The Lowdown on Uranium Demand

Friday, 22 December 2023 | 37 | 31:00

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, Senior Managing Partner at Sprott Asset Management. Joining us today is Justin Huhn, founder of Uranium Insider, which provides news and analysis and focuses on all things uranium. Justin, thank you for joining Sprott Radio.

Justin Huhn: It's my pleasure. Good to see you, Ed. I'm happy to be here with you today.

Ed Coyne: Well, Justin, before we unpack the world of uranium, please tell our listeners about yourself and your newsletter, the Uranium Insider.

Justin Huhn: Sure, I've been in the market for over a decade. I started primarily as a technical momentum breakout trader. I did that successfully for several years leading up to my initiation, let's call it, with the uranium thesis. That happened in late 2016, coincidentally within a month or two of the actual bottom for the spot commodity, just under $18 a pound. I was very intrigued by a couple of things.

One was this fundamental contrarian investment into something hated and ignored. Two was that I realized I knew absolutely nothing about nuclear energy. My preconceived notions about it were utterly wrong. I've always enjoyed having my mindset or my thinking about something turned on its head. I don't know why I enjoy that humbling experience of being wrong about something, but that piqued my interest. The investing side was this contrarian bet with a potentially huge upside regarding investment returns. Looking at the previous bull market was one for the ages.

This was a multi-year, very patient investment, 180 degrees from the type of investing or trading I had been doing. I enjoyed that, and I just continued to build on my knowledge about the space. As I continued to dig deeper, the investment thesis became more interesting. The risk-reward was huge, and it still is, even though the commodity has 4Xed from the bottom. I built up a community on Twitter by joining a small community and building some knowledge around it.

I enjoy communicating and educating on subjects I know more about than the average person. That built up into this Uranium Insider Twitter account, and I started writing about it. I started a free newsletter writing about the macro elements of this sector and this investment thesis. That just organically led to a paid newsletter product I've been doing since August 2019, over four years now.

It was a very unintentional but organic process, and I have turned it into a great community. I have a partner and a small team working for me, and it’s just an inspiring and interesting space. It's gone from this terrible, hated sector, where you were making a super contrarian bet on it, going from absolutely awful to just bad. It has turned into a sector where a nuclear renaissance is happening globally. The potential for this to be a long-term, almost "supercycle" type investment is undoubtedly on the table.

Ed Coyne: Speaking about 4X plus from the bottom, 2023 has been quick. It's been a great year for those focused on, watching, and tracking uranium. It's been a wonderful bright spot and a volatile year for most investments. What's driving the most recent performance in uranium? What are the primary causes there?

Justin Huhn: It's the performance of the spot price of uranium itself. The commodity uranium is up almost 50% year to date. It's a huge move. It's contrasted, of course, with an underperformance of much of the rest of the commodity space. That has to do with the back of a relatively good run for commodities in the previous couple of years and looking at going into a recession, and maybe we're already there. Deflationary effects typically influence commodities' performance during periods of recession.

Uranium is flying in the face of that and doing the exact opposite. The commodity has a lot more upside, but a 50% move in the spot price is very large. The case for the commodity is very strong.

Ed Coyne: Investors whom the current move has piqued, have they missed it? What should they be worried about going forward? What would you say to somebody you meet at a cocktail party who says, "I've been reading about uranium, and I'd like to be part of this, but it's run up so much, maybe I've missed the boat." What would you say to someone like that?

Justin Huhn: We focus most of our energy on the actual fuel cycle in the physical market. Everything we look at in that space right now points to higher prices. There's nothing that we can see in the near, mid, or even long term that looks to us like a good case for a falling uranium price. I am still determining where that will come from. There's, of course, always the exogenous event possibility of a reactor meltdown or something like that hurting sentiment in the short term.

If it hurts demand, that can hurt the price of uranium in the mid to long term, as Fukushima did. It is very hard to predict in the near future, but with a high level of confidence, we expect the price of uranium to continue to rise.

Ed Coyne: This host supply-demand equation, in theory, is a multi-decade issue or opportunity depending on what side of the table you're sitting on. Is that because more reactors are coming online? Is that because shuttered reactors are now reopening? Walk us through that a little bit. Why do you think this is a multi-decade opportunity, and will that supply-demand disconnect continue for the foreseeable future?

Justin Huhn: Yes, it will be continuing for the foreseeable future. Now, there are always inventories that can buffer a bit of that undersupply problem, let's call it. The investing side always seemingly wants this panic moment where the utilities realize their hair is on fire, and they're running for the exit door and doing everything they can to secure pounds as fast as possible. That usually only happens if a significant event triggers a panic. Utilities have inventories for a reason. It takes two years for the material to go from mined uranium through the fuel cycle, conversion enrichment, deconversion, and then fuel fabrication.

That takes a long time. The reactors are multi-billion dollar strategic assets that they must fuel. You must think ahead as a nuclear fuel buyer for a utility. Part of the way that they de-risk the operations of that particular plant is by holding inventories. Inventories always act as a buffer, but we see a supply deficit going out for many years, possibly for as long as we can look into the future. Now, several interesting supply elements could come online in a very long-term timeframe with sustaining high prices, like uranium from phosphates to uranium from seawater, and things like that.

Neither of those elements could solve this problem within the next 5 to 10 years. That's just not possible. We have a backdrop of a stable and growing demand. Anytime you're looking at a commodities investment, the basic first place to start is to look at the supply and demand. The demand for uranium is about 180 million pounds per year this year. That is the burnup rate of the global nuclear fleet. That does not include inventory restocking, financial buying or producers buying uranium—all of which is happening currently.

The actual demand on an annual basis is more difficult to put your thumb on. This year alone, it's probably around 200 million pounds. This year, the mined supply out of the ground will be about 145 million pounds, and we'll have a bit of secondary supply. Usually, that comes from underfeeding from enrichers, but the underfeeding in the West is gone. We may have 15 million pounds of secondary supply, which brings us to about 160 million pounds. That means, on a supply and demand basis for this year, we're about 40 million pounds short on the supply side.

Production should slightly increase in the next few years, but demand is also increasing. For example, the World Nuclear Association does great work, has a fantastic website, and updates its modeling all the time, almost monthly. They've just recently updated that there are 436 operable reactors worldwide. Some of those are idled, like in Japan. There are 61 reactors under construction right now globally, and 68 gigawatts of new nuclear are currently under construction. There are 112 reactors, or 109 gigawatts, that are ordered or planned, and there are over 300 that are proposed, including 350 gigawatts.

It's a huge story. We're currently looking at a 3% to 4% compound annual growth rate for the sector. Almost half of the new builds currently under construction are in China. What's also happening is that existing reactors are becoming increasingly de-risked. There's been a recognition of the importance of having stable, clean baseload power. I just attended the Nuclear Energy Institute conference in Charlotte a couple of weeks back. In the opening presentation for this conference, he said that in years past, there was a table that they called the “Table of Shame,” where they showed premature reactor shutdowns. That table isn't there this year because there are none.

Ed Coyne: Wow.

Justin Huhn: We're seeing life extensions all the time. Life extensions are in immediate demand in the uranium market. New reactors build life extensions and restart, like in Japan and South Korea.

Ed Coyne: Let's talk about life extensions for a minute. Some people mistakenly think, "You're taking an old reactor that should be shut down, and you're continuing to operate it, so it's going to be dangerous." Life extension is more about licensing, if I understand that correctly. Can you walk us through that? That means that people can better understand whether this reactor will be shut down or was already shut down and is going back online. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Are there safety features there? What's going on with that? Please describe that a little bit for our listeners.

Justin Huhn: As far as we're concerned, life extensions are very positive from an investment and nuclear advocacy standpoint. When a reactor comes online, it's given an initial operating license for its lifespan. In the U.S. and Japan, it's 40 years. When the reactor is getting close to the end of that initial operating license timeframe, they can apply for extensions, and they usually do. We're looking at 60-year operating lifespans and up to 80 years, possibly even longer here in the U.S.

Ed Coyne: Wow.

Justin Huhn: In Japan, their fleet is a little bit younger than here in the U.S., on average. They just granted, for the first time, a 60-year operating lifespan to two reactors in Japan that were coming up. Their 40-year lifespan was ending at the end of the decade. They applied for that and received it. The Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) in Japan just this past week gave their first 60-year operating license to reactors. That's a first for Japan, and there's more coming on that front.

It is the same thing in the U.S. There are clean energy production tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed last year. There's a lot of funding in the IRA for extending the lives of the operating plants in the U.S. PG&E got a five-year extension for the Diablo Canyon plant in California, and they just applied for a 20-year extension. The Perry plant in Ohio has a life extension application in place. A couple of others are also in place, and we expect the entire U.S. fleet to get life extended.

It adds immediate demand as well. When PG&E got that, they expected the reactor to shut down in 2024-2025. They were in the market when they got that five-year extension approved. Earlier this year, a big RFP was in the market, shaking it up. The Koreans have a big RFP right now for a construction restart that was idled with the previous anti-nuclear administration that was in place. There's just been a big shift.

Ed Coyne: Let's go back to supply for a moment. Are current mines and refineries out there profitable today at the current prices? Are these companies making money off the current price of physical uranium?

Justin Huhn: The producers operating, producing, and selling uranium are making money. It varies between which producer, how much they're producing and how they're selling it. Current producers are doing well, but the slow pace and the complicated nature of bringing uranium mines online, even care and maintenance mines, especially greenfield mines, makes the supply very slow to respond to an appropriate pricing environment. We're getting there. The price is $74 a pound. There's some production that's working on coming online.

Ed Coyne: Let's talk about that for a minute because the next step would be a mine that had shuttered because the prices got so low. You said the bottom was $18 a pound, or right around there, and it wasn't profitable, so they just turned the switch off and walked away. Do they need it higher than $70 or $75 a pound? Is it $85 a pound? What is their break-even to say, "Let's flip the switch back on. Let's start producing more uranium. Let's try to put more supply into the market." In your mind, what would a price point be for a shuttered mine to go back online?

Justin Huhn: It largely depends on the mine, of course. Right now, a number of care and maintenance mines are working their way back towards production. That would be Paladins, Langer Heinrich in Namibia. That's five or six million pounds a year, and 20% or 25% of that goes straight to China. They're working on bringing that back online. They are estimated to have their first production next year, with full production in 2025. Cameco just restarted McArthur River last year, and they should get 12 or 13 million pounds out of that this year, full production. They're looking at 18 million pounds next year.

The pricing environment is good enough for that mine to come back online. That's a very big, complex mine. There are a number of smaller mines in the U.S. These are primarily ISR, in-situ recovery mines, where there's a series of wells rather than an open pit or an underground mine. Only a few productions will come from there, but we're in a pricing environment that justifies that—one, two, three million pounds out of the U.S. over the next few years.

Also, care and maintenance: ISR mine, the Honeymoon Mine operated by Boss Energy in Australia, is working on coming back online. They should have their first production in the next few months. Besides that, there are mostly greenfield mines in various development stages, and there's only a little on that front.

Ed Coyne: What would you need for you and me to start a mine tomorrow? Is it, we're talking over $100 a pound sustainable to say that could justify us starting a business or a new mine, going into the permitting process? Of course, it will depend on where, location and so forth, but what kind of pricing are you seeing on that side?

Justin Huhn: It, of course, depends on the grades and the type of mine, and the size of the mine, etc. To give you an example, now we're at $73, $74 a pound spot uranium, and there's a number of development projects in Namibia that are lower grade, big open pit, hundreds of millions of pounds of uranium, but it's low grade. It takes a decent amount of CapEx to develop these mines. The last big open pit low-grade uranium mine developed in Namibia was the Husab Mine by the Chinese. That went way over budget. They spent billions of dollars to get this into production.

Now it's cranking. They're producing 12 to 14 million pounds of uranium annually out of Husab. That was a big, expensive, complicated project to get online. There are a number of companies that are operating in Namibia that have these large development assets. None have yet signaled to the market that they're working on bringing those towards production. To look at the supply and demand dynamic and recognize that the marginal pound will set the price, those marginal pounds are in Namibia. We will need those development projects producing uranium by the decade's end.

To do so, prices need to be higher than they are here. Wherever that is, $90, $100 a pound, probably somewhere in that ballpark. Also, remember that we could be at $90 a pound in six months. That doesn't mean uranium is coming out of Namibia in six months. You will have to add two, three or four years and billions of dollars of capital to make that happen.

Ed Coyne: We've talked a lot about miners, and we've talked a lot about the plants themselves. Are there any HALEU (high-assay, low-enriched uranium) effects or other industries that one could look at when considering uranium? Are there any other parts of the world or other parts of industries that people say, "This is something I should maybe also think about investing in, which will benefit from this movement?"

Justin Huhn: That's an interesting question. Uranium mining is the obvious one. You, of course, can invest in the commodity itself. Investing in the fuel cycle is more difficult, but you can invest in enrichers. Centrus, based in the U.S., has just produced its first HALEU, which will be the "fuel of the future" for these advanced reactor designs and higher enrichment. Silex has majority ownership of global laser enrichment, and Cameco has minority ownership.

There are some interesting developments for the next few years and beyond. It takes more work to invest in conversion in the fuel cycle. There are a couple of fuel fabricators, but for the most part, it's uranium. There's an interesting use case for nuclear, especially with small modular reactors, for producing hydrogen because hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism. It's not a source of energy. They call it pink hydrogen, which is hydrogen produced from nuclear. There's an interesting relationship between hydrogen and nuclear going forward, and that’s something to look at. There is an exciting potential future for investable small modular reactor developers.

Right now, the only one publicly traded, at least in the U.S. currently, is NuScale. Then you have Rolls-Royce. Of course, they're not only doing small modular reactors, but there are so many others. There are over 100 designs. Some of these companies will be going public in the coming years, and that's a place to watch to invest in the actual nuclear builders and designers.

Ed Coyne: We've talked about the SMRs, or the small modular reactors, in the past. When are they going to hit the market? Is it in the next 5 or 10 years? If you can spend a little time on the SMRs, that's a fascinating, substantial technological shift in how we think about nuclear.

Justin Huhn: Sure. SMRs stands for small modular reactors. It's a vague descriptor, but it's reactors smaller than 300 megawatts. The typical large reactor is 1,000 megawatts, or in that ballpark. There are a lot of exciting features around the proposed SMR designs that are being engineered and, in some cases, developed currently. Their modular aspect is that they would be like airplanes instead of airports. It is building the actual parts for the plant in a factory, shipping them and assembling them on-site.

To some extent, that's what happens with large-scale reactors, but there are various designs, and many supply chain problems can come from these larger reactors that could be addressed with these smaller designs. A lot of them are walk-away safe. They're meltdown-proof. Either they're using newly designed meltdown-proof fuel or the designs around the core essentially allow them to be operated without personnel. You could have personnel not show up for work that day, and the reactor wouldn't melt down.

A number of them use highly enriched uranium, so they're more efficient. They can operate at higher temperatures. There are industrial heat and community heat aspects that you could utilize from these reactors. One of the developers, X-energy, has made a deal with Dow Chemical in South Texas to develop and build some small modular reactors where they would be utilizing industrial steam. They're high-temperature gas cold reactors that would pair very nicely with chemical-producing companies.

There are incredible opportunities in the market that are not just electricity producing for small modular reactors; of course, it's the size. Where a large reactor, you're making 1,000 megawatts of energy. You can utilize that in a place with an established grid and infrastructure and a decent size with enough consumers from local cities to consume that amount of electricity. If you're producing 50 or 100 megawatts, you could put that in a much smaller community, potentially like a military outpost, powering a mine, or something like that. These things are all possible.

Many of these designs address safety concerns, even though nuclear is statistically the safest source of electricity that's ever been conceived. Still, you have people questioning the safety because a couple of past accidents are top of the headlines. In many ways, the SMR "revolution" is exciting for people skeptical about large traditional nuclear. That said, the first small modular reactors are now being constructed.

Four GE Hitachi BWRX-300s are being built in Ontario, currently at the Darlington site, where there is a large reactor. Those are in the early stages of construction. Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is already in the market buying uranium. We're already seeing demand for these first SMR builds.

Ed Coyne: Wow.

Justin Huhn: The Chinese currently have an SMR build under construction, but there are hundreds and hundreds of letters of intent and memorandums of understanding worldwide for various SMR designs. There's much momentum around it. It's hard to model exactly how much demand will come from these. Still, it is very interesting to see that the first ones are being constructed, with the first expected electricity production only in the late decade. Probably early 2030s. They're already in the market buying fuel. TradeTech is one of the primary nuclear fuel consultants. They predict we'll see 200 million pounds plus cumulative uranium demand from small modular reactors between now and 2035.

Ed Coyne: I'm a bit older than you are, but this supply-demand thing doesn't seem possible to resolve in our lifetime.

Justin Huhn: It's looking very robust for the future. As I said, if we see sustained prices, $150 or $200 a pound for many years, we'll see some innovation on the supply side. There are potentially billions of pounds of uranium in phosphates. It's just not something that's there, at these prices, that will stem the tide in the next decade. I'm a nuclear advocate. Beyond this investment that we're in currently, we see it could last for many more years. I'm looking at nuclear going out for the rest of my life and wanting to see growth in the industry.

Not just for my financial interests but because I believe nuclear is the answer to many of the current questions plaguing humanity. We need a bigger supply of uranium that isn't easy to get out of the ground in enough quantities. Suppose we want nuclear to double or triple. In that case, we're going to want to see uranium from phosphates, and potentially from seawater, and all of these things, but still a lot of it in the ground, and plenty to keep the world operating on nuclear, and for nuclear to grow at these rates for the next 100 years, for sure.

Ed Coyne: Well, this has been fantastic. The level of stats and knowledge you have is incredible. Hopefully, our listeners enjoyed that as well and learned something today, but before we sign off, are there any last points you want to make that I didn't ask that you think people would find interesting or informative that you want to leave us with?

Justin Huhn: The most interesting thing right now is looking at China and their build-out because there's so much misunderstanding about the Chinese inventories, uranium production, and their needs to be purchased. They, by far, have more inventories than any other country. They probably have 400 to 500 million pounds of inventory. They currently have about 55 gigawatts of nuclear, and they're trying to achieve 150 gigawatts by 2035. If at that point, 150 gigawatts by 2035 is about 70 million pounds of uranium per year of consumption just in China.

China doesn't have domestic uranium other than phosphate tails, but they have yet to start exploring it because it's still cost-prohibitive. In the ground, they continue to try to explore for uranium, and they're coming up with dusters. They are out in the market buying a lot of uranium. As I mentioned, they have two very large contracts just this year with Kazatomprom. Once they soak up as much as they can from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, they're going to go into Africa even further, in Namibia, possibly Niger. Just recognize that the China story is balanced regarding the amount of uranium they hold.

Everybody's always concerned that we will hit a certain price of uranium, and suddenly, you'll see supply come into the market. While that's theoretically possible, the evidence has been the exact opposite. When we were at $25, the market was concerned that we would hit $40 a pound, Kazatomprom will open the taps, and we'll see inventories flood into the market. That didn't happen. Now, we are all the way to $75 a pound, and the market is tighter than ever. Not just since we've been watching it. We have connections throughout the industry. Some people have worked in nuclear for longer than I've been alive.

They said they had never seen a market like this. It is incredibly thin. The evidence is the exact opposite. The price has gone higher, and inventories are being held on more tightly. The Chinese and the Russians have been marginal spot market sellers in past years and have become buyers this year. There's just an absolute swing in sentiment, in selling turning to buying, and then a huge shift from a buyer's market to a seller's market. We're in the early stages of that seller's market. We are in year one of a contracting cycle for nuclear utilities. There are many exciting developments that will lead to higher prices continuously for the next few years and potentially beyond that as well.

Ed Coyne: Well, it's exciting to listen to this. Again, I hope everyone walks away from this podcast today feeling the same. Justin, we appreciate you taking the time to share your views and thoughts on Sprott Radio. If you want to learn more about what Justin's up to, clearly, after listening to this podcast, you see he's a plethora of information. He's got a ton of extensive work on uranium. He has a great newsletter featuring what he calls the Insider Pro's Focus List, which talks a lot about the names and opportunities we discussed today.

I encourage you to look at him on his website, uraniuminsider.com, and catch up on what Justin's working on. Once again, my name is Ed Coyne, and I appreciate you all listening to Sprott Radio. Thanks again, Justin, for joining us.

Justin Huhn: It was my pleasure. Thank you, Ed.