The Derivative - Going Nuclear: How Uranium is Powering Portfolios with Trevor Hall & Justin Huhn

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

In this episode of The Derivative, host Jeff Malec talks with uranium analyst Justin Huhn and mining and commodities commentator Trevor Hall of the Going Nuclear podcast about why uranium and nuclear power may be the most compelling long-term solution for clean baseload energy. They dig into the current uranium bull market, how AI and data centers are driving a step-change in electricity demand, what makes the uranium supply–demand setup unique versus oil and gas, and why life extensions of existing reactors matter so much. The discussion also takes its course exploring the future of SMRs and advanced reactors, the realities of nuclear safety and waste, the role of geopolitics and utilities, and what could propel the next major move in uranium prices. SEND IT!Chapters:00:00-01:06= Intro01:07-09:33= Why Nuclear Now? The Case for Clean Baseload Power, AI Demand, and the Uranium Supply Squeeze09:34-18:37 = Uranium as a Commodity: Mining, Supply Risks, Financial Players, and Long-Cycle Price Dynamics18:38-28:50= Nuclear Safety, Waste Myths, and Why Fossil Fuels Funded Anti-Nuclear Fear28:51-39:59= SMRs, Advanced Reactor Designs, and the Costly Lesson of Vogtle40:00-50:20= SMRs, Military Reactors, and the High Stakes of Building New Nuclear50:21-57:09= Politics, Big Projects, and How Data Centers Are Driving an Energy Crunch57:10-1:03:50= Hyperscalers, Fuel Security, and the Next Uranium ShockFrom the episode:Going Nuclear podcast: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/going-nuclear-with-justin-huhn-and-trevor-hall/id1660633132Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6QAKNtCsXExOBKV8y6cwCuFollow along with Trevor and Justin on LinkedIn, check them out on Twitter/X: @TrevAHall / @uraniuminsider, and be sure to visit https://clearcommodity.net/ and https://www.uraniuminsider.com/ for more information!Don't forget to subscribe to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Derivative⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, follow us on Twitter at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@rcmAlts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and our host Jeff at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@AttainCap2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ , and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠sign-up for our blog digest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer⁠⁠⁠⁠

Welcome to the derivative by RCM alternatives. Send it. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Hope you're enjoying the Olympics as I am. I'm a big fan of the alpine skiing, the downhill, of course. Late night curling is always fun on the couch. And then the biathlon for some reason.

I don't know. Something about them having to cool the heart rate down, make those shots is pretty cool. You know what else I'm a fan of? The nuclear trade. It's the only thing that makes sense to me for our future. Just look around your house. How many things you got plugged in? I've got my mattress plugged.

in for goodness sake. So I listened to the Going Nuclear podcast from Time to Time and was excited to get Justin Hoon and Trevor Hall on this podcast to take my personal nuclear thesis from uninformed to better informed, well informed. Not sure, but one of those. So we're going nuclear. Send it. All right, everybody. We are here with Justin and Trevor from the Going Nuclear podcast. I was excited to have you guys on. I've listened to the podcast. I've personally been loading up on uranium and SMR stocks and stuff for a few years now. So wanted to kind of chat about all of it with you and kind of let's start there.

If we're maybe Trevor jump on the grenade first of like, what's your overall thesis? Why did you think you needed a uranium piece to the content puzzle? And what's the nuclear story if you can say it in less than six hours? Yeah. No, I mean, I think the reason was it is because I think there's growing demand that this is a potential answer to a problem. We need a baseload energy and everybody wants it clean. I think that's pretty, I think that hits the nail right on the head. I mean, obviously, I do think continued fossil fuels and traditional energy will continue to play a huge part of the infrastructure.

and not only just developed worlds in the U.S., but globally, but as the need for cleaner energy continue to move on, and we've obviously seen a number of things. We've seen renewable energy can fit a small piece to the puzzle, but it's not something can terribly reliant upon. How do you continue to have clean baseload energy, and obviously uranium nuclear energy fills that huge gamut. Now, what we've tried to discuss on the podcast for a number of years is we've seen huge sentiment shift, positive sentiment shift over the last five years.

What we haven't seen yet is like tangible implementation and really like a lot of, you know, willing to spend the money to get new reactors up and going connect to the grid. Now, the artificial intelligence piece, that's a side story. We're seeing a little bit of that. But obviously momentum stare at them from my seat, I'm still waiting to see, you know, something tangible, something new that's going to come online to really change the game. Yeah, and Justin or Trevor, if you want to jump back in, do you think the AI is kind of a red herring of like it's brought all this attention to the space? It could easily just as easily take it all away. Or is it net good for the space? Do you want to take that to that?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it is net good, but what we've seen is basically hyperscalers have been forced to find their own supply. And again, they're not just using nuclear energy and signing these contracts to put small module reactors in their data center parks. I mean, they are also using coal. They're also using net gas because those are a little bit lower-hanging fruit to supply the energy to run these things. But as they continue to be forced to find their own supply, they are looking at SMRs. But again, we're still waiting for that switch to be flipped and turn things on that really the first kind of first person in the door shows that it's safe and reliable and not a problem. We're still waiting for that.

Justin, anything to add there? Yeah, I think, you know, the AI story is definitely a tailwind. But from our perspective, you know, this is a sense. essentially a commodity investment. It's a cyclical commodity uranium is. It's an irreplaceable fuel for nuclear reactors. And the growth of nuclear is definitely a positive. The very lofty goals of multiple countries around the world wanting to double triple quadruple nuclear capacities, that's all, that's all great. But from a core commodity investment perspective, you're simply have to try to predict supply and demand. So when we have the sector modeled out in terms of

all of the operating reactors in the world, all of the reactors that are under construction that will be hitting the grid in the next five, six, seven years, expected life extensions, expected shutdowns. We have that all very thoroughly modeled in our spreadsheets, and comparing that to the supply, it's a very obvious under-supplied market with a firm, predictable, de-risk rising demand profile. So there's a lot of supply risk here. And that's what makes it an exciting investment on a commodity perspective. So for the growth of AI, what it's primarily done from our perspective has been a de-risking of the existing reactors. So every single reactor operating in the United States is going to get 20-year life extensions to 60 years and probably 80 years.

And that's a huge bump in demand. In an environment that we had for nuclear five years ago, we were expecting way more life extensions and shutdowns in the United States at the end of their operating life. So the average life of a reactor operating in the United States right now, the average age is about 44 years. These are all getting 60-year extensions, and most of them will probably see 80 years. So that's an incredible tailwind for us. 60-year extension, so they'll be online for 100 years. A total 60-year operating span is what almost all of the reactors in the United States that are operating right now have already been approved to operate out to 60 years. And they, you know, the nuclear regulatory agency in the United States, the World Nuclear Association, a number of these, the Nuclear Energy Institute, all these organizations believe that the modern boiling water, light water reactors, if properly maintained, can run to 100 years. So they're expecting that some of these reactors are going to be operating out to 100 years. So we could actually see the life, the average age of the reactor is like more than double from where they're at right now. And that's a huge, huge demand story.

So in that way, just the rising electricity demand for whatever reason, in this case, it happens to be largely driven by the growth of data centers, but that's not the only story. There's electrification of transport and of cooking and of heating and all these things are happening, not just here in many places around the world. And that's all great tailwinds. But coming back to the core investment thesis, it's how much demand do we expect in the next five to seven years? because that's what you can accurately model out. You go past that based on the fuel cycle, based on mining projects that have yet to be built, but of course based on construction timeframes

for nuclear reactors. So right now, you go out five years, we know with a 99% level of accuracy, I would argue barring some catastrophic event, which is always possible, what's going to be operating five years from now? You go out 10 years, you start starting to have to put some plugs in. What will the Indians do?

What will the UAE do? What will the Saudis do? What will the Chinese do in particular? Because they're currently constructing 38 of the 70 reactors under construction globally right now. So looking at that, we just take our models. We're very conservative on the demand side, very generous on the supply side. And even with that implemented, we still see a shortfall in supply, which should mean higher prices. That's the core of the thesis.

But SMR is fantastic. As far as we can tell all of the evidence is there that there's a lot of interest and momentum here. But to Trevor's point, we've literally seen one built, and that was in China. There's one under construction in the United States right now. There's one under construction in Canada.

There's multiples under construction in Russia, China, in other areas like that. So we've yet to really see who the winners are of these 150 plus designs that are out there. It looks like there's going to be a clear three, four, five winner. that are going to have first implementation and industry understanding

of the cost structure for constructing these things. And from there, we'll have to see how it goes. But for whatever reason, the big tech companies, the hyperscalers, they're interested in doing the advanced stuff and the small modular and advanced designs. And I don't think there's been a single deal

with just a standard, low-enriched uranium-powered light water reactor. They're all high-temperature gas reactors or sodium-cooled-fast reactors. they're like advanced reactor designs and that's what they're into. I don't know why, but that's just what's happening. So you have to kind of invest on what's happening, not what you think should happen. So a few things.

Unpacked there. One, you make me nervous saying it's a commodity story because in my world, commodities are notoriously bad investments over the long term, right? Like, they may go long term up, but there's a lot of volatility. There's a lot of downside to them. So do you feel like this is different or will it become more like a standard commodity or how do you kind of separate it from, all right, I think oil, right? If you thought oil is a somewhat similar thesis, right, like, hey, we need more and more

electricity, we need more transportation. But we were at $120 oil five years ago. Now we're at $60 oil. So how do you kind of compare, contrast those to them? Sure. I mean, I definitely have my opinions on this, but I'd be curious how Trevor kind of sees it as a commodity because I know he's very well educated on other commodities as well. Yeah, I think the basic fundamentals behind the uranium supply market is far different than what the oil market really is. You're talking incredible production markets

throughout the world in oil and crude, and a lot of it is price set by, you know, OPEC plus cartel who can basically say every month that they're bringing more online or cutting more off, which has immediately a huge effect on production supply in the US. I mean, I would, maybe go back and talk to Rory Johnson over at the Oil Groundup podcast about those dynamics.

He's obviously an encyclopedia on it. But just comparing it, I don't think you're not comparing apples to apples here. Uranium is obviously the mass producers are out of Central Asia and Russia. We have supply here in the West, nothing coming out of the United States really, but we do have potential supply partners out of Canada in the Athabasca Basin that could potentially bring that supply online to if relationships between Canada and the U.S. improved as trading partners. Yeah, good thing we're alienating them, that when we need that. So it's, and that's a whole other story that maybe it's worth having a conversation later.

But the fundamentals of the market are vastly different. It's a lot tighter of a market in uranium. There's a lot of brand new players like Sprott truss and yellow keg are bringing, I mean, they're acquiring uranium and taking those pounds offline when they can. So that's even creating a much tighter market. And Justin just explained the thesis behind the need for supply for extensions of what the current infrastructure is over the next five, the 10 years. Now, we could see a bulrush of small modular reactors come online. If this one in the U.S.

say, actually, you know, works and all systems go for 18 months straight. I think you're going to see a lot more implementation and adoption throughout the grid and for hyperscalers. That's going to create an even tighter supply. The thing is, I think my focus is really on where is the supply going to come from in a very fragile geopolitical trading hub that we have. They could be, like we've seen deals left and right on a lot of different things like cars and electronics and semiconductors. You know, China can make a partnership with one or two specific countries for production supply for their infrastructure and cutting us out.

That would be a really hard thing for us to swallow. So how do we continue supply coming in to what? potentially would be a huge infrastructure buildout and nuclear energy going forward. What is the mining process look like? How are we getting out of the ground? Is it super more intensive than mining for other minerals? Or is it basically the same mineral extraction process? I don't think anything much has changed on the process of mining uranium for the last number of years.

I mean, some other technology involvements, but I haven't heard anything like drastically changing. And, you know, we're still mining uranium similar fashion traditionally that we have done in the last 20 years. But which is what, like just you're digging it out. Basically, classic mining. Yeah. Yeah, classic mining. And I'm sure the uranium mining is out there probably wanting to backhand me at that stage. Well, and that's to bring it back to my oil company.

Right. Like we ran out of, it was supposed to be out of oil a long time ago. But they figured out how to drill down 1,000 feet, then over 1,000 feet and access old wells and all that. The technology usually keeps pace with the price, right? The price is high enough. They'll figure out how to get more of it out of the ground. Justin, I wanted to ask you, so those extensions, that by definition, they have to use more uranium? What does that look like?

Are you, like, refilling the pellets every X number of years? What does that look like in a classic reactor? Sure, yeah. The reactors do refueling about every 18 months, just to speak generally. And they replace about a third of the reactor core every 18 months. And they burn through approximately 450,000 pounds to maybe half a million pounds per gigawatt of capacity per year. And that's essentially, you have to make other assumptions that get more complex that are not worth geeking out on this conversation. But that's some rough math that you can use to gauge general demand.

But I completely agree with Trevor that it's basically a supply story now because the demand, the demand is relatively static. I mean, it's definitely rising, but you don't really have acute demand events with the exception of what's financially driven, like from the Sprott physical uranium trust. There's a lot more players right now than there were even two to three years ago that are other financial interests trading the commodity. And that's, for better, for worse, it's adding a lot of liquidity to the spot market, both on the buying side and on the selling side. So you've had the classics, you know, the classic commodities traders that have been there sort of for. like the Traxis, VOMC, Mercuria, there's a handful of others. Macquarie, sorry, but Mercuria, Natixis, City Bank. Goldman Sachs has been there for a while, but all of these banks and financial institutions

have sort of emerged in the last 18 months, and especially last year. So they're buying on dips and they're selling on rips and it's adding to some liquidity in the spot market. But besides the financialization of the sector, you don't really have big, massive changes in demand. You can have a large nuclear utility come in with a large RFP that can sort of shock the market in the near term. But demand is pretty stable. You can model it out relatively easily.

The supply is the more difficult situation. There's some elements that make this commodity very unique compared to something like oil or gas or even other metals. And that is that supply is very, very slow to respond. And for potentially obvious reasons, you have incredible price volatility. historically in this market. So the large multinational mining company is not really all that interested in uranium. The only one being BHP because they have uranium is a byproduct from an Olympic dam mining gold and copper.

The other majors, they're not really interested in it because you can go from previous cycle, $10 a pound, $8 a pound all the way up to $134 and crashed back down to 40. And that's just way too much volatility in price for most majors to be interested in that type of commodity. And so where are we at today, roughly? Today we're at 85, 86 in the spot market. We're at 89 in the long-term market. The forward curve is about $100 a pound going out a few years. So what this commodity has that is different is very, very, very long cycles.

This is not something like Trevor mentioned, the OPEC is just going to say, oh, we're ramping, oh, we're cutting. And the whole market reacts and it has a meaningful reaction that can last for a while. This doesn't really have that type of environment. We do have suppliers that are OPEC-like in terms of their market share. We have, you know, 40% of the uranium comes out of Kazakhstan, and that's the cheapest type of mining. That's in-situ recovery mining. That hasn't really changed in technology in the last 20, 25 years,

but it has become a more prominent method of production. Then we have Canada that produces 35 million pounds a year out of Saskatchewan. There's a good amount of production. Namibia, about 20 to 25 million pounds a year out of Namibia. So we have big players and there's only a handful of places where it's mined in size. So any sort of interruption to any of these locations or these very complicated mines has very, very significant implications on the supply side and therefore the price. Just really, really long cycles. Right. If you're talking 60, 80 year extensions, yeah, long cycle. What does that look like shipping it? So you're getting it out of the

ground in Kazakhstan and it has to ship to the U.S.? So, I mean, the U.S. is the largest consumer. We're still the largest nuclear market, not for very long. China will be larger in less than five years. We do get some uranium from Kazakhstan a decent amount. Shipping has typically never been a problem, but in the last few years, because of issues between the Western world and Russia, Usually the uranium from Kazakhstan goes through Russia and shipped out of the port of St. Petersburg. And so Camaco, for example, that has a joint venture project with Kazad and Prom in Kazakhstan, the Inkya project, a gigantic ISR mine that's going to be operating for another 30 years from where we are now. That they usually got their pounds through St. Petersburg, but during, you know, post-conflict in Ukraine,

they elected to voluntarily have their material shipped to them via a Western route that went through the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan. And it took three times as long. It cost 10 times as much. But they chose to do that. And a lot of their shipments were delayed. So how the Western world has reacted to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has impacted deliveries. It's impacted the market in terms of Russia's very large, the largest market share of both conversion and enrichment. But as far as just going back to my previous comment of how long these cycles go, it doesn't really have to do with the demand.

It has to do with how slow supply can respond or how quickly it can respond, which is not very quick at all. So if you go back, huge price spike in the 70s with oil crisis and massive building of nuclear plants. So the price just absolutely skyrocketed and went to an inflation adjusted, almost 250 pounds, dollars a pound. Inflation adjusted from the 1970s. From there, it crashed because we had a lot of secondary supply coming out of primarily Russia, where they were downblending warheads and down blending high-enriched uranium and feeding 20 million pounds of uranium per year into the U.S. market. And that ended in 2013.

Even with that happening, the price finally bottomed in like 2002 or 2001, $7, $8 a pound. Then it went all the way up to 134 by 2007. Then we had the GFC, which was a temporary drop in the price that was largely financial driven. It wasn't really reactor demand driven. It was just supply. You had physical, you had hedge funds that were buying physical on the way up selling into the market, de-rising because of the massive crash that we had. So that was 01 to 0708. But from there, the commodity bottom started to climb again.

And all signs were this is a resumption of a bull market. So this was 10 years after the bottom of the commodity. It was still the Chinese are building reactors. The Japanese are still operating their giant fleet. All of this was happening. And then Fukushima happened. And Fukushima was obviously an accident that spooked the market and hurt sentiment in the short term. But it hurt demand in the long term.

The Japanese shut off all of their reactors, 10% of the global demand offline over the course of, what, 18 months after that accident, two years. The Germans decided we're shutting them down too, which was in hindsight and absolutely ridiculous. decision, but hey, they did it. And the Spanish implemented a phase-out policy. The Belgians implemented a phase-out policy. So all of these things happened post-Fukushima, and that caused the price collapse. Without that accident, as far as we can tell, we would have had a continued bull market in 2011.

That arguably, I don't always want to say a bull market begins when the price stops falling. It's not necessarily the case for anything, really. but from the bottom of the commodity to when the price crashed, Fukushima, that was 10 years. And it would have kept going had that accident not happen. So now we come back, bottom in 2016, 18 bucks a pound. We've been generally moving higher from there,

volatile spikes and higher lows, but we can't tell where this turns around. We don't know where the supply is going to come from in size, sufficient to satisfy demand, bring enough supply online, actually taper off prices and eventually turn the price back down. That will happen at some point. We just don't know when. We don't see where that's going to happen. We can't model out where that supply is going to come from. And I might add, Justin, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but a lot of

what's setting the price is going to be the urgency of the utilities to get those contracts for pounds in the future. And right now, there's no real urgency for utilities to say, oh, man, we got to go fill up the coffers now. So they are, they basically can be very patient. Now, that might change, you know, a year from now, two years from now to where, you know, they are going to have to be price takers at all, you know, we're just not there. Like, they're not just going to buy pounds at any cost because they have to. They could afford to be a little bit patient. Is that, it's kind of where we're at right now? To speak generally, I would say that's pretty accurate. Yeah. The utilities, there's definitely signs that they're increasing their activity.

They're coming back to the term, the long-term contracting market currently. You know, they procured 71 million pounds in Q4 of last year. So that was a big jump. The activity is absolutely picked up from the stagnant period of, let's say, you know, early 24 through mid-25. We had an 18-month period of them doing absolutely nothing, just waiting for the price to settle out as low as it possibly could. But to your point, Trevor, they don't really speculate. They don't really look at supply and demand graphics and go, oh, this doesn't look very good. We should be buying now.

They don't really do that. They sort of buy what they need to buy when they need to buy it. And a fuel buyer for a nuclear utility isn't really incentivized to try to predict price. Get the price. So a rising price can oftentimes trigger utilities to come into the market. A falling price usually gets them out of the market because they're just going to let it fall as much as they can. The contracts that they sign are almost always at least part. partially referenced to the market price at the time of delivery.

So utility, the market is so thin right now that the utilities, I'm almost kind of negating what I just said, but they do pay more attention to price now because as time moves on, we're going to more and more and more of a percentage in these contracts that are referenced to the market because that's what the sellers want. It's a seller's market. So compared to five, six years ago when it was mostly fixed price contracts, they would be flexing up getting as much as they could at those fixed prices. Now that their deliverables are at least 50-50 market reference to fixed,

three years from now they're going to be 80% market reference, five years from now. I mean, we're seeing 100% market reference contracts being signed right now. So the thinness of the market has utilities a bit more careful. They don't want to buy in the spot market if they don't have to. And if they don't see sufficient liquidity there at this perfect moment in time, They're not going to push price up voluntarily because that hurts their own bottom line for contracts that they're getting deliveries of right now that are referenced in the market. So it's, look, it's a really, really difficult environment for utilities.

Historically speaking, uranium has always been there abundantly and cheap with very, very few exceptions. Like a price, they see that price spike in 07 is being driven by financial players almost entirely as a one-off. So there's still a lot of skepticism amongst fuel buyers that this is it and we have a continual market ahead of us, despite even the very conservative price reporters telling them, guys, there's no more inventory overhanging this market. It's very fragile. Any sort of supply shock is going to send the price higher. They're getting warned by the price reporters and the analysts that have historically been

very conservative and really don't have a dog in the fight in terms of prediction. But they're starting to say, we've got insufficient inventories commercially. overhanging this market that have always been there in history. They're just not there any longer. It's fragile. Kind of buyer beware. Get what you can get and do it, you know, a relatively soon basis. Don't expect prices to fall from here. And that's not coming from our bullish investors like us. This is coming from unbiased analysts in the industry that utilities are their primary clientele. So very unique environment right here. Do you think that, right, there's basically no volume in the futures markets, right?

nobody's hedging. Is that because they all used to be fixed price contract? Right? If they're variable now, maybe they get some interest in hedging, but you said they don't really have a dog in the fight. They're just working at the utility. The Iranian market sort of is a futures market. You know, because utilities are buying for delivery

three, four, five, six, seven, eight years out in the future. They're paying now. They're setting prices now for deliveries in the future. So the whole industry exists in the future. The spot market is basically a surplus disposal market. It's not where most of the volume is done. It's where the financial players interact. It's where the traders.

Some traders get production off-takes, and then they sell into the spot market. So that's always happening. There's some liquidity there, but most of the market really is kind of a futures market. But there isn't futures speculation, like paper trading of uranium, let's say. It doesn't really happen. Yeah. And then back to my transport, I'm just envisioning like some soccer mom at a train stop as the freight trains going by.

Like one of those containers is filled with uranium potentially. Like it's moving 70 million pounds around into the country. Yeah, it's typically shipped by train or by or by truck. Sometimes like I don't think many people know. For ISR operations, the uranium-born lixiviant that came out of the ground, that will actually travel by truck to a processing center. But a lot of it goes by train. It's totally safe.

Oversea by ship. There's never been an accident in the history of nuclear energy related to the transport. And then back onto the safety topic, right, in Fukushima, you mentioned, like, how much better are we today? And maybe Trevor takes one, how much better are we today than Fukushima, then Chernobyl, then all of that? Like, on the one hand, makes people nervous. Oh, you're going to take this plant that was supposed to be shut down. De-risk it, you said, extended out 60 years. Like, that sounds like you're adding some potential for an accident. I think the overall concern following Fukushima was proven to be way overdone.

Yeah, I agree. There were no casualties linked to the actual disaster itself. I think there was, I think they tried to connect one death to Fukushima, but it was, it was proven to be something not relevant. Yeah. But it was just a lot of fear, a little bit of, a lot of fear mongering from general. that, and I think it was also during the height of, you know, the green revolution and the push towards a renewable energy sector, that really that was a linchpin to get that voice elevated quite a bit. But since then, we have seen more people from that green energy movement come to the table in support of nuclear energy.

More and more come every day. They see the writing on the wall of what needs to happen. Well, it's always been weird to me. How did nuclear get put in with like fossil as like dirty energy? Didn't make a lot of sense. Because it requires, I think because it requires mining, because it requires there's like, you know, the concern about what you do with the waste, although it's minuscule, you know, waste comes something like this and can be deposited far, far away. Nobody would ever find it. And the fact, there's some startups and some ventures are trying to find ways. of repurposing the waste right now, which is quite interesting.

I don't know if there's much to report from that, but there is some studies and, you know, people trying to figure out what can happen. But those 70 million pounds a year, that's coming to how much waste is getting. Yeah, I mean, it is not big. I think, like I heard it, like basically comes in like a gallon bucket. You know, if that.

Is that right, Justin? I know it's like super small. Yeah. But waste, I guess it depends on the reactor style. there's casks that are constructed of steel and concrete. So the spent fuel spends a year or sometimes too in a cooling pond, basically a pool where most of the heat is dissipated. And in this pool, by the way, the fuel rods are at the bottom of it.

You could do laps in the surface and you're not going to get any radiation. Once those fuel rods go into that cask, that depending, again, depending on where you're on the, in the United States, those are stored just on site. Because they're spent basically? They're not radiating anymore. They've gotten the best amount of energy that they can as far as utilizing it to boil water and create steam. There's still a lot of potential energy stored, to Trevor's point.

And so there already is some fuel recycling. The French do it. It's just expensive compared to running uranium through the fuel cycle. As far as the waste goes, all of the waste. that has been produced and the entire civilian nuclear history of the United States can fit on a single football field 30 feet high. All of it. So the waste is something that it's always a talking point amongst the general public, but it's something that the industry is incredibly proud of. It's not a problem. They say we can give you clean energy to power a million homes and this is your waste right here. Like we can fit it in a Coke can. And so, you know, it's it's something. something that the industry is really proud of. There's never been an accident with waste. The industry does not see it as a problem. It's the general public that thinks that it's dangerous or it's,

or it's going to be radioactive for 100,000 years, which is technically true. It's highly radioactive. Nobody wants it in their backyard. It's highly radioactive for a few decades. Beyond that, it's basically, you know, and you can go stand next to a cask that has spent fuel that just went in that cast, you'll get less radiation than taking a plane flight. So, and after Fouca's, and after Fouca's, And I agree with Trevor's points on that accident, but it's, you know, it's, it's kind of like the airline industry. When there's a bad plane crash, you have the entire industry kind of do a gut check and go over their safety protocols. And so that's basically what's happened. I'm not saying it could never happen again.

But most of the time in most cases, like Three Mile Island, you know, we had a core melt down there. And that was entirely contained as it was designed to buy the container. Dome around the reactor core. And the Japanese that, let's say, suffered that accidents, their majority in favor of nuclear. And so they can see, obviously, the biggest tragedy of that whole situation was what happened with the earthquake and the tsunami

and not the reactor meltdown. So who's on the other side of that? Like, who's pushing these myths, coal and other energy sources of, like, there's going to be a mushroom cloud. Trevor, let me jump in really quick here. Sorry. There are a lot of the,

The anti-nuclear and pro-renewable lobby that we saw in the 90s into the 2000s was funded by the fossil fuel companies. And the reason for that is every nuclear reactor that shut down, they knew 1,000% that wasn't going to be replaced by solar panels. You know, every single time a reactor shuts down, it's fossil fuels that pick up the pieces. So that was a lot of it. And now we're seeing that shift. We've actually kind of been hearing some whispers about some of the big oil companies, getting interested in the growth of nuclear, just seeing how the energy demand is growing so much.

In general, it's like all of the above, they want a piece of every pie. But, yeah, the fossil fuel companies, they loved seeing, and still do, love seeing a reactor shutdown. I mean, to your point, I mean, that's exactly what happened in Germany. Once they shut down their nuclear reactors, the coal-powered generation is what filled the void.

It wasn't renewable energy. In fact, their coal-powered output just boomed. after they shut off the nuclear reactors. And Russian gas that then got shut off. But that's another podcast. But yeah. But right, I think growing up, you're like, oh, three mile island, in my brain there was a mushroom cloud and 100,000 people died. Right.

Like, that's how bad the news was and the sentiment was about that. So, yeah, we got along with it. Yeah, you had, you had, you know, the concert tours going around the United States that were just absolutely anti-nuclear. I mean, there was, it was out of feet. Pover pitch because it was getting associated with, you know, like the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia and everybody was so freaked out about that, just the word nuclear caused because a huge, you know, a huge backlash. And then you had Three Mile Island and then you had Chernobyl and that was like, that just

killed the reactor growth in the West for a very long time. We need a rebrand, like clean coal, just something like clean coal for nuclear. I would add, and I don't, obviously I'm not at. nuclear power engineer by any means. But I would assume, and I think it's safe to assume that generate nuclear power generation, the technology alone is completely different than the way it was 15, 30 years ago. Just the technology advancements alone and the safeguards in place with nuclear power plants is probably looked a lot different now than it did, you know, even if when you

went, walked through Fukushima 15 years ago. Yeah. Well, just imagine what you could do with, with AI and sensors and every, all that. Yeah. Improvement and all that stuff. You have real time. I mean, Chernobyl was basically, for the most part, run on an analog platform. Yeah.

Right? And think about that wouldn't fly now. We would, that would not pass muster. So that reactor design did not have a containment around the, around the core. So when the meltdown happened, there was an explosion. It just went in the environment. that literally isn't physically possible anymore. Yeah.

What does that look like now? What's the containment sphere made out of? It's like one and a half meter thick concrete around that's shielding the actual core. They design it basically, you can crash a 747 into the side of it and it won't penetrate the containment. What about a bunker buster? Well, I mean, that you get into it. Sure, are there musicians that can destroy a plant? Absolutely.

But at the same time, you know, there's also nuclear munition. So why you want to destroy nuclear power plant, just drop a nuke? I mean, hopefully not. But, you know, just the thought exercise doesn't really make a lot of sense. And then my argument for people who push back on me, I'm like, the U.S. Navy's been doing this for 60 years, right? On ships, maybe there's been submarine accidents that we never knew about that are at the bottom of the ocean that got buried. But as far as I know, not one severe accident, right? it's been unbelievably reliable.

I don't know of any nuclear accident that's happened in a submarine. One of my good contacts is in the nuclear Navy and talks about this stuff all the time. As far as I know, it's the crown jewel of the operating Navy fleet is the ability to load highly, highly enriched fuel into that reactor core once and have it operate for, what, three, four, five decades without ever refueling. It's clean. It's quiet. it's, you know, they absolutely love the technology. That's the reason the U.S. government and Department of War can do it, but the public can't because there's not profitability behind it.

We'll talk through that. So that was my confusion. I thought the power plants were using highly enriched and they could last 60 years. They're using some lower grade? Yes. Yes. Because the higher grade is like nuclear bomb material, so you have to have. It's a different reactor design.

Yes. It's basically almost nuclear bomb, nuclear, yeah, nuclear, yeah, nuclear warhead, essentially, enrichment levels for the uranium fuel for the submarine and aircraft carrier reactors. And that's why they're only, you know, the set amount of power, they know exactly how much power is going to be used from that. And they can operate for decades and decades on that one fueling. But the reactors that operate around the world are almost entirely light water and boiling water reactors that operate on a four, five, five and a half percent enrichment. The super, the submarine reactors and warhead material is like 90 plus percent enrichment. So much, much higher enriched.

And they have to refuel, you know, like I mentioned, every 18 to 24 months. Let's get into SMR. So the SMRs are going to be which model that, that they need to super enriched to work or no? Or that's why there's so many. One of your podcasts, you guys said there's 160 some SMR designs. The designs are all over the, the place. So there are some small versions of light water and boiling water reactors and those are

definitely being promoted by a handful of companies. Most of the reactor designs seem to be trying to benefit from or push some different types of innovations in terms of how the reactors actually operate. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but the sort of leading companies right now, from what it looks like you have you have terra power which is building a sodium cooled fast reactor that's the natium reactor that is 300 if i recall correctly 340 megawatts that one can actually store excess heat in the form of molten salt and take that excess heat and pull it back into the reactor and cycle up and down the amount of electricity they're producing so they can cycle they can go i think from 340 down to 100 something megawatts.

So they can actually, it's, the reason they design it like this is so that it could be potentially implemented into grids with renewables. Because at, you know, 1 p.m. in the desert southwest, you have max production from solar panels. So you can cycle that down, cycle it back up when they, when the sun goes out, et cetera. So that's that one. X energy's XE100 is a high temperature gas reactor. O'Clo is also an advanced reactor. New scale is a light water reactor, but they don't really have any deals.

I think of one Romania don't seem to be leading in terms of actual MOUs. But essentially all of these are making steam at the end of the day? Yeah, they're all just really complicated ways of boiling water, basically. Which is so crazy to me, like all this tech and we're still just making steam to make a flywheel go around. Yeah. And how big are these things, like small modular reactor is still the size of an office, the size of a boat? If I recall correctly the footprint of something like, G. Hittachi's BWRX-300, which is probably the leading SMR design right now.

It's a boiling water reactor design, low-enriched uranium fuel. The footprint of that is like less than 50 acres for the entire reactor. I mean, they're not terribly, to me, using the word small module reactors is kind of an oxymoron. Because to me, it's like, that's not terribly small. It's smaller than the AP-1000s. So it's like, it's not like something you can just kind of shovel into your, your garage, you know, and power your neighbor. That's what I was thinking, they were the small, like on the submarines, like, that small.

No, I think my first, my, my first epiphany with that is like we interviewed Rolls Royce last year. Remember that, Justin? Yeah. They had images of their kind of their SMR design. I looked at this thing. It's like, that's like almost like a whole like park size type thing. It almost looks like an auditorium almost. Yeah.

Yeah, there are some microreactor designs. I'm forgetting the company's name off the top of my head, but it's, you know, it's only like one megawatt of power and it'll theoretically fit in a shipping container. It can be trucked around and used like a diesel generator. So there's that type of thing, but it's not a lot of capacity. So we're talking about the typical SMR that like the hyperscalers are interested in. Still, you know, still a reasonable size footprint. But of course, if you compare that footprint to what can be produced by other clean energies, like solar, for example, you know, it's a factor of 100 to 1 in terms of the actual land use

that's necessary to produce the smaller energy. Yeah, than wind or solar. Yeah. And then the last point I would make is on the submarine and aircraft carrier type reactor design. They're actually looking at because the Department of Defense or the Department of War can actually take, they can sort of circumvent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and they don't need to wait for NRC approval for anything.

they can just go and do what they want, essentially. So the DOD is working on some various designs and fast-tracking those to actually be critical this year. And that was, they wanted within a 12-month period from July 4th of last year to July 4th of this year to get multiple new designs up and running and actually producing electricity in 12 months. And that's because they're like, screw the NRC,

we're just going to do this thing, let's see what we can do. And they have a, like you said, a 60-year history of safe nuclear operations. operations on these small reactors. So there's there is interest in taking that technology. Like we already have this. It's worked for decades safely. Let's put this on land. So there, there is that thinking and there's people working on that. Well, at least like, okay, start with powering all our bases around the country, right? Like all our military bases and around the world. Like my argument's been, I'm like, I think within, I've say 30 years,

that's probably too soon that every large university will have an SMR powering their whole campus. right, of like we're literally zero emissions now, not just buying carbon offsets or whatever. Sure. Like we're actually zero emission. But I thought they could be in a small building, not the size of the football team. Some of the microreactor designs are significantly smaller.

Like I said, potentially truck mounted. But most of the SMRs that we're generally talking about are, you know, 75 to 350 megawatts. They're larger. They're just smaller than a big one. And it's the Department of Defense. I'm still going to call them defense. I haven't moved over to war yet.

Are they partnering with these private companies? Like, they must be, right? No. In the case of these small test reactors, it doesn't appear so. I do believe they have government contractors in terms of who's aiding the construction. I think WXT is possible. There's a few others. But as far as partnering with private companies and the tech companies, no, not to my knowledge.

It's sort of the Department of Energy has been a lot more active than yes the DOW. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Secretary Chris Wright, who was an oil and gas guy, he was actually on the board of Oklahoma before he came over to Washington. So he's got a lot of ties to the SMR industry. And then let's talk the politics and the nuclear commission you mentioned like so Microsoft can't just say, right, they bought three mile Island or whatever that was at all optics or they actually own it. But they didn't buy it.

They signed a 20-year power purchase agreement and they're partially funding the restart. So they're making a purchase commitment for the electricity. It's going to come from that unit one. So maybe Microsoft is a bad example because they're already doing something. Let's say Google is just like, hey, we've bought this land in Nevada. We're going to put a data center there and run it with an SMR. Like, they can just go ahead and do that, or they have to get commission approval? Like, what does that look like?

We're the industry still trying to figure that out because, at least in the United States, all of the reactors are operated by nuclear utilities, public or private. And the utilities at this point are very gun-shy about building new nuclear. Most of them want to do it. None of them want to be the first to build a new design. Most of them are interested in small because the perception is that even if the economies of scale don't really make sense, it's the financing risk. So if you've got capital that's four, five, six percent interest and it takes a year longer, rather, you know, I mean,

that's a very, very big change to the bottom line. So it's the finance risk and the capital risk that has them interested in doing something that potentially can get done faster. That's why they're all to do small, but they don't want to be the first ones to do it. So the tech companies at this point have either engaged in power purchase agreements and off-takes from existing nuclear reactors or nuclear utilities. So you have Vistra just signed one with, I think it was Amazon, if I recall correctly, and they're putting up some cash to aid Vistra in doing refurbishments on those reactors and up rates that will basically allow them to produce a little bit more electricity from these already operating reactors. Microsoft did a deal with Constellation

that owns Three Mile Island and their restarting Unit 1. And then let's see, Amazon did a deal with X energy to actually build. I think it was a dozen. XE 100s in Washington state, who actually is going to build those, we don't know yet. So all of this is still being worked out. But there's like, what's the cost of that build? Yeah, I mean, billions. They have cost estimates, but we still don't have first of a kind

to be able to say this cost this much. But like, what's a, if I was going to build an old school, big nuclear plant, right? What is that? Tens of billions a dollar? Well, Vogel 3 and 4 were 30 billion. those two reactors. Three was $20 billion. Four was 10. So, you know, the cost got cut in half by building a second, a second reactor. And that's just how much, you know, once you get ent of a kind, you can really start to see those cost savings. But it's estimated. So, you know, the deal that the

U.S. just did with Japan, with the Japan funding, what was the $350 billion investment fund in the the US that 80 billion of that is being earmarked to build 10 new AP 1,000 reactors. So just seeing the major mistakes that were made, and there were so many mistakes made in Vogel. But from Vogel 3 to 4, having the cost get cut in half, they think, okay, if we build 10 of these things, we can probably do that at 8 billion per reactor. And that's in the U.S., you know, it's a third of that cost in China. It just depends on where it's happening. But in the U.S., it's still, you know, it's still pricey. With that said, you have enormous upfront sunk costs and then the operational cost of the reactors over the life of the reactor, especially if they go out 80 plus years,

become very, very affordable relative to other types of technologies. Where are the Vogel? In Georgia. In Georgia. So those are a known mess up, screw up? It's got prolonged. It just kept on getting delayed and delayed and delayed. But once it's a, up and running, there hasn't been, I haven't heard of any issue since it was, you know, the tape was cut. That's a really, really good point. So there were so many problems.

One of the biggest problems with Vogel was that the total engineering design of the reactor wasn't even complete when they started construction. So they sort of figured a lot of things out as they went along. But there were things like, I can't prove this, but I did hear this from somebody knows way more than I do about actual history of nuclear in the United States. The foundation concrete that was poured for Vogel 3, the rebar grid, the spacing on the rebar was off by an inch, and they had to scrap the whole thing and redo it, and that was a billion dollar mistake. So, I mean, that's just one example, and my numbers might be off there, but you get the idea.

And even though these two reactors cost $30 billion, even though it was a major, incredible headache for the Southern company that operates them. It bankrupted Westinghouse, this process bankrupted Westinghouse. Even though all of that happened, it's the crown jewel in the state of Georgia. They have stable, clean, relatively cheap electricity. Their industry is growing really, really fast. All these companies are leaving California and going to Georgia. You know, they're, let's like the next Hollywood is being built outside of Atlanta because everybody's leaving California. The cost of labor, the cost of electricity here, we pay 32 cents a kilowatt hour.

It's double, it's double the cost of the average cost in the United States. So it's something that the state and the industry there is really, really proud of, despite the fact that it was a massive cost and schedule overrun. So even when it's a complete stub-your-toe thing, it's still a great benefit to Georgia. But yes, the mistakes that happened there, the huge cost overruns are, I would say, suspect number one in terms of how it's influenced the hesitancy of the entire nuclear industry in this country of building new reactors. I would also argue it just kind of shows you the societal challenges we have the willingness to take on big projects, not just nuclear energy. Just to think long term.

To think long term. We do not think like 50, 100 years from. now, what can we do now to make sure society is best set up as we possibly can? We used to do that. But then with the hyper-financialization of the economy, capital markets, what they're doing with interest rates, the general incredible amount of debt we have carried in the United States, not only are we beholding to the affordability of these projects, but how do we do it in the face of public scrutiny and criticism, knowing that I'm going to have to go run for office in another two to four years, six years.

Yeah, sorry. The last four years, we were way underwater, but because I'm planning for 20 years later. Exactly. And I don't think nuclear energy is, you know, it's tied to this whole problem. And if we had a better sound way of managing, you know, our spend in the U.S., and that includes with entitlements, defense spending, all of those things. And we could, would have actually started building big projects, energy projects, when we could, not when we needed to. Yeah.

We probably wouldn't be having as much of this conversation as we were having right now. But the question now lies, do we do it now or do we continue to kick the can until it's way too late. And I think people are seeing them riding on the wall and start trying to do it now. And I've talked to Justin about this numerous times. And according to SMR is a great example. I think that once one SMR comes online and shows a quarter of positive cheap energy flow without any problems, you're going to see the second one, the third one, the sixth one, the 12th one really quickly. And they'll be like incrementally cheaper as well. Nobody wants to be the first one in the door.

Nobody wants to take on that scrutiny if things go wrong. But if it doesn't go wrong, like people are going to really pay attention and you'll see this sector really launch. It seems like we've come full circle of the private sector is taking control. They're like, fine, politicians, you can't figure this out. But I need energy. I'm thinking, right, Microsoft, Amazon, they're thinking long term, like we are going to need massive amounts of energy.

That's why they're doing these deals. that's why they're looking into SMRs and securing it. But you will start seeing it because we already know energy prices are rising in places where hyperscalers are building. If you get enough of the public, you know, voters, voters complaining and pushback against the utilities, against the cost of energy, maybe they'll provide a solution to the problem. We're not seeing that right now, but.

Well, that's a, right. I've seen some documentary. One piece on that of like the data center went in down the block and everyone's electricity is much higher. And these people are now protesting. We don't want a data center here. Yeah. I mean, listen, and just anecdotally, like we're using more energy now than we ever have. And in 10 years, we're going to just even put what the energy use we're putting in now.

It's going to look like peanuts compared to what we're going to need in 10 years. I mean, I'm just thinking like in the last three. years. I bought a plug-in hybrid. I remodeled my house and put in, God, way too many plug-ins to charge everything else. You know, just me as a consumer of energy, I look back and like, I'm almost ashamed. But, you know, it's, it's- I have two teenagers. We've got like a thousand cords around the house. My wife, we're in Chicago. We've got the heated glow, the electric gloves, electric vest. Like, everything's plugged in and charging all the time. Yeah. So we're going to need it. We're going to need the energy. So I do think it will start steamrolling once one person or one group shows it's

doable. Any last thoughts to wrap it all up? Tell us a little bit. We didn't talk much about the podcast you touched on different topics and guests you've had, but you're going to keep going. The thesis is only getting stronger, so you might as well, right? We're going to keep going until Justin tells me to bugger off. Yeah, onward and upward. I completely agree with Trevor's last comments. I think that what I find most interesting in terms of the hyperscaler influence on this particular sector is,

especially I'm watching Amazon here because we've already heard that Amazon has kind of been sniffing around the fuel cycle, and that was over a year ago that the early whispers of that happening. So we just saw Amazon do a deal for an offtake directly from a copy mine in Arizona. This is a couple of weeks ago. And so they know they need copper for their data

centers. They're going directly to the source out of the ground for that copper. And we believe that let's say over the next five years and probably sooner, as these deals get more solidified, as more deals are made between hyperscalers and either nuclear operators or actually them funding the building of their own reactors at their own data centers, because this thing that's growing right now with the data centers is bring your own generation. You can't just show up and build these data centers and hope to get what you need from the grid and however that influences the grid and the pricing for the surrounding communities. Oh well, that's not something that's going to keep happening. So they have to show up with their own generation and oftentimes right now that's

solar and batteries and or gas. But gas turbines are basically sold out. Its energy is the limiting factor on the growth of AI. So I believe that they're going to continue to make new deals and fund the actual construction of these small reactors and potentially large reactors. And when they do, once they get to that level of commitment that, oh, this is happening, I think they're going to make sure that they have sufficient fuel to operate those. Whereas right now, the reactors around the world, utilities are sitting on two or three years of inventory. And it takes two, years to put material through the fuel cycle. There's really not very much of a buffer. It's like, oh, that sounds like a lot. Yes, it does give them a little bit of flexibility during price fluctuations.

But generally speaking, they have to hold that inventory. They always have an additional core load on site, always, always, always. And then they have two or three years of inventory across the fuel cycle because of how long it takes to move through the fuel cycle. So will somebody like Amazon who just invested, let's say, $5 billion to build a half dozen XC 100 reactors in Washington, are they just going to hope that the fuel appears on time for those to be operating their data centers? Probably not.

So I think that a right-tail catalyst in the next few years is going to be somebody like Amazon making some sort of off-take agreement with a producer or a 2B producer developer for actual pounds coming out of the ground. I can't guarantee that's going to happen, but it's on my wish list, and I think if I'm a betting man,

and I suppose in this sector I kind of am, I'm betting that something like that disrupts it. And you know what? And if I'm wrong, that's okay. Something else will. I don't know what's going to disrupt it. You just have to see the conditions are there for disruption. They 100% are.

So always looking good. We'll keep doing this as long as Trevor will have me. I feel like the current administration doesn't lend itself to announcing Amazon announcing, a deal with Kazakhstan of, hey, we've secured rights to this supply. We're going around the government here. Yeah, I mean, they'd probably get slapped on the rest, if not worse. The Chinese and the Russians are already taking, they already have the most joint venture projects in Kazakhstan, but they're also contracting with the Kazakhstan mostly state-owned

operator Kazanoprom. So they have their own projects there that are JVs, but they're also buying more from the 100% owner of projects, which is because that's a problem. So I don't know how much is going to be there left over, even for the tech companies, but they'll likely buy domestic and or from allies. There's big development projects in Canada, wink, wink. I think it's highly likely that some off takes will be signed with some of those projects in the next few years. That's what I'm looking for. Is there uranium in Greenland? Is that the Greenland thesis? There is, but that's not, I don't think that's the reason they're. We had a natural resources guy on, he's like, no, there's nothing in Greenland.

We don't need any of the resources in Greenland. I don't know what's happening. I think it's a geographic strategy more than anything. Yeah. Awesome, guys. Thanks so much for time. It's been fun. We'll put links to the podcast and to your other ventures in the show notes.

and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you. Go your aim. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Jeff. Okay, that's it for the pod. Thanks to Justin. Thanks to Trevor.

Sorry, I called you Travis a few times. Thanks to RSA for hosting. Thanks, Jeff Berger for producing. We'll be back next week with a South African farmer turned ag trader. Still lives there on a rhino ranch. So not every day you get to talk to somebody on a rhino ranch on the pod. So tune in next week. Peace.

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