 40% of his stock recently. >> Yeah. And you know I I would probably as well if I was an insider um at the company it just it's become a meme stock. You know it moved up on a thematic with everything. nuclear kind of had a really solid last 12 months or so, but Oaklo, a couple of other stocks like Centress have have sort of become memes where, you know, you can go ahead and search that ticker on Reddit or or on Twitter and what you'll find is just a number of these trading groups that are trying to pump it and um Wall Street Bet style moves. But with all of that said, I mean, Oak is, you know, they're moving and shaking. they're they're in uh the investor's purview and and good for them and and hopefully you know the way that Oklahoma has moved that stock has moved and the valuation it's achieved will bring more attention to the space will bring more capital to to other uh nuclear projects that are upcoming. So that's in that way it's positive from a valuation standpoint doesn't make a whole lot of sense at least not right now. Are you seeing the big tech companies, are they navigating through the political red tape, the rules, regulations that used to take many years and tens of mill millions of dollars? Are they able with their lobbying and their capital and their political contacts with in both political parties in Congress to actually navigate through and maybe get this process accelerated to where they can uh maybe partner with one of these electrical utility companies. They then go to someone in the Trump administration or the Department of Energy or Congress. They have congressional people backing them and they say, "Guess what? We're gonna build like a new Stargate AI um because they built the one in Abalene, Texas, but that one has natural gas, but they're talking about I think three or four more in the United States of 300 megawws, potentially up to 1 gawatt with like insane amounts of Nvidia Blackwell chips. Are they going to be able to navigate through this process and and eliminate a lot of the red tape and start uh building nuclear power plants faster? >> That's a really good question. Um, unfortunately, unless the reactor is built on a Department of Defense site, they can't really circumn the the NRC. But on the positive side, since Trump's executive orders earlier this year, the NRC is absolutely accelerating the timelines for all of their processes. So, that is looking very positive. The tech companies are getting more directly involved in the nuclear sector. I'll give you a couple of examples. Um, Amazon intends to build 12 XC 100 units in the state of Washington. That's where the the demonstration first demonstration project is is set to be built. Now, those units are still many years away. This is of a this is still a novel design in terms of it being advanced nuclear high temperature gas reactor. Um, Microsoft, however, they had a representative at the WNA and there is a rep from Microsoft that is now on on the board at the World Nuclear Association and both Microsoft and Amazon have recently subscribed to UXC's work. So, they're actually actively looking at the fuel cycle. These two big tech companies and that's something that should have utilities a little bit concerned. Um, it doesn't at this point, but it should. So, the involvement is getting more direct. We know they're going to need the power. I know that there's obviously a very urgent need for more power that nuclear is not going to be able to solve, but it does appear that the tech companies in addition to the federal government is thinking a little bit more long-term in addition to the urgency. So, of course, if you're Microsoft, if you're Amazon, um if you're any of these big tech companies that wants to build data centers and power them with stable, clean base load and you want to have a reasonable market share, some sort of dominance in this sector and you're out towards the end of the decade, you're going to want to build nuclear right now so that you can have that operational in the mid 2030s for 80 or 100 years. So, it does seem to be moving in that direction. And like I said, this is I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it's not necessary for the you know, uranium prices going higher thesis, which is really the core of the investment thesis in the uranium mining stocks and the space in general. Um, but from a from a general perspective, the growth of nuclear and wanting to see this sector um grow and thrive, we are moving in the right direction in that as far as that goes. >> Well, a lot of the growth seems to be from China. Can you talk about maybe the difference between how quickly and efficiently a nuclear power plant can be built in China and how many on average are the Chinese building per year? They China is building nuclear reactors right now. Um well to to speak generally about large lightwater boiling water reactors. They're building them in less than 6 years and these are large you know gawatt plus size reactors. Um they build them as as fast as about 5 years. Most of them are coming in under six years and on average under six years. Um, currently they are on pace they're they're almost on pace to hit 150 gawatts by 2035 and I believe right now they have 57 or 58 gawatts currently operational. So it's about 10 per year but in recent in the only in the last couple of years we've seen them on pace with construction starts to hit that in years prior is a few a few less. So five or six per year. So, conservatively, they're building five to six per year, uh, potentially up to eight or nine per year, and and it does appear based on what they're actually doing that they intend to hit that goal. Yeah, they're just their electricity usage demand growth is is exponential as well. It's uh the US is is starting to finally grow again for electricity demand usage but China has been growing at a break neck pace for a long time especially a lot of their cities over the last uh 5 to 7 years have been immensely modernized the tier 2 tier three cities a lot of them are a lot cleaner they've been installing a lot of solar panels and wind turbines and on top of that they've been uh building the nuclear power plants as well so they've just been investing across the board in a lot of different energy >> yeah they're they're building absolutely every kind every type of of electricity generation and um they're they're thinking in decades. They're absolutely thinking in decades. The the nuclear growth doesn't seem to be slowing down. Um I connected recently with a representative from one of the Chinese mining companies and we were talking about the Chinese inventory and the growth of the Chinese appetite for for purchasing involved getting involvement in in projects, purchasing projects and contracting for more uranium. and he basically said, "Yeah, that's not going to slow down." The the the uranium once it's on Chinese soil, it doesn't leave. So the Chinese do sell a very very small amount of enrichment. They sell that to the United States. They sell it to Europe. But our understanding is that seems to be roughly in line with the amount that they buy from Russia. So China's own domestic conversion, enrichment, fabrication, that all basically stays um on Chinese soil. It doesn't leave. And they have they have relatively large inventories, you know, pushing 600 million pounds across the fuel cycle. That's U308, UF6, EUP. That also includes military stockpiles or in that included in that number, which um it's hard to say to delineate how much of that 600 plus million is for military use. But this is strategic sovereign inventory. They don't sell this. They couldn't care less about the price of uranium. So, a lot of people think that the Chinese are actively trying to manipulate the price of uranium. And yes, the nuclear operators would prefer lower prices, but the nuclear the uranium mining companies would prefer higher prices. They're both state-owned. Um, so they don't necessarily have aligned in uh incentives there. But the Chinese 100% do not sell their inventories into the market. They have never, they will never. So, the trading that they do is minimal in volume relative to global, you know, overall annual volumes being traded. and the enrichment that they sell usually is roughly in line with what they are buying from Russia. So, it's something that um I know a few people have been concerned with over the years, but it's not going to be able to stop what we see coming in terms of overall utility demand and insufficient supply in the uranium side of things. >> I actually haven't heard that conspiracy theory that the Chinese were trying to manipulate the uranium price. I mean, I've heard the gold and silver prices that they were manipulating that or some other commodity prices. I mean, they've stopped buying soybeans and wheat from American farmers, but not the not the uranium one. So, does China buy where where do they buy their uranium supply from? You mentioned Russia. Are are they buying directly from say uh uranium miners in Africa or are they buying mostly from Russia? Where where is China buying their supply from for their nuclear power plants? >> The bulk of the contracting that has taken place on behalf of Chinese utilities for uranium procurement has uh taken place in Kazakhstan. So, in directly from Kazadam. Now they're also the second largest JV partner with Kazadam Prom. So they have JV projects in Kazakhstan in addition to buying from Kazadrom directly. So that's the bulk of it. They have a very large mine in Namibia called the Husab mine. It produces 156 million pounds a year. A gigantic open pit mine. All of that uranium goes straight to China. Those are the big ones. They have uh they have an offtake from Langer Heinrich also in Namibia Paladins project. They own a small share of um of Patterson Lake in Canada that is not producing uranium and isn't expected to produce uranium necessarily this cycle. Most of their procurement comes from Kazakhstan. And so they're actively trying to develop new uh new projects in China domestically in Inner Mongolia. They um they're looking at some of the idle projects in Nishair as well. Um, so the Azelik project which was in development in the last decade and then halted because of uh low too low of prices. They're looking at that. How much they'll get, how soon out of that, nobody really knows. So China generally speaking will continue to be net buyers uh as far as we can see out into the future. And if you consider 150 gawatt um by by 2035, you know, that's going to be 7580 million pounds per year consumed only by China in only 10 years. So that 600 million stock pile pound stockpile starts to look really really small when you consider that they're they're shooting for 150 gawatt. And by the way, as far as we can tell, they they aim to continue that trend and reach 200 gawatt by 2040, which is actually their stated goal as well. So huge consumption coming out of China and not a lot of domestic production. So we expect them to stay relatively active both in procurement and in project development globally. So I want to drill down a little bit more in Kamico because the share price is up enormously over the last five or six years. I mean, I remember during the heights of the bare market, I was getting just nasty social media messages, messages from paying customers, from patrons. Why do you say anything nice about Kamico? This was during the heights of the bare market when it was stuck between $8 and $15 a share. I don't They had been shutting down the uranium mines. They're basically running the company like a hedge fund where I think they were going into the spot market and then buying the uranium for cheap like a hedge fund and then reselling it to the utility companies at a long-term contract price. Do you think Kamako can uh maintain steady profitability now? Uh is it a profitable operational business or is this uh share price just uh based on what the uranium demand and the data centers? >> So a lot of what's happened the share price has has come from ETF flows and fund just literally a flow of funds and honestly that's what moves this sector more than anything is is swings in sentiment swings in the flow of funds. we start to see the ETFs grow their outstanding share count rather than contract it like we saw in the first half of the year and that really moves especially the large cap large caps the most. So um so when you have you know stocks like Centric or El just blowing out to the upside as meme stocks that pulls on URA which pulls on everything else. So you know everything is kind of connected. With all of that said, Kamako has sort of become more of a a one-stop shop for for all things uranium and nuclear. So, if you want to play the story with one stock, that's kind of the stock to go to. Um, you could you could go back a couple of years and you would see a lot of criticism over their contract book and how they, you know, arguably signed a lot of contracts at too low of prices going back into the earlier part of the decade, which which is generally true. Now, that has a lagged effect. You know, as the years go on, those old contracts roll off and the significantly higher price that contracts that are well into the money in terms of profitability for the company start to start to be realized. And that's what we're we're going to see in the coming years. Now, you have to look at what sort of cash flow is the company going to be seeing with each large uh AP-1000 that Westinghouse is going to be building that Kamo has a 49% share of. So Kamako is that they've got um conversion at Port Hope, which nobody gives them any credit for, but conversion has been a very very high priced uh part of their business over the past couple of years since the disruption in Russia. And with all of that said, then they have uh Westinghouse has fuel fabrication as well. Westinghouse also has the Springfield's conversion facility in the UK, which looks like it will likely be at some point refurbished and restarted. So soup to nuts all they all they're lacking is enrichment but of course they have a minority share in global laser enrichment they are highly likely to increase that stake in uh GLE that they have a joint JV partner with sillex and as soon as uh Sillex or GLE gets some sort of funding from the DOE which I believe is going to happen and could happen any day now uh we think that Kamico will increase their position size I believe it's the 70% that they're allowed to under that agreement so it's kind of a one-stop shop for all things nuclear and uranium. On the uranium side of things, they're having a bit of trouble with uh MacArthur River. Currently, our understanding is that they're moving into a new zone of mining in that deposit. This zone uh appears to have a higher clay content, a little bit more difficulty in in establishing the freeze walls. This is basically this is a underground mine, very high-grade ore that pretty much exists in in an aquifer. So they have to freeze the area around the deposit that's going to be mined. Extremely complicated, extremely expensive, and the ore is so high-grade and so rich, and there's so much of it that it's well worth it and profitable for the company. But they're they're having some issues there. And we don't know exactly when that's going to be back up and running to full capacity, but they we also know that their pipeline of projects is somewhat diminishing as far as tier one operational currently. So, Cigar Lake is also moving into phase two, which our understanding is it's a little bit a little bit more difficult mining, a little bit more high-cost mining, but they'll be able to do it. That's done in 2035. Cigar Lake is over. MacArthur River is over in 2042 or three. And if they ramp that to 24 million pounds, which they probably will at some point, that'll be done in 2040. So, everybody's wondering like, what is Kamico doing here? What are they going to do? Do they have enough tier 2 just with Rabbit Lake and a couple of other large undeveloped projects in the Aabaska? Some some tier 2 ISR stuff in the United States. Are they going to go after nextG/ Arrow? Uh that's the thing that everybody wants to know. So it's a it's a wonderful stock to own and hold to play this whole cycle, both the nuclear side and the uranium side. Not really sure what their strategy is for uranium going forward. So we'll have to see how this plays out. Now, the Trump administration has talked about what strategic metal stockpiles and they've done that for rare earth elements or at least they're trying to do it for rare earth elements with funding and fasttracking that. Are they talking about that already for say like uranium enrichment? Because I think the US has plenty of uranium supply to mine the uranium, but it seems like the US over the last like couple decades, they've really been importing a lot of enriched uranium from Russia and elsewhere. Do you think that the US should fasttrack like a new uranium enrichment facility here in the United States and that would solve a lot of the problems for the uh nuclear power plants? >> Yeah, I think that enrichment is moving in the right direction already. So there there and there is funding that we're expecting to hear announcements literally any day now in terms of I think there's an additional couple of billion that's available that is probably going to be dispersed across centric and BWXT and GLE and possibly general matter that which has already received some funding. So it's already kind of moving in that direction. Enrichment enrichment isn't as big of a bottleneck that everybody believes is. Um, is there insufficient enrichment domestically to satisfy the US utilities? Yes, specifically if you're talking about US-owned. So, Urano has operations here in New Mexico, but it's not owned by by the US. It's owned by a conglomerate of European countries, um, European companies, I should say. So, we do need more enrichment domestically, but it's not a huge bottleneck in the fuel cycle. It's just a highlighted point because about 25% of the enriched uranium needs of the US fleet is bought from Russia. And so that that's the main reason it's really in in the crosshairs and in the spotlight of the Trump admin. The Trump admin has talked recently about reestablishing a strategic uranium stockpile and I think that would be a very very intelligent thing for the admin to do. It does look like that is highly likely to happen. We're going to have to see how the um how the additional section 232 petition uh in investigation works out and what they'll recommend. It's probably not going to be nothing. So that will most likely be a certain amount of funding annually for a certain amount of years of purchasing uranium from um from domestic miners here in the states and that's something we have to look forward to. But yes, the fuel chain needs to be supported in the states. But I think generally speaking, if we see these sustained high prices in conversion enrichment and eventually see higher prices in uranium that sustains for a while, the problem will generally solve itself in my in my opinion. Well, we're at a long-term contract price right now for utilities around $81 according to the Chemico website and the spot market is around $75 a pound. Are those uh a a uh uranium price where a uranium miner uh can go get funding saying look the uranium our stock is up a lot, the contract price is reasonable, the utility company, it's not going to hurt their profit margins where they can actually go get funding and restart a uranium mine in the next couple years. So, uh, I mean the the short answer is yes and no. So, right now we've seen a little bit of supply respond. We're seeing efforts for more supply to respond. Uh, we're seeing a lot of effort on behalf of the state-owned entities to source as much uranium as they possibly can. The French, the Chinese, the Russians, they're doing what they can to get more supply online, sort of anywhere that they can. In terms of the publicly traded market and especially in the west, we're still not at prices where some of the larger projects and the marginal cost projects are have yet to make the decision to develop. And you know, the best highlight you can give is is in Namibia. So Deep Yellow and Bannerman and Forsis, these are large open pit projects and none of them are actually moving towards direct development to eventually get into production. So, and the long-term price moved up a couple of dollars for UXC. So, and it stayed the same for Trade Tech. So, it's now 82. However, the UXC 3ear Ford and 5year Ford jumped up by $5 and $3 uh per pound respectively for the month of September. So, 3year Ford is 90 bucks. 5-year Ford is 98. And that really tells you where the price is going for uranium. I think once we're above 100 and it stays there for a while, we're going to see more supply respond. But we have we've already modeled out the prospective minds with an assumption of prices rising. We don't see the market balancing anytime soon, Jason. So, it's going to be very interesting to see how quickly the price moves. Um, how stable it gets there. $100 for the term market and it stays there for a while. We'll see more supply respond, but we don't know what will happen on the spot price front and most of the risks barring let's say a nuclear incident, a nuclear accident. let's say or a drastic change in demand for some other reason. I don't even know what that could possibly be. We expect most of the disruptions to be sort of right tail risks here. We could see further financialization of the sector. We could see more countries establishing strategic sovereign stock piles in addition to China, which is pretty much the only one that's doing it. Both the US and the EU have talked about doing this um very very soon. Uh and then of course we could see inventory restocking on behalf of certain utilities and globally speaking inventories are basically kind of stable here. A lot of utilities have been able to flex up on legacy contracts over the past 2 or 3 years and do what they can to buy enrichment. That was the big disrupted market wi with uh with Russia with conversion and enrichment. Now it's kind of time for uranium. That's the general feel I would say of the WNA conference which I attended earlier in the month at um in London. the conversion enrichment markets have stabilized. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll see an end to the conflict in Ukraine and that market will sort of open up again terms of uh the West voluntarily dealing with Russia. Of course, shipments from Russia have not been disrupted once, you know, basically not at all since the war started. But uranium's time to shine. We need to see a lot of uranium procurement to fulfill into these contracts for conversion and enrichment. And that's what we have in front of us. >> Yeah. and the growth for the new nuclear power plants. China is building at a breakneck pace compared to the rest of the world. But the US is not shutting down new uh the older nuclear power plants. And it looks like potentially Europe could restart those plants. Japan probably will be restarting more of their nuclear power plants. I think about 18 months ago, cuz I've been interviewing you now for a couple years, every I don't know 3 to 5 months, didn't you say that there was a 40 million pound or more deficit for supply for the Iranian market? >> That's correct. And it's a little bit less than that this year I would argue but at the same time we've also had disruptions both from Kazadenrom and Kamako that Kamico is going to come in three or four million pounds under from MacArthur River this year cuz Adamrom is saying is reducing their subs soil use agreement levels for 2026. So we're actually expecting somewhere around 160 million maybe a little bit more than that on the supply side and reactor demand for this year is about 195 million. So it's about a 35 plus um shortfall in a structural between supply and demand based on reactor demand but we've already seen you know4 million pounds plus excuse me we've seen more than that it's I believe it's pushing6 million pounds that spud has procured this year in the spot market yellow cake still has some buying to do so that secondary demand is absolutely there this year so we're at the end of the day we'll probably be north of 200 million pounds of actual demand of uranium for 2025 with primary mind supply about 160. We'll see about 10 million 10 to 15 million in secondary supplies primarily from underfeeding from Russia. But that number is dwindling as well. So overall including secondary supply and secondary demand still probably a 30 to 35 million pound shortfall for 2025. >> That's that's absolutely insane. And I don't see electricity demand collapsing. So I know electricity prices are going up. I don't know what the governments are going to do about it exactly, but if they made it easier for a lot of these energy companies, whether it's natural gas pipelines, liqufied natural gas exports, uh, oil and natural gas drilling, nuclear power plants, we need to invest across the board. We're seeing, uh, just more and more announcements, Justin, like almost every day now from a technology company, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, the big tech companies, the utility companies. You're seeing Chinese technology companies. Europe has been behind on this for years. Europe starting to catch up now announcing these data center projects. They just brought online the Stargate AI the first phase. Uh they're announcing additional expansions for that one in Abalene, Texas. And I think they just announced with Open AI another three or four facilities uh data center facilities they're going to be building in other parts of the United States in the Midwest. So, it sounds like there's going to be the potential there for even more electricity demand growth going forward. As long as the capital is spent and we start to see these projects uh under construction. >> Yeah, there's there's no real end in sight to to the growth of that. Um it's it's hard to say. I mean, there's definitely some some kind of macro analysts out there that are believing that the the growth projections for AI data centers will ultimately uh come shorter than than what we're expecting. But with all that said, it doesn't matter sort of at all for nuclear. It's just a d-risking already. So all these plants are being extended as it is based on the growth that's happening right now. How much it grows in the next 5 years is not really going to affect this person, this investment. Um it could affect sentiment. We we've seen some of the nuclear stocks and that'll trickle into uranium stocks sometimes when when one of the tech companies comes back and reduces the amount that they're spending this year even though it's still a shockingly high number. sentiment can kind of shift around a little bit, but as far as we can tell, Jason, it's it's it's going up and to the right and and steeply so. >> Well, I have just in the United States alone, and this is not counting the Stargate facility, but all the other capex budgets for the other big tech companies, that's only five or six companies. They were projecting $300 billion just in 2025. So, that's an insane number. That's not counting spending in Europe. That's not counting spending in Japan. That's not counting spending in China. And there's a lot of announcements from the Chinese technology companies. I think Alibaba just said what they're going to put about 50 billion in commitments. And then we're seeing what announcements from Oracle. We're seeing announcements from the data center construction companies that are are announcing contracts. So it it's wild the the pace that they want to build these data centers out. And it's not in any one place except for Northern Virginia where where I am 20 minutes outside of Washington DC. >> Yeah, it truly is. It's the these numbers are are clearly just unbelievably shocking. Um I mean these companies have more cash than sort of any companies on the planet. So they're they're able to execute on what they want and and that's that's one reason why we think it's obviously positive for the investment is that um we have them in our corner and that that's a really good thing. So eventually we're going to we're going to see more direct collaboration and investment in the nuclear side of things. But the growth is is truly something to see. It's it's remarkable how quickly it's growing. >> Well, also if you listen to interviews with the CEO, so Mark Zuckerberg and the head of Microsoft, head of Google, I mean, they're talking about they need to the technology podcast, which I listen to with Tom Billu and the all-in guys. I mean, they mention >> nuclear power all the time. So, they're like, well, we don't want well, maybe natural gas temporarily. So like the Stargate AI facility with that's in Abalene, Texas. That's right next to the Peran Basin, the Shell the Shale uh oil fields that have a lot of natural gas byproduct, they just put what a new natural gas uh power plant there and move a pipeline there. But most of the other places that they're building, I mean, they're going to it makes more sense to build a nuclear power plant there long-term rather than move natural gas pipelines because a lot of politicians, Justin, are not in favor of building natural gas pipelines. >> Right. Yeah. No, I think um I think it's it's a it's a marriage that makes sense and I think that everybody gets it. It's just a matter of of getting through the bureaucratic red tape, figuring out the the financing risk and and getting these things going. It's going to take some time. So, I I understand why there isn't as much immediate focus because best case scenario, some of these new novel designs are going to be operational, you know, 2033, 34, whatever it might be. by the time they get NRC license l licensing and break ground on building them, it's going to take many, many years. Um, with that said, there's plenty of designs that are already licensed and I don't know why yet. We haven't seen a collaboration with the tech companies and some of these developing companies to build new APs at existing sites, but I think that's coming. Um, Fermy America is one entity that seems to be coming out guns of blazing building a a data center uh campus in um in Texas. And this is going to have multiple gigawatts of of all forms of electricity, including multiple gig g gawatts of nuclear. It's going to be behind the meter as well. So that's something that's moving very very quickly. They might be the first ones to get new AP1000s built in the states. Who knows? Wait and see. But there obviously is a lagged effect from investments now to actually getting first electricity from a new nuke, which is why they have to take kind of a all of the- above strategy for getting electricity now and later. And you said basically that almost no new mining supply other than maybe in Kazakhstan Kazataprom because they can bring what the ISR production online fairly quickly. But a lot of the other open pit mining operations that are hard rock mining, it's going to take them years and they need at least you said $100 a pound uranium and we're not there yet. Yeah, the Namibian projects are going to take higher prices before we see actual um raising raising of financing and and those shovels hitting the ground for those big open pit projects there. Um the underground mines like NextGen's Arrow that's probably going to move towards development within the next 12 to 18 months. We assume NextG is in their last their their two hearings prior to permitting. First one's happening in the next couple of months. The second one's in February. So, best case scenario, shovels hit the ground in the middle of next year. That's going to take multiple years and before pounds are coming out of the ground for for that particular project. Um, you know, like I said, supply is attempting to respond. The CASAs there's we're going to see marginal increases there. We're going to see marginal increases in the United States. We're going to see, you know, hopefully Kamico get things figured out and and we'll see a few more million pounds coming out of Canada. Um, and there's other stateowned stuff happening. Usbekistsan is is ramping up a little bit. It's not looking as positive there as a lot of people were expecting, but it is moving in that direction. New projects, like I said, Inner Mongolia from China, they've kind of kept a lid on that. We have it in our model to produce a few million pounds a year starting in a few years, but we don't really see where the disruptive supply is going to come from, Jason. And that's that's something that should have the attention of utilities. And I think it's it's it's getting there. We can confirm now following WNA that there are multiple large utilities in the US that get it. They are very well covered in their needs and they're also concerned about the future of supply and and attempting to influence other utilities to come to the table. That's the first time we've heard anything like that since I've been following this market. So that's a very good sign. But yes, supply is going to be a problem. And the most important point on this is in order for this market to even come close to balancing in the early 2030s, we're going to have to rely almost entirely on pounds coming out of the ground of projects that haven't even started construction yet. So that's Dennis's Phoenix, NextGen's Arrow, Global Atomics, DSA, uh, and some of the Namibian projects. They're going to have to get built and they're going to have to start doing that very, very soon. And then we're going to have to have the construction of those mines happen without a hitch. So on time, on budget in order for the market to balance for a point in time before the alligator jaws open up again. We see the Kazak projects start to decline. Most of them in the early to mid 2030s. Like I already mentioned, Scar Lake and MacArthur River both done by 2040ish. It's we don't know where that supply is going to come from. high enough prices for long enough, it'll come from somewhere. But we're many, many, many years away from that being the case. >> And the tech company CEOs, I mean, I saw an interview with Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. I mean, he's looked at this problem. He said, "Look, we have to invest more into nuclear power." So, I don't know exactly what type of next generation nuclear power uh plants he's thinking about, but he realizes that like he's looking at the electricity usage, the data centers that Meta's already building, how they're hyperscaling these data centers. What we're already up to 200,000 uh Nvidia Blackwell GPUs per data center now at the Colos Colossus XAI facility in what uh Memphis, Tennessee area. I think there's also one in Mississippi. the Stargate AI one in Abene, Texas has a similar one. They're talking about Elon Musk with uh XAI and others. I've seen Justin talk about scaling this up to 1 million GPUs by the early 2030s at a data center. So, I I don't know if it's feasible. The engineers that the uh when the 200,000 GPU data centers, they said it was impossible. And now that's the new design build. That's the the base. That's the base design build now is that type of data center. That range in the 200,000 250,000 uh GPU range, but they're talking about scaling this up to 1 million GPUs per data center. It's mindboggling. >> Absolutely insane. Yeah, Zuckerberg's up to something. He's he's clearly I think he's outspending everyone in the AI growth. He's and he's and he's hiring everybody in in the industry. Oracle, too. I mean, the Oracle did you see how much debt Oracle borrowed? and Ora's Oracle Oral Oracle's booking what all those um what this cloud computing and data center deals. So Oracle's getting involved in this and they're using a ton of debt. >> It's amazing. Um and um you know Meta is up to something. Zuckerberg's up to something in terms of nuclear. So they put out an RFP for nuclear projects. They basically said we want to build um x amount I can't remember the the number of gigawatts they wanted to build. And they wanted to get responses from multiple nuclear builders and nuclear designs. This was that was due those responses were due in February and we haven't heard anything from Meta since then. >> Elon has said publicly and I think Google just said something similar. Google wants to build a 1 gigawatt data center I think in Wisconsin. They're talking early 2030s and Elon Musk is talking about similar stuff with XAI uh the two facilities he has one in Mississippi and one in Tennessee scaling those up to 1 gawatt and 1 million GPUs each. >> Insane. Yeah. these I can't even mind. >> Yeah, it just doesn't sound feasible. But then again, the 200,000 ones didn't sound feasible and now that seems to be the normal design build that all of them are aiming for, >> right? It's wild. >> And that's what the that's what um 300 400 megawws at those facilities, the Starai and the Colossus one. So those are like that's going to be the new normal. That's way larger than the data centers we have for like Netflix and YouTube for normal streaming and normal internet usage. Yeah, it's uh I mean this trend is absolutely real. I I think AI is going to be so unbelievably disruptive in in ways that most people aren't considering, positive and negative. And obviously I you know there's a lot of there's a lot of doubt um I would say amongst the investing community in terms of uh how this sector is going to grow and and what these companies will be able to to achieve in terms of profitability coming from AI. And I would just say that the people running these companies aren't stupid. And I don't think they're just going to burn, you know, light $300 billion on fire. They are obviously seeing something that most people are not. They are seeing adoption of whatever AI um elements they have currently on offer. U probably at rates that we can't even understand. And I think that they have a vision for how to utilize AI in the data center capacity that they're building right now for the future. So I wouldn't I wouldn't doubt these people. I wouldn't bet against them. And clearly they are seeing the way that the wind is blowing. And I I honestly think I think AI is is is potentially going to be bigger than the internet in terms of its uh its disruption of how civil so society operates. And I think that it's going to be embedded in absolutely everything technology-wise in a very very short period of time. It's certainly going to use a lot more electricity than the regular internet because I think like whether you're using a regular chat GPT search on your phone, the backend there, all the servers that um open AAI for chat GPT needs are insane. So I think like the average search or query or prompt on chat GPT, it uses a lot more electricity than a regular standard Google search or one of the other internet internet browsers. And that's not even talking about the new types of artificial intelligence software, Justin. The new ones are the video. I mean, they're releasing like fully artificial intelligence, like digital made. It's not based on real content. Like, they just released a uh 2026 World Cup commercial that they made for 2 minutes long with Shakira in it. I don't know if you saw it, but that was fully a it was fully AI made and it probably cost like a fraction of the price to hire like a Hollywood director and actors and it's like in full 8K, but it it probably required an enormous amount of time and electricity. >> Crazy. I did not see that. That's Yeah, it's it's going to be so disruptive. Uh it it's and it's a it's a trend that isn't going away. >> Well, what they're what they're doing now, uh 50 Cent released one of these. He took one of his old songs uh from his hit album, I think in 2003, and he added it to another genre. So, he's been remixing, he's been playing around with the artificial intelligence video software, and remixing old songs with different types of genres. So they just did one with uh Snoop Dogg too. I just saw out that he mixed in uh like one of his old songs with a different type of music genre. So they've been playing around with that. So and you know I think Hollywood with video games, animation, CGI for movies, I think like that's where it's headed. There's not going to be as many human beings employed. It's all going to be this artificial intelligence software and I don't think that trend is going to stop. >> Yeah, I agree with you. >> Well, it's good for electricity usage demand growth. So if you're investing into what? natural gas and and nuclear power. I mean, I as long as this trend continues, I I don't see the demand collapsing. >> Yeah, 100%. That that's one thing that's very unique about uranium is the demand is is is relatively stable and relatively easy to model. Um so it it it's not something that can be um flipped. It can't be like a like a flip of a switch like you'll see with OPEC um design deciding just on a whim to to produce more or produce less or or the Chinese in uh increasing or decreasing lithium supply as they wish. It's one of those markets that can't really be influenced in that way. So um the electricity demand is is extremely derisking to the existing fleet globally and and therefore this investment for sure. Well, I had someone compare the total electricity usage of a next generation data center that's being propose proposed to an aluminum smelter that uses around 1 gawatt of electricity and power to aluminum smelt. But that's super sensitive. I mean, they could shut that down. The aluminum prices fall, the energy costs go up. That's very marginal with aluminum smelter. I mean, once these data centers are built, >> you don't want your data loss. They're not going to shut down the data center. Once these data centers are built, they want it running 24/7 365 cuz people are going to have their businesses online on running the software online. It's not going to be uh as marginal and easy to shut down. Why would you want to shut it down then and risk all your data um going away? Yeah, that that's my understanding as well, Jason, is once once these are operational um of any any hiccup in electricity availability is extremely detrimental um to the data center and how these how these uh chips function. So, yeah, you're 100% right. Needs to be base load, needs to be always on. >> And the cooling systems, the cooling systems that are required to cool down the GPU chips. So, I mean, yeah, you can put solar panels on the data center. Yeah, you maybe you can put if you're in Texas like Abalene out there in the middle of nowhere, you can put some wood turbines, but they can't be your base load. So, you have to have natural gas. You have to have nuclear power. You have to have reliable base load. Maybe if you want to save a little bit of money, you can run solar and wind during the day if it's if the weather's not too bad, but you have to have the base load there because if the data is lost, I mean, you're going to get sued. >> Yep. 100%. >> Yeah. You're going to put someone out of business. There's going to be angry people. Well, you're going to get sued, >> right? >> Well, I I want to thank you so much for your time today, Justin. It just sounds like this is a long-term trend here. So, people are are looking at the share price. If you go and look up a chart of the Camo stock or the uranium uranium miners ETF, it's up enormously over the last five or six years. Some people might think the trend is over. From what you've said over the last 30 35 40 minutes, it sounds like actually the trend is really just starting because this new technology here, it's brought on potentially an enormous amount of new growth that the market was just not anticipating. >> Yeah, it it definitely hasn't hurt us. It's it's a significant tailwind for for this investment. And you know, one element of of this investment thesis from, you know, from six, seven years ago that is still not panned out, which must pan out is a a return of global utilities to the long-term contracting market, you know, in in much much higher volumes in volumes approaching replacement rates and that we haven't seen that yet. And that's what we still have in front of us. So in the meantime, we're seeing the SPA physical uranium trust and Yellow Cake and some other financial entities sort of corner the spot market and a lot of institutional interest has been coming into the into the equities and then into spot over the past few months. And that's that's great to see and it's it's it's certainly better than what we experienced in the first four months of the year, which was a a wicked sell-off and the worst sentiment I've seen since, you know, 2018 probably. um even worse than COVID I would say that was just a few short months ago. It's been a great recovery from those lows but the real moves in the price of uranium and the real moves on behalf of utilities we still have not seen that is still in front of us and I think we have a nice long runway here Jason we're going to have some exciting highs and some gut-wrenching lows along the way but you know that's that's how it goes in this volatile sector and I'm I'm here for it. Wait, so you're saying that like Dominion Energy, the utility company, Duke Energy, Constellation, they haven't locked in long-term uranium supply for their nuclear power plants yet that they've been delaying this. >> Um, they have to some extent. The US utilities are decently covered for the near term, right? So, you're going out two 2 and 1/2 years. On average, the utilities are decently well covered. Um, the big utilities in the US are better covered than the small ones. So there's a number of smaller utilities that are operating one or two nuclear power plants. The constellations, the Dukes, the Vistas, the Dominions, they're all better covered and they're amongst those, you know, I don't want to say smarter utilities, but they have fuel buyers that there's there's a few fuel buyers u primarily in the US, but you know, abroad there's a couple as well that are actually more aligned with let's say the investors. That is to say um either they have their own model of supply and demand and have acted on that model uh in expectation of increasing prices by making sure that they have covered themselves well enough for for a little bit longer out on the curve. But there's uh you know generally speaking utilities in the US despite how robust the growth is of their business and and the increasing prices of electricity and the power purchase agreements and life extensions of their fleet they're not going to cover their their fleet for 20 years. You know the market the uranium market goes up and down and they get you know renewed budgets on an annual basis. So they'll come in they'll cover off what they need to cover off the prices are going to do what they do. So, as as shocking as that is, and as obvious to anybody who's actually spent the time on modeling the sector out, that we've got a we've got a supply problem and highly likely to see much much higher uranium prices in the next few years. Plus, utilities don't really don't really go out and cover beyond a few years to speak very generally. Um, with the exception of the Chinese. So, yes, much much more procurement. In fact, the numbers coming from the relatively conservative UXC is that there's there's more there's uh what is it? Uh two around 2 billion pounds of uncovered utility requirements out to 2040. And there's and we're looking at, you know, 3 or 400 million uncovered just out to 2030. So, there's still a lot of uranium that has to be procured from utilities. We still have not seen that yet. >> Uh it's shocking that they haven't locked that up yet. I you would think that they would have done that over the last year or two because I think you've talked about in past interviews that the uranium price it wasn't that much of their input cost. It would have made more sense just to lock up some of the supply, make sure they have it secured rather than risk a couple years from now they're not being supply available or the Chinese have locked up the supply. But the data set con center construction. I mean like people see the capital expenditures. They're seeing um the people on business television talk about the AI bubble and it's over really a lot of the construction Justin. It's just starting. Yes. They just finished the first phase of the Stargate AI facility. Yes. Uh Elon Musk has two very large um Colossus AI data center facilities. Those are the only two ones that are actually online. The companies have actually spent a bunch of money, many, many billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars each. And those facilities are still under construction. They're going to be coming online in the next couple years. And we're just seeing the headlines that they're announcing more. I think like uh Stargate projects. There's another three or four more, maybe five that were announced all over the Midwest in the United States. They're going to build one, I think, in the United Arab Emirates. Russia was talking about one since they have cheap natural gas that they want a massive new data center. So anywhere with cheap natural gas or can accelerate nuclear power plant growth, if they have the capital, it makes sense that they want to have a data center facility there supplied with cheap energy for the new technologies that are going to be coming online. >> Yep, you're absolutely right. And and speaking of the UAE, you know, their their building of the four reactor plant at Baraka was one of the one of the more recent success stories outside of China for new nuclear and and they're looking at building multiple gigawatts more of nuclear and part of the reason is is an expansion of their of their data center and AI growth. So yeah, it's happening. It's absolutely happening. Jason, >> well, please tell my listeners more about the Uranium Insider newsletter because you cover this better than anyone. This is this is all you do, right? >> Yeah, 100%. We're 100% focused on the uranium market and and we focus a lot of our energy on the physical market. So, um, keeping keeping tabs on what is happening in both the spot market and the long-term market and, uh, in distilling that down to what you need to know as an investor because it can be a very complicated and complex market despite the fact that, uh, you know, demand from utilities is is relatively stable. And once you have the spreadsheets for all the reactors globally, then you kind of can can pretty easily model that out, which we have, which we do. We have our own internal models that inform our investing decisions, but we have uh an in-depth monthly newsletter that's pushing 40 to 50 pages. We do a monthly membersonly webinar. I do weekly video updates for our membership. And we put out a daily communication that tracks the sput ETF flows and highlights the the main uh news stories for that day. We have a focus list portfolio that's more of a fundamental buy and hold. We also have a trading portfolio we call our dynamic model portfolio. we launched back in February which is up 62% year to date. Um significantly outperforming URMM. So um yeah, it's this is all we do. We live, eat, and breathe uranium and and the uranium market and um like I said, we've been doing this for many, many years. We've got a great network and a really good team built up and we see a really strong runway ahead of us for the for multiple years. >> Yeah, I agree. Congratulations on your success. I I know when you launched the newsletter, you were wondering exactly the timing, how long it would take, but it's finally paid off. And I do not think the nuclear power and uranium run is over. I I honestly think it's fairly early on in the stage. Maybe if there wasn't this uh next generation data centers and all the artificial intelligence software technology, if there wasn't that opportunity for the growth, there wouldn't be as much future growth. But I I think the stuff I'm seeing there was an article for listeners out there on futurism which is a technology uh research website and they were talking about the new artificial intelligence video software which is what a lot of the Hollywood people, the animation people, the video game people, the people on social media with memes and commercials are playing around with. And they were talking about the energy usage just to make like a really good couple minute video. And they were saying like it's not linear. They're saying to go from like a uh a two-minute video up to like a 10-minute video, it's almost an exponential increase in energy and electricity usage to make these amazing things uh that we're seeing online right now. >> Wow. Yeah, that's that's truly astonishing. It's it's an unbelievable trend and we're definitely here for
Justin Huhn: Electricity Demand Growth For Decades With AI? Uranium Supply Deficits Until $100/lb?
Summary
Transcript
Hi everyone, this is Jason Ber of Wall Street for Main Street. Welcome back for another Wall Street for Main Street podcast interview. We're recording this interview on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025. The Kamico shares, which is one of the top uranium producers, they hit $85 a share, I think in the last day or two, just up enormously over the last four or five years. Today's special guest is a returning guest. He was covering uranium and uranium mining companies during the the heights of the bare market. He launched his newsletter, the uranium insider. I mean there was like just nasty trolling uh from lots of people there like why are you gonna say anything nice about uranium and kamo kazataprom nuclear power nuclear power is dead because of Fukushima Germany shutting down their nuclear power plants the United Kingdom shutting them all down and now here we are what Justin like four or five years later and things seem very very different compared to the heights of the bare market >> it's definitely been a wild swing in in sentiment around nuclear since I first started looking at the sector which was you know 2017 2018 and we launched the newsletter in 2019 and had at that point still a little bit of let's call it contrarian optimism uh from the investing side of things but the picture for the growth of nuclear wasn't extremely robust like it is now. It was still, I believe, at that time an expected 1 to 2% compound annual growth. And you know, the the sector was so hated back then that it was a surprise to anybody who'd looked into it for a moment to see that it actually still was somewhat slightly growing. But, you know, fast forward to today and we're expecting a 4 to 6% compound annual growth rate for nuclear going out to 2040 and beyond. and the active operating nuclear fleet of the world with very few exceptions has been extremely derisked by the growth in electricity demand. That's not happening absolutely everywhere but in most developed countries and developing countries electricity demand is just going you know up and to the right in a way that we haven't seen in the west in in 20 to 25 years. So the US >> especially the US and China because it seems like they're in a what a technology arms race with five or six key technologies. A lot of it's based on artificial intelligence software data centers but then that's also going to be applying to future technologies that integrate those things with like humanoid robots and drones and quantum computing. So the uh electricity demand growth, we're seeing this right now here in the US like the consumer price index. I think the fastest growing thing in the consumer price index is electricity prices and electricity demand right now here in the US. >> Wow. That's that's not not shocking whatsoever. Um electricity growth uh the demand growth is is truly remarkable right now. And like you said, a lot of that's being driven by not only AI but actual, you know, data centers that are simply storing information that both of those elements are growing extremely fast. And that's in addition to you know the growth of in adoption of electric vehicles which that is slowing down a bit but still growing you know electrifying everything electrifying heat electrifying cooking some of the big cities have been mandating this over the last years. So a growth across the board in demand for electricity has been very very d-risking to this particular investment and to you know to any sort of operational electricity producing assets in in in the states here even coal plants are are being derisked somewhat. they're not being shut down as aggressively as in past years. And it's it's very good. I don't I still don't know whether or not the United States is going to get uh get over the line in terms of building new large nuclear reactors. I believe that we will, but we're not modeling for that. And actually, for this investing thesis, we don't need it. The entire fleet in the US is going to be life extended, and practically every reactor has already received an additional 20-year life extension beyond that initial 40-year license. The only exception is Diablo Canyon, California, which has received the license to extend from the NRC, but still working through the bureaucratic channels to get that extended. I believe they will have to extend that one. Looks looks very good for nuclear right now, Jason, across the board. >> Now, just uh and again, this is Justin Yun of Uranium Insider. I was, you know, talking about how we launched the newsletter. Pretty good timing at the heights of the bare market and some of his accomplishments with Kamico stock, which is up over, I think, 10x. I was t writing about extensive articles about Kamico and about them in the uranium miners in in uh in the pandemic 2020 2022. Now, now Justin, in terms of like the uh nuclear power plants in the United States, we've I'm sure my listeners have seen the headlines from a lot of the technology companies, pretty much all of them. So, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, uh pretty much all of them, uh with Stargate AI project, are they able to make these large investments for billions of dollars and get like extensions to where like at the nuclear power plants to where the the existing nuclear power plant, they have permits to expand, say add more cones. Are they able to do that or or is that not allowed right now? >> So, a lot of a lot of the current operating nuclear reactors in the United States, the location where they're where they're operating are already licensed to build further units of of any licensed design. And so, so that's probably the most likely locations where if we see new reactors, whether they're small or large, in the United States, will be at existing nuclear power plant sites. and uh and many of these utilities for their you know in in conjunction with applying for and or receiving license extensions from the NRC a lot of utilities have signed power purchase agreements and and many of these have been with with the big tech companies that you know obviously the the one that's you know most in most people's purview is the is the three-mile island restart and the 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft but there's been a few others um The Palisades, for example, the Palisades restart also has been derisked with with uh multi-deade power purchase agreements, not with big tech companies, but with with the power uh distributors in Michigan. So, yeah, um it is possible absolutely it's not necessarily a small ask to to build an additional reactor at an existing site. That's still a costly uh costly expense and still a lot of utilities are a little bit gunshy due to the cost overruns and time overruns that Vogle experienced in Georgia. But they're all moving in that direction. They most of the utilities in the US do want to build new nuclear. Most of them want that to be small. Not because they couldn't use more electricity, but simply they believe that, you know, in a higher interest rate environment that it's if you can get anything done faster, you derisk the the financing for that project. But almost all of them do not want to build first of a kind. So we're seeing first of a kind start to be built with Terapowers Natrium. X Energy's XC100 is in early stages. The BWX uh excuse me, the Gi Hitachi BWRx300, the first of a kind is being built at Darlington in Ontario. Once we get these first ones built and we can get a better idea around budgeting, then I think we're going to see much more adoption and further units being um first construction in the US. >> Well, those are pilot plants, right? So, those aren't able they're not going to be able to handle the electricity demands for say a small city or even like a metro area. Well, in this case, the NRAM is going to be the full size. The I off the top of my head, 315 megawatts, if I recall correctly, and the BWRX300 is going to be a full size. Now, there's a number of quote unquote advanced reactors that are pilot projects that are being constructed at the Idaho National Labs. So, um in that case, you're correct. But in these demonstration projects and the first of a kind with the with Gi Hitachi's um unit, those are full-sized as far as their designs are concerned. >> Yeah. And the the hot stock everyone's talking about what is Ollo and Ollo's pre-revenue. They haven't even built a pipeline yet. So they have no cash flow. So those shares have just gone like as a speculation. Congratulations to the listeners who did that. But there's like insane insider selling. I think one of the insiders sold like 30 or 40% of his stock recently. >> Yeah. And you know I I would probably as well if I was an insider um at the company it just it's become a meme stock. You know it moved up on a thematic with everything. nuclear kind of had a really solid last 12 months or so, but Oaklo, a couple of other stocks like Centress have have sort of become memes where, you know, you can go ahead and search that ticker on Reddit or or on Twitter and what you'll find is just a number of these trading groups that are trying to pump it and um Wall Street Bet style moves. But with all of that said, I mean, Oak is, you know, they're moving and shaking. they're they're in uh the investor's purview and and good for them and and hopefully you know the way that Oklahoma has moved that stock has moved and the valuation it's achieved will bring more attention to the space will bring more capital to to other uh nuclear projects that are upcoming. So that's in that way it's positive from a valuation standpoint doesn't make a whole lot of sense at least not right now. Are you seeing the big tech companies, are they navigating through the political red tape, the rules, regulations that used to take many years and tens of mill millions of dollars? Are they able with their lobbying and their capital and their political contacts with in both political parties in Congress to actually navigate through and maybe get this process accelerated to where they can uh maybe partner with one of these electrical utility companies. They then go to someone in the Trump administration or the Department of Energy or Congress. They have congressional people backing them and they say, "Guess what? We're gonna build like a new Stargate AI um because they built the one in Abalene, Texas, but that one has natural gas, but they're talking about I think three or four more in the United States of 300 megawws, potentially up to 1 gawatt with like insane amounts of Nvidia Blackwell chips. Are they going to be able to navigate through this process and and eliminate a lot of the red tape and start uh building nuclear power plants faster? >> That's a really good question. Um, unfortunately, unless the reactor is built on a Department of Defense site, they can't really circumn the the NRC. But on the positive side, since Trump's executive orders earlier this year, the NRC is absolutely accelerating the timelines for all of their processes. So, that is looking very positive. The tech companies are getting more directly involved in the nuclear sector. I'll give you a couple of examples. Um, Amazon intends to build 12 XC 100 units in the state of Washington. That's where the the demonstration first demonstration project is is set to be built. Now, those units are still many years away. This is of a this is still a novel design in terms of it being advanced nuclear high temperature gas reactor. Um, Microsoft, however, they had a representative at the WNA and there is a rep from Microsoft that is now on on the board at the World Nuclear Association and both Microsoft and Amazon have recently subscribed to UXC's work. So, they're actually actively looking at the fuel cycle. These two big tech companies and that's something that should have utilities a little bit concerned. Um, it doesn't at this point, but it should. So, the involvement is getting more direct. We know they're going to need the power. I know that there's obviously a very urgent need for more power that nuclear is not going to be able to solve, but it does appear that the tech companies in addition to the federal government is thinking a little bit more long-term in addition to the urgency. So, of course, if you're Microsoft, if you're Amazon, um if you're any of these big tech companies that wants to build data centers and power them with stable, clean base load and you want to have a reasonable market share, some sort of dominance in this sector and you're out towards the end of the decade, you're going to want to build nuclear right now so that you can have that operational in the mid 2030s for 80 or 100 years. So, it does seem to be moving in that direction. And like I said, this is I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but it's not necessary for the you know, uranium prices going higher thesis, which is really the core of the investment thesis in the uranium mining stocks and the space in general. Um, but from a from a general perspective, the growth of nuclear and wanting to see this sector um grow and thrive, we are moving in the right direction in that as far as that goes. >> Well, a lot of the growth seems to be from China. Can you talk about maybe the difference between how quickly and efficiently a nuclear power plant can be built in China and how many on average are the Chinese building per year? They China is building nuclear reactors right now. Um well to to speak generally about large lightwater boiling water reactors. They're building them in less than 6 years and these are large you know gawatt plus size reactors. Um they build them as as fast as about 5 years. Most of them are coming in under six years and on average under six years. Um, currently they are on pace they're they're almost on pace to hit 150 gawatts by 2035 and I believe right now they have 57 or 58 gawatts currently operational. So it's about 10 per year but in recent in the only in the last couple of years we've seen them on pace with construction starts to hit that in years prior is a few a few less. So five or six per year. So, conservatively, they're building five to six per year, uh, potentially up to eight or nine per year, and and it does appear based on what they're actually doing that they intend to hit that goal. Yeah, they're just their electricity usage demand growth is is exponential as well. It's uh the US is is starting to finally grow again for electricity demand usage but China has been growing at a break neck pace for a long time especially a lot of their cities over the last uh 5 to 7 years have been immensely modernized the tier 2 tier three cities a lot of them are a lot cleaner they've been installing a lot of solar panels and wind turbines and on top of that they've been uh building the nuclear power plants as well so they've just been investing across the board in a lot of different energy >> yeah they're they're building absolutely every kind every type of of electricity generation and um they're they're thinking in decades. They're absolutely thinking in decades. The the nuclear growth doesn't seem to be slowing down. Um I connected recently with a representative from one of the Chinese mining companies and we were talking about the Chinese inventory and the growth of the Chinese appetite for for purchasing involved getting involvement in in projects, purchasing projects and contracting for more uranium. and he basically said, "Yeah, that's not going to slow down." The the the uranium once it's on Chinese soil, it doesn't leave. So the Chinese do sell a very very small amount of enrichment. They sell that to the United States. They sell it to Europe. But our understanding is that seems to be roughly in line with the amount that they buy from Russia. So China's own domestic conversion, enrichment, fabrication, that all basically stays um on Chinese soil. It doesn't leave. And they have they have relatively large inventories, you know, pushing 600 million pounds across the fuel cycle. That's U308, UF6, EUP. That also includes military stockpiles or in that included in that number, which um it's hard to say to delineate how much of that 600 plus million is for military use. But this is strategic sovereign inventory. They don't sell this. They couldn't care less about the price of uranium. So, a lot of people think that the Chinese are actively trying to manipulate the price of uranium. And yes, the nuclear operators would prefer lower prices, but the nuclear the uranium mining companies would prefer higher prices. They're both state-owned. Um, so they don't necessarily have aligned in uh incentives there. But the Chinese 100% do not sell their inventories into the market. They have never, they will never. So, the trading that they do is minimal in volume relative to global, you know, overall annual volumes being traded. and the enrichment that they sell usually is roughly in line with what they are buying from Russia. So, it's something that um I know a few people have been concerned with over the years, but it's not going to be able to stop what we see coming in terms of overall utility demand and insufficient supply in the uranium side of things. >> I actually haven't heard that conspiracy theory that the Chinese were trying to manipulate the uranium price. I mean, I've heard the gold and silver prices that they were manipulating that or some other commodity prices. I mean, they've stopped buying soybeans and wheat from American farmers, but not the not the uranium one. So, does China buy where where do they buy their uranium supply from? You mentioned Russia. Are are they buying directly from say uh uranium miners in Africa or are they buying mostly from Russia? Where where is China buying their supply from for their nuclear power plants? >> The bulk of the contracting that has taken place on behalf of Chinese utilities for uranium procurement has uh taken place in Kazakhstan. So, in directly from Kazadam. Now they're also the second largest JV partner with Kazadam Prom. So they have JV projects in Kazakhstan in addition to buying from Kazadrom directly. So that's the bulk of it. They have a very large mine in Namibia called the Husab mine. It produces 156 million pounds a year. A gigantic open pit mine. All of that uranium goes straight to China. Those are the big ones. They have uh they have an offtake from Langer Heinrich also in Namibia Paladins project. They own a small share of um of Patterson Lake in Canada that is not producing uranium and isn't expected to produce uranium necessarily this cycle. Most of their procurement comes from Kazakhstan. And so they're actively trying to develop new uh new projects in China domestically in Inner Mongolia. They um they're looking at some of the idle projects in Nishair as well. Um, so the Azelik project which was in development in the last decade and then halted because of uh low too low of prices. They're looking at that. How much they'll get, how soon out of that, nobody really knows. So China generally speaking will continue to be net buyers uh as far as we can see out into the future. And if you consider 150 gawatt um by by 2035, you know, that's going to be 7580 million pounds per year consumed only by China in only 10 years. So that 600 million stock pile pound stockpile starts to look really really small when you consider that they're they're shooting for 150 gawatt. And by the way, as far as we can tell, they they aim to continue that trend and reach 200 gawatt by 2040, which is actually their stated goal as well. So huge consumption coming out of China and not a lot of domestic production. So we expect them to stay relatively active both in procurement and in project development globally. So I want to drill down a little bit more in Kamico because the share price is up enormously over the last five or six years. I mean, I remember during the heights of the bare market, I was getting just nasty social media messages, messages from paying customers, from patrons. Why do you say anything nice about Kamico? This was during the heights of the bare market when it was stuck between $8 and $15 a share. I don't They had been shutting down the uranium mines. They're basically running the company like a hedge fund where I think they were going into the spot market and then buying the uranium for cheap like a hedge fund and then reselling it to the utility companies at a long-term contract price. Do you think Kamako can uh maintain steady profitability now? Uh is it a profitable operational business or is this uh share price just uh based on what the uranium demand and the data centers? >> So a lot of what's happened the share price has has come from ETF flows and fund just literally a flow of funds and honestly that's what moves this sector more than anything is is swings in sentiment swings in the flow of funds. we start to see the ETFs grow their outstanding share count rather than contract it like we saw in the first half of the year and that really moves especially the large cap large caps the most. So um so when you have you know stocks like Centric or El just blowing out to the upside as meme stocks that pulls on URA which pulls on everything else. So you know everything is kind of connected. With all of that said, Kamako has sort of become more of a a one-stop shop for for all things uranium and nuclear. So, if you want to play the story with one stock, that's kind of the stock to go to. Um, you could you could go back a couple of years and you would see a lot of criticism over their contract book and how they, you know, arguably signed a lot of contracts at too low of prices going back into the earlier part of the decade, which which is generally true. Now, that has a lagged effect. You know, as the years go on, those old contracts roll off and the significantly higher price that contracts that are well into the money in terms of profitability for the company start to start to be realized. And that's what we're we're going to see in the coming years. Now, you have to look at what sort of cash flow is the company going to be seeing with each large uh AP-1000 that Westinghouse is going to be building that Kamo has a 49% share of. So Kamako is that they've got um conversion at Port Hope, which nobody gives them any credit for, but conversion has been a very very high priced uh part of their business over the past couple of years since the disruption in Russia. And with all of that said, then they have uh Westinghouse has fuel fabrication as well. Westinghouse also has the Springfield's conversion facility in the UK, which looks like it will likely be at some point refurbished and restarted. So soup to nuts all they all they're lacking is enrichment but of course they have a minority share in global laser enrichment they are highly likely to increase that stake in uh GLE that they have a joint JV partner with sillex and as soon as uh Sillex or GLE gets some sort of funding from the DOE which I believe is going to happen and could happen any day now uh we think that Kamico will increase their position size I believe it's the 70% that they're allowed to under that agreement so it's kind of a one-stop shop for all things nuclear and uranium. On the uranium side of things, they're having a bit of trouble with uh MacArthur River. Currently, our understanding is that they're moving into a new zone of mining in that deposit. This zone uh appears to have a higher clay content, a little bit more difficulty in in establishing the freeze walls. This is basically this is a underground mine, very high-grade ore that pretty much exists in in an aquifer. So they have to freeze the area around the deposit that's going to be mined. Extremely complicated, extremely expensive, and the ore is so high-grade and so rich, and there's so much of it that it's well worth it and profitable for the company. But they're they're having some issues there. And we don't know exactly when that's going to be back up and running to full capacity, but they we also know that their pipeline of projects is somewhat diminishing as far as tier one operational currently. So, Cigar Lake is also moving into phase two, which our understanding is it's a little bit a little bit more difficult mining, a little bit more high-cost mining, but they'll be able to do it. That's done in 2035. Cigar Lake is over. MacArthur River is over in 2042 or three. And if they ramp that to 24 million pounds, which they probably will at some point, that'll be done in 2040. So, everybody's wondering like, what is Kamico doing here? What are they going to do? Do they have enough tier 2 just with Rabbit Lake and a couple of other large undeveloped projects in the Aabaska? Some some tier 2 ISR stuff in the United States. Are they going to go after nextG/ Arrow? Uh that's the thing that everybody wants to know. So it's a it's a wonderful stock to own and hold to play this whole cycle, both the nuclear side and the uranium side. Not really sure what their strategy is for uranium going forward. So we'll have to see how this plays out. Now, the Trump administration has talked about what strategic metal stockpiles and they've done that for rare earth elements or at least they're trying to do it for rare earth elements with funding and fasttracking that. Are they talking about that already for say like uranium enrichment? Because I think the US has plenty of uranium supply to mine the uranium, but it seems like the US over the last like couple decades, they've really been importing a lot of enriched uranium from Russia and elsewhere. Do you think that the US should fasttrack like a new uranium enrichment facility here in the United States and that would solve a lot of the problems for the uh nuclear power plants? >> Yeah, I think that enrichment is moving in the right direction already. So there there and there is funding that we're expecting to hear announcements literally any day now in terms of I think there's an additional couple of billion that's available that is probably going to be dispersed across centric and BWXT and GLE and possibly general matter that which has already received some funding. So it's already kind of moving in that direction. Enrichment enrichment isn't as big of a bottleneck that everybody believes is. Um, is there insufficient enrichment domestically to satisfy the US utilities? Yes, specifically if you're talking about US-owned. So, Urano has operations here in New Mexico, but it's not owned by by the US. It's owned by a conglomerate of European countries, um, European companies, I should say. So, we do need more enrichment domestically, but it's not a huge bottleneck in the fuel cycle. It's just a highlighted point because about 25% of the enriched uranium needs of the US fleet is bought from Russia. And so that that's the main reason it's really in in the crosshairs and in the spotlight of the Trump admin. The Trump admin has talked recently about reestablishing a strategic uranium stockpile and I think that would be a very very intelligent thing for the admin to do. It does look like that is highly likely to happen. We're going to have to see how the um how the additional section 232 petition uh in investigation works out and what they'll recommend. It's probably not going to be nothing. So that will most likely be a certain amount of funding annually for a certain amount of years of purchasing uranium from um from domestic miners here in the states and that's something we have to look forward to. But yes, the fuel chain needs to be supported in the states. But I think generally speaking, if we see these sustained high prices in conversion enrichment and eventually see higher prices in uranium that sustains for a while, the problem will generally solve itself in my in my opinion. Well, we're at a long-term contract price right now for utilities around $81 according to the Chemico website and the spot market is around $75 a pound. Are those uh a a uh uranium price where a uranium miner uh can go get funding saying look the uranium our stock is up a lot, the contract price is reasonable, the utility company, it's not going to hurt their profit margins where they can actually go get funding and restart a uranium mine in the next couple years. So, uh, I mean the the short answer is yes and no. So, right now we've seen a little bit of supply respond. We're seeing efforts for more supply to respond. Uh, we're seeing a lot of effort on behalf of the state-owned entities to source as much uranium as they possibly can. The French, the Chinese, the Russians, they're doing what they can to get more supply online, sort of anywhere that they can. In terms of the publicly traded market and especially in the west, we're still not at prices where some of the larger projects and the marginal cost projects are have yet to make the decision to develop. And you know, the best highlight you can give is is in Namibia. So Deep Yellow and Bannerman and Forsis, these are large open pit projects and none of them are actually moving towards direct development to eventually get into production. So, and the long-term price moved up a couple of dollars for UXC. So, and it stayed the same for Trade Tech. So, it's now 82. However, the UXC 3ear Ford and 5year Ford jumped up by $5 and $3 uh per pound respectively for the month of September. So, 3year Ford is 90 bucks. 5-year Ford is 98. And that really tells you where the price is going for uranium. I think once we're above 100 and it stays there for a while, we're going to see more supply respond. But we have we've already modeled out the prospective minds with an assumption of prices rising. We don't see the market balancing anytime soon, Jason. So, it's going to be very interesting to see how quickly the price moves. Um, how stable it gets there. $100 for the term market and it stays there for a while. We'll see more supply respond, but we don't know what will happen on the spot price front and most of the risks barring let's say a nuclear incident, a nuclear accident. let's say or a drastic change in demand for some other reason. I don't even know what that could possibly be. We expect most of the disruptions to be sort of right tail risks here. We could see further financialization of the sector. We could see more countries establishing strategic sovereign stock piles in addition to China, which is pretty much the only one that's doing it. Both the US and the EU have talked about doing this um very very soon. Uh and then of course we could see inventory restocking on behalf of certain utilities and globally speaking inventories are basically kind of stable here. A lot of utilities have been able to flex up on legacy contracts over the past 2 or 3 years and do what they can to buy enrichment. That was the big disrupted market wi with uh with Russia with conversion and enrichment. Now it's kind of time for uranium. That's the general feel I would say of the WNA conference which I attended earlier in the month at um in London. the conversion enrichment markets have stabilized. Hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll see an end to the conflict in Ukraine and that market will sort of open up again terms of uh the West voluntarily dealing with Russia. Of course, shipments from Russia have not been disrupted once, you know, basically not at all since the war started. But uranium's time to shine. We need to see a lot of uranium procurement to fulfill into these contracts for conversion and enrichment. And that's what we have in front of us. >> Yeah. and the growth for the new nuclear power plants. China is building at a breakneck pace compared to the rest of the world. But the US is not shutting down new uh the older nuclear power plants. And it looks like potentially Europe could restart those plants. Japan probably will be restarting more of their nuclear power plants. I think about 18 months ago, cuz I've been interviewing you now for a couple years, every I don't know 3 to 5 months, didn't you say that there was a 40 million pound or more deficit for supply for the Iranian market? >> That's correct. And it's a little bit less than that this year I would argue but at the same time we've also had disruptions both from Kazadenrom and Kamako that Kamico is going to come in three or four million pounds under from MacArthur River this year cuz Adamrom is saying is reducing their subs soil use agreement levels for 2026. So we're actually expecting somewhere around 160 million maybe a little bit more than that on the supply side and reactor demand for this year is about 195 million. So it's about a 35 plus um shortfall in a structural between supply and demand based on reactor demand but we've already seen you know4 million pounds plus excuse me we've seen more than that it's I believe it's pushing6 million pounds that spud has procured this year in the spot market yellow cake still has some buying to do so that secondary demand is absolutely there this year so we're at the end of the day we'll probably be north of 200 million pounds of actual demand of uranium for 2025 with primary mind supply about 160. We'll see about 10 million 10 to 15 million in secondary supplies primarily from underfeeding from Russia. But that number is dwindling as well. So overall including secondary supply and secondary demand still probably a 30 to 35 million pound shortfall for 2025. >> That's that's absolutely insane. And I don't see electricity demand collapsing. So I know electricity prices are going up. I don't know what the governments are going to do about it exactly, but if they made it easier for a lot of these energy companies, whether it's natural gas pipelines, liqufied natural gas exports, uh, oil and natural gas drilling, nuclear power plants, we need to invest across the board. We're seeing, uh, just more and more announcements, Justin, like almost every day now from a technology company, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, the big tech companies, the utility companies. You're seeing Chinese technology companies. Europe has been behind on this for years. Europe starting to catch up now announcing these data center projects. They just brought online the Stargate AI the first phase. Uh they're announcing additional expansions for that one in Abalene, Texas. And I think they just announced with Open AI another three or four facilities uh data center facilities they're going to be building in other parts of the United States in the Midwest. So, it sounds like there's going to be the potential there for even more electricity demand growth going forward. As long as the capital is spent and we start to see these projects uh under construction. >> Yeah, there's there's no real end in sight to to the growth of that. Um it's it's hard to say. I mean, there's definitely some some kind of macro analysts out there that are believing that the the growth projections for AI data centers will ultimately uh come shorter than than what we're expecting. But with all that said, it doesn't matter sort of at all for nuclear. It's just a d-risking already. So all these plants are being extended as it is based on the growth that's happening right now. How much it grows in the next 5 years is not really going to affect this person, this investment. Um it could affect sentiment. We we've seen some of the nuclear stocks and that'll trickle into uranium stocks sometimes when when one of the tech companies comes back and reduces the amount that they're spending this year even though it's still a shockingly high number. sentiment can kind of shift around a little bit, but as far as we can tell, Jason, it's it's it's going up and to the right and and steeply so. >> Well, I have just in the United States alone, and this is not counting the Stargate facility, but all the other capex budgets for the other big tech companies, that's only five or six companies. They were projecting $300 billion just in 2025. So, that's an insane number. That's not counting spending in Europe. That's not counting spending in Japan. That's not counting spending in China. And there's a lot of announcements from the Chinese technology companies. I think Alibaba just said what they're going to put about 50 billion in commitments. And then we're seeing what announcements from Oracle. We're seeing announcements from the data center construction companies that are are announcing contracts. So it it's wild the the pace that they want to build these data centers out. And it's not in any one place except for Northern Virginia where where I am 20 minutes outside of Washington DC. >> Yeah, it truly is. It's the these numbers are are clearly just unbelievably shocking. Um I mean these companies have more cash than sort of any companies on the planet. So they're they're able to execute on what they want and and that's that's one reason why we think it's obviously positive for the investment is that um we have them in our corner and that that's a really good thing. So eventually we're going to we're going to see more direct collaboration and investment in the nuclear side of things. But the growth is is truly something to see. It's it's remarkable how quickly it's growing. >> Well, also if you listen to interviews with the CEO, so Mark Zuckerberg and the head of Microsoft, head of Google, I mean, they're talking about they need to the technology podcast, which I listen to with Tom Billu and the all-in guys. I mean, they mention >> nuclear power all the time. So, they're like, well, we don't want well, maybe natural gas temporarily. So like the Stargate AI facility with that's in Abalene, Texas. That's right next to the Peran Basin, the Shell the Shale uh oil fields that have a lot of natural gas byproduct, they just put what a new natural gas uh power plant there and move a pipeline there. But most of the other places that they're building, I mean, they're going to it makes more sense to build a nuclear power plant there long-term rather than move natural gas pipelines because a lot of politicians, Justin, are not in favor of building natural gas pipelines. >> Right. Yeah. No, I think um I think it's it's a it's a marriage that makes sense and I think that everybody gets it. It's just a matter of of getting through the bureaucratic red tape, figuring out the the financing risk and and getting these things going. It's going to take some time. So, I I understand why there isn't as much immediate focus because best case scenario, some of these new novel designs are going to be operational, you know, 2033, 34, whatever it might be. by the time they get NRC license l licensing and break ground on building them, it's going to take many, many years. Um, with that said, there's plenty of designs that are already licensed and I don't know why yet. We haven't seen a collaboration with the tech companies and some of these developing companies to build new APs at existing sites, but I think that's coming. Um, Fermy America is one entity that seems to be coming out guns of blazing building a a data center uh campus in um in Texas. And this is going to have multiple gigawatts of of all forms of electricity, including multiple gig g gawatts of nuclear. It's going to be behind the meter as well. So that's something that's moving very very quickly. They might be the first ones to get new AP1000s built in the states. Who knows? Wait and see. But there obviously is a lagged effect from investments now to actually getting first electricity from a new nuke, which is why they have to take kind of a all of the- above strategy for getting electricity now and later. And you said basically that almost no new mining supply other than maybe in Kazakhstan Kazataprom because they can bring what the ISR production online fairly quickly. But a lot of the other open pit mining operations that are hard rock mining, it's going to take them years and they need at least you said $100 a pound uranium and we're not there yet. Yeah, the Namibian projects are going to take higher prices before we see actual um raising raising of financing and and those shovels hitting the ground for those big open pit projects there. Um the underground mines like NextGen's Arrow that's probably going to move towards development within the next 12 to 18 months. We assume NextG is in their last their their two hearings prior to permitting. First one's happening in the next couple of months. The second one's in February. So, best case scenario, shovels hit the ground in the middle of next year. That's going to take multiple years and before pounds are coming out of the ground for for that particular project. Um, you know, like I said, supply is attempting to respond. The CASAs there's we're going to see marginal increases there. We're going to see marginal increases in the United States. We're going to see, you know, hopefully Kamico get things figured out and and we'll see a few more million pounds coming out of Canada. Um, and there's other stateowned stuff happening. Usbekistsan is is ramping up a little bit. It's not looking as positive there as a lot of people were expecting, but it is moving in that direction. New projects, like I said, Inner Mongolia from China, they've kind of kept a lid on that. We have it in our model to produce a few million pounds a year starting in a few years, but we don't really see where the disruptive supply is going to come from, Jason. And that's that's something that should have the attention of utilities. And I think it's it's it's getting there. We can confirm now following WNA that there are multiple large utilities in the US that get it. They are very well covered in their needs and they're also concerned about the future of supply and and attempting to influence other utilities to come to the table. That's the first time we've heard anything like that since I've been following this market. So that's a very good sign. But yes, supply is going to be a problem. And the most important point on this is in order for this market to even come close to balancing in the early 2030s, we're going to have to rely almost entirely on pounds coming out of the ground of projects that haven't even started construction yet. So that's Dennis's Phoenix, NextGen's Arrow, Global Atomics, DSA, uh, and some of the Namibian projects. They're going to have to get built and they're going to have to start doing that very, very soon. And then we're going to have to have the construction of those mines happen without a hitch. So on time, on budget in order for the market to balance for a point in time before the alligator jaws open up again. We see the Kazak projects start to decline. Most of them in the early to mid 2030s. Like I already mentioned, Scar Lake and MacArthur River both done by 2040ish. It's we don't know where that supply is going to come from. high enough prices for long enough, it'll come from somewhere. But we're many, many, many years away from that being the case. >> And the tech company CEOs, I mean, I saw an interview with Mark Zuckerberg of Meta. I mean, he's looked at this problem. He said, "Look, we have to invest more into nuclear power." So, I don't know exactly what type of next generation nuclear power uh plants he's thinking about, but he realizes that like he's looking at the electricity usage, the data centers that Meta's already building, how they're hyperscaling these data centers. What we're already up to 200,000 uh Nvidia Blackwell GPUs per data center now at the Colos Colossus XAI facility in what uh Memphis, Tennessee area. I think there's also one in Mississippi. the Stargate AI one in Abene, Texas has a similar one. They're talking about Elon Musk with uh XAI and others. I've seen Justin talk about scaling this up to 1 million GPUs by the early 2030s at a data center. So, I I don't know if it's feasible. The engineers that the uh when the 200,000 GPU data centers, they said it was impossible. And now that's the new design build. That's the the base. That's the base design build now is that type of data center. That range in the 200,000 250,000 uh GPU range, but they're talking about scaling this up to 1 million GPUs per data center. It's mindboggling. >> Absolutely insane. Yeah, Zuckerberg's up to something. He's he's clearly I think he's outspending everyone in the AI growth. He's and he's and he's hiring everybody in in the industry. Oracle, too. I mean, the Oracle did you see how much debt Oracle borrowed? and Ora's Oracle Oral Oracle's booking what all those um what this cloud computing and data center deals. So Oracle's getting involved in this and they're using a ton of debt. >> It's amazing. Um and um you know Meta is up to something. Zuckerberg's up to something in terms of nuclear. So they put out an RFP for nuclear projects. They basically said we want to build um x amount I can't remember the the number of gigawatts they wanted to build. And they wanted to get responses from multiple nuclear builders and nuclear designs. This was that was due those responses were due in February and we haven't heard anything from Meta since then. >> Elon has said publicly and I think Google just said something similar. Google wants to build a 1 gigawatt data center I think in Wisconsin. They're talking early 2030s and Elon Musk is talking about similar stuff with XAI uh the two facilities he has one in Mississippi and one in Tennessee scaling those up to 1 gawatt and 1 million GPUs each. >> Insane. Yeah. these I can't even mind. >> Yeah, it just doesn't sound feasible. But then again, the 200,000 ones didn't sound feasible and now that seems to be the normal design build that all of them are aiming for, >> right? It's wild. >> And that's what the that's what um 300 400 megawws at those facilities, the Starai and the Colossus one. So those are like that's going to be the new normal. That's way larger than the data centers we have for like Netflix and YouTube for normal streaming and normal internet usage. Yeah, it's uh I mean this trend is absolutely real. I I think AI is going to be so unbelievably disruptive in in ways that most people aren't considering, positive and negative. And obviously I you know there's a lot of there's a lot of doubt um I would say amongst the investing community in terms of uh how this sector is going to grow and and what these companies will be able to to achieve in terms of profitability coming from AI. And I would just say that the people running these companies aren't stupid. And I don't think they're just going to burn, you know, light $300 billion on fire. They are obviously seeing something that most people are not. They are seeing adoption of whatever AI um elements they have currently on offer. U probably at rates that we can't even understand. And I think that they have a vision for how to utilize AI in the data center capacity that they're building right now for the future. So I wouldn't I wouldn't doubt these people. I wouldn't bet against them. And clearly they are seeing the way that the wind is blowing. And I I honestly think I think AI is is is potentially going to be bigger than the internet in terms of its uh its disruption of how civil so society operates. And I think that it's going to be embedded in absolutely everything technology-wise in a very very short period of time. It's certainly going to use a lot more electricity than the regular internet because I think like whether you're using a regular chat GPT search on your phone, the backend there, all the servers that um open AAI for chat GPT needs are insane. So I think like the average search or query or prompt on chat GPT, it uses a lot more electricity than a regular standard Google search or one of the other internet internet browsers. And that's not even talking about the new types of artificial intelligence software, Justin. The new ones are the video. I mean, they're releasing like fully artificial intelligence, like digital made. It's not based on real content. Like, they just released a uh 2026 World Cup commercial that they made for 2 minutes long with Shakira in it. I don't know if you saw it, but that was fully a it was fully AI made and it probably cost like a fraction of the price to hire like a Hollywood director and actors and it's like in full 8K, but it it probably required an enormous amount of time and electricity. >> Crazy. I did not see that. That's Yeah, it's it's going to be so disruptive. Uh it it's and it's a it's a trend that isn't going away. >> Well, what they're what they're doing now, uh 50 Cent released one of these. He took one of his old songs uh from his hit album, I think in 2003, and he added it to another genre. So, he's been remixing, he's been playing around with the artificial intelligence video software, and remixing old songs with different types of genres. So they just did one with uh Snoop Dogg too. I just saw out that he mixed in uh like one of his old songs with a different type of music genre. So they've been playing around with that. So and you know I think Hollywood with video games, animation, CGI for movies, I think like that's where it's headed. There's not going to be as many human beings employed. It's all going to be this artificial intelligence software and I don't think that trend is going to stop. >> Yeah, I agree with you. >> Well, it's good for electricity usage demand growth. So if you're investing into what? natural gas and and nuclear power. I mean, I as long as this trend continues, I I don't see the demand collapsing. >> Yeah, 100%. That that's one thing that's very unique about uranium is the demand is is is relatively stable and relatively easy to model. Um so it it it's not something that can be um flipped. It can't be like a like a flip of a switch like you'll see with OPEC um design deciding just on a whim to to produce more or produce less or or the Chinese in uh increasing or decreasing lithium supply as they wish. It's one of those markets that can't really be influenced in that way. So um the electricity demand is is extremely derisking to the existing fleet globally and and therefore this investment for sure. Well, I had someone compare the total electricity usage of a next generation data center that's being propose proposed to an aluminum smelter that uses around 1 gawatt of electricity and power to aluminum smelt. But that's super sensitive. I mean, they could shut that down. The aluminum prices fall, the energy costs go up. That's very marginal with aluminum smelter. I mean, once these data centers are built, >> you don't want your data loss. They're not going to shut down the data center. Once these data centers are built, they want it running 24/7 365 cuz people are going to have their businesses online on running the software online. It's not going to be uh as marginal and easy to shut down. Why would you want to shut it down then and risk all your data um going away? Yeah, that that's my understanding as well, Jason, is once once these are operational um of any any hiccup in electricity availability is extremely detrimental um to the data center and how these how these uh chips function. So, yeah, you're 100% right. Needs to be base load, needs to be always on. >> And the cooling systems, the cooling systems that are required to cool down the GPU chips. So, I mean, yeah, you can put solar panels on the data center. Yeah, you maybe you can put if you're in Texas like Abalene out there in the middle of nowhere, you can put some wood turbines, but they can't be your base load. So, you have to have natural gas. You have to have nuclear power. You have to have reliable base load. Maybe if you want to save a little bit of money, you can run solar and wind during the day if it's if the weather's not too bad, but you have to have the base load there because if the data is lost, I mean, you're going to get sued. >> Yep. 100%. >> Yeah. You're going to put someone out of business. There's going to be angry people. Well, you're going to get sued, >> right? >> Well, I I want to thank you so much for your time today, Justin. It just sounds like this is a long-term trend here. So, people are are looking at the share price. If you go and look up a chart of the Camo stock or the uranium uranium miners ETF, it's up enormously over the last five or six years. Some people might think the trend is over. From what you've said over the last 30 35 40 minutes, it sounds like actually the trend is really just starting because this new technology here, it's brought on potentially an enormous amount of new growth that the market was just not anticipating. >> Yeah, it it definitely hasn't hurt us. It's it's a significant tailwind for for this investment. And you know, one element of of this investment thesis from, you know, from six, seven years ago that is still not panned out, which must pan out is a a return of global utilities to the long-term contracting market, you know, in in much much higher volumes in volumes approaching replacement rates and that we haven't seen that yet. And that's what we still have in front of us. So in the meantime, we're seeing the SPA physical uranium trust and Yellow Cake and some other financial entities sort of corner the spot market and a lot of institutional interest has been coming into the into the equities and then into spot over the past few months. And that's that's great to see and it's it's it's certainly better than what we experienced in the first four months of the year, which was a a wicked sell-off and the worst sentiment I've seen since, you know, 2018 probably. um even worse than COVID I would say that was just a few short months ago. It's been a great recovery from those lows but the real moves in the price of uranium and the real moves on behalf of utilities we still have not seen that is still in front of us and I think we have a nice long runway here Jason we're going to have some exciting highs and some gut-wrenching lows along the way but you know that's that's how it goes in this volatile sector and I'm I'm here for it. Wait, so you're saying that like Dominion Energy, the utility company, Duke Energy, Constellation, they haven't locked in long-term uranium supply for their nuclear power plants yet that they've been delaying this. >> Um, they have to some extent. The US utilities are decently covered for the near term, right? So, you're going out two 2 and 1/2 years. On average, the utilities are decently well covered. Um, the big utilities in the US are better covered than the small ones. So there's a number of smaller utilities that are operating one or two nuclear power plants. The constellations, the Dukes, the Vistas, the Dominions, they're all better covered and they're amongst those, you know, I don't want to say smarter utilities, but they have fuel buyers that there's there's a few fuel buyers u primarily in the US, but you know, abroad there's a couple as well that are actually more aligned with let's say the investors. That is to say um either they have their own model of supply and demand and have acted on that model uh in expectation of increasing prices by making sure that they have covered themselves well enough for for a little bit longer out on the curve. But there's uh you know generally speaking utilities in the US despite how robust the growth is of their business and and the increasing prices of electricity and the power purchase agreements and life extensions of their fleet they're not going to cover their their fleet for 20 years. You know the market the uranium market goes up and down and they get you know renewed budgets on an annual basis. So they'll come in they'll cover off what they need to cover off the prices are going to do what they do. So, as as shocking as that is, and as obvious to anybody who's actually spent the time on modeling the sector out, that we've got a we've got a supply problem and highly likely to see much much higher uranium prices in the next few years. Plus, utilities don't really don't really go out and cover beyond a few years to speak very generally. Um, with the exception of the Chinese. So, yes, much much more procurement. In fact, the numbers coming from the relatively conservative UXC is that there's there's more there's uh what is it? Uh two around 2 billion pounds of uncovered utility requirements out to 2040. And there's and we're looking at, you know, 3 or 400 million uncovered just out to 2030. So, there's still a lot of uranium that has to be procured from utilities. We still have not seen that yet. >> Uh it's shocking that they haven't locked that up yet. I you would think that they would have done that over the last year or two because I think you've talked about in past interviews that the uranium price it wasn't that much of their input cost. It would have made more sense just to lock up some of the supply, make sure they have it secured rather than risk a couple years from now they're not being supply available or the Chinese have locked up the supply. But the data set con center construction. I mean like people see the capital expenditures. They're seeing um the people on business television talk about the AI bubble and it's over really a lot of the construction Justin. It's just starting. Yes. They just finished the first phase of the Stargate AI facility. Yes. Uh Elon Musk has two very large um Colossus AI data center facilities. Those are the only two ones that are actually online. The companies have actually spent a bunch of money, many, many billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars each. And those facilities are still under construction. They're going to be coming online in the next couple years. And we're just seeing the headlines that they're announcing more. I think like uh Stargate projects. There's another three or four more, maybe five that were announced all over the Midwest in the United States. They're going to build one, I think, in the United Arab Emirates. Russia was talking about one since they have cheap natural gas that they want a massive new data center. So anywhere with cheap natural gas or can accelerate nuclear power plant growth, if they have the capital, it makes sense that they want to have a data center facility there supplied with cheap energy for the new technologies that are going to be coming online. >> Yep, you're absolutely right. And and speaking of the UAE, you know, their their building of the four reactor plant at Baraka was one of the one of the more recent success stories outside of China for new nuclear and and they're looking at building multiple gigawatts more of nuclear and part of the reason is is an expansion of their of their data center and AI growth. So yeah, it's happening. It's absolutely happening. Jason, >> well, please tell my listeners more about the Uranium Insider newsletter because you cover this better than anyone. This is this is all you do, right? >> Yeah, 100%. We're 100% focused on the uranium market and and we focus a lot of our energy on the physical market. So, um, keeping keeping tabs on what is happening in both the spot market and the long-term market and, uh, in distilling that down to what you need to know as an investor because it can be a very complicated and complex market despite the fact that, uh, you know, demand from utilities is is relatively stable. And once you have the spreadsheets for all the reactors globally, then you kind of can can pretty easily model that out, which we have, which we do. We have our own internal models that inform our investing decisions, but we have uh an in-depth monthly newsletter that's pushing 40 to 50 pages. We do a monthly membersonly webinar. I do weekly video updates for our membership. And we put out a daily communication that tracks the sput ETF flows and highlights the the main uh news stories for that day. We have a focus list portfolio that's more of a fundamental buy and hold. We also have a trading portfolio we call our dynamic model portfolio. we launched back in February which is up 62% year to date. Um significantly outperforming URMM. So um yeah, it's this is all we do. We live, eat, and breathe uranium and and the uranium market and um like I said, we've been doing this for many, many years. We've got a great network and a really good team built up and we see a really strong runway ahead of us for the for multiple years. >> Yeah, I agree. Congratulations on your success. I I know when you launched the newsletter, you were wondering exactly the timing, how long it would take, but it's finally paid off. And I do not think the nuclear power and uranium run is over. I I honestly think it's fairly early on in the stage. Maybe if there wasn't this uh next generation data centers and all the artificial intelligence software technology, if there wasn't that opportunity for the growth, there wouldn't be as much future growth. But I I think the stuff I'm seeing there was an article for listeners out there on futurism which is a technology uh research website and they were talking about the new artificial intelligence video software which is what a lot of the Hollywood people, the animation people, the video game people, the people on social media with memes and commercials are playing around with. And they were talking about the energy usage just to make like a really good couple minute video. And they were saying like it's not linear. They're saying to go from like a uh a two-minute video up to like a 10-minute video, it's almost an exponential increase in energy and electricity usage to make these amazing things uh that we're seeing online right now. >> Wow. Yeah, that's that's truly astonishing. It's it's an unbelievable trend and we're definitely here for