Conference Transcript - CCJ 2026-05-29

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

I am Bob Brackett, Bernstein's Co-Head of Energy and Transition and Global Metals and I will be hosting this fireside chat with Grant Isaac, the President and COO of Cameco. But ultimately, this is your fireside chat. The way you can join the conversation is through the QR codes you've been given. That will take you to Pigeonhole. You can use that to ask questions, which will appear on my phone and in the iPad up here. With that, I will adjourn and we'll begin our conversation.

Grant Isaac, COO

First of all, Grant, thanks very much for joining us. Yeah, thank you very much.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

Really pleased to be here. I was saying earlier, we've had the majority of the S&P Energy Index by market cap here this week, and I've spent most of this week in the Regent Room, which is down the hall, and it's one of the smallest rooms. Apparently, oil and gas can be well-contained, uranium can't. This is your first time here doing a fireside chat. We're going to talk about you all for the next 50 minutes, but maybe in two, three, four minutes, talk about Cameco. So introduce yourselves, and then we'll jump in from there.

Grant Isaac, COO

Yeah, absolutely happy to do that. And by the way, I do encourage questions from the floor, really interested in what you're thinking. Your questions help us understand where our story is being understood and where it's not being understood as well. So please, we'd love to hear from you. When you think about Cameco, I think one of the themes that we often use is that we are a nuclear pure play company, but we are right across the entire spectrum of the industry. Everything from the biggest exploration land package in the Athabasca Basin, in the prolific Athabasca Uranium Basin in Saskatchewan, largest uranium mines, highest grade uranium mines we operate, the world's largest uranium mill. As you start to work your way downstream, world's largest uranium refinery, western world's largest converter of uranium as we start to work through the stages. We're not in the enrichment business, but it is something we're very interested in being a part of and have quite a unique investment in the enrichment space. Then we find ourselves in the fuel fabrication space for reactors. And between what we do as Cameco for pressurized heavy water reactors, the Canadian can-do reactors, and what Westinghouse, which we own half of with Brookfield, does for the rest of the global fleet, about 60, 65% of all the fuel in Western reactors comes through either our facility or Westinghouse's facility. Of course, Westinghouse provides incredible reactor services. They are involved in most of the operating plants in some way, shape, or form, and have the best-in-class gigawatt-scale reactor, the AP1000. So now we're across the reactor cycle as well. We're putting a big shoulder into that as Cameco, but also as Brookfield, our co-owner of Westinghouse, because the idea of starting to build gigawatt-scale reactors in a fleet way in the Western world is actually the creation of 80 to 100 years of demand for our core business. So it really is about taking control of the main drivers of our industry and then bringing that back into the core of our business. And I would just maybe end the advertisement with the nuclear industry has been repriced. If you look at the fuel cycle, you've seen strong repricing in many of the stages. The repricing hasn't fully hit uranium yet, but uranium price is up, and it's up in a very healthy way. And the way we contract our services forward under long-term contracts means that all that pricing power is still in front of us. All the cash flow and earnings that come from producing from a Tier 1 asset base with stronger prices now flowing through the contract portfolio, that's all still in front of us, so we're very, very excited about our position in this industry. We're very, very excited about this industry, and we think there's a lot to talk about and a lot to unpack. So thank you for that opportunity.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And I'm going to start with a very short-term question, and then I'm going to ask a very long-term question. But on the very short term, we are now effectively 90 days, 91 days into an energy crisis, an oil crisis where 20% of the world's oil can't exit the Strait of Hormuz. It can find its way around. 20% of the world's LNG, similarly. No real impact on nuclear power and uranium cycles. Has anything around today's energy crisis changed your thinking of how we should consider uranium and nuclear?

Grant Isaac, COO

The last time the Western world built out nuclear reactors on a fleet scale was a Middle East energy crisis. That's what led to the 58 reactors in France And the nearly 60 reactors in Japan at one time, and the 104 reactors in the United States, and the 21 in Canada, energy security is a really difficult lesson for nations to learn, and we're in the grip of an energy security crisis. And I would say it didn't start with the recent Middle East action. It really started with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the realization that some really important Western economies had bargained away their energy sovereignty to Russia. And then that began a real focus on energy security. That combined with the climate security attributes of nuclear. And now if there's a third leg to the stool for our industry, it's actually the linkage of our industry with national security. The idea that there is a race for generative AI and agentic AI, and the critical path item for that is electrons. Electrons that are 24-hour, electrons that are base load, electrons that are resilient and robust, coming from an energy system that is highly, highly reliable. And so those three things have really come together, and I would say the crisis we're seeing right now in the Middle East is actually just adding fuel to a fire that was already burning and already helping the nuclear industry, I think, regain its appropriate role in national considerations of climate, energy, and national security.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And the very long-term question, amidst that backdrop, if we think about net zero ambitions, if you sort of go back five or ten years, and we had a number of countries around the world pledging or directing themselves to do less of something, and frankly the results might have been disappointing. Now we have countries around the world pledging to do something. 38 countries, maybe more it moves around, have pledged to triple nuclear power by 2050. That's adding something like 1,000 world-scale AP-1000 reactors. These are countries from China, from the U.S., goes down to developing economies in Africa, Senegal, for example. what do you think of that pledge that sort of if that's real that's a five percent CAGR in reactor builds out to 2050 how real is that can it be achieved the tripling nuclear pledge really

Grant Isaac, COO

was I think the result of the factors that we just discussed a couple years ago a cop 28 it was the recognition of nuclear's attributes for climate security, of course. It was at COP28, but it was also the context of the energy security and the national security which came together. We often look at those kind of announcements and we say, boy, it would be great if we just got started. And what I think a lot of people lose sight of is actually there's 73 reactors under construction today. So this isn't something we're waiting for. A lot of nations have continued to build through Central and Eastern Europe. Nuclear new build didn't stop. It just happened to be Russian reactors, and now they're looking to pivot away from Russian reactors. But Slovakia just brought on two brand new reactors in the last two years. But when you look around the world, over 70 reactors currently under construction, and really the focus now is how do we get launch conditions in a nation like the United States. We're going to see new build and we are seeing new build in Canada. We're going to see new build in Poland, in Bulgaria. You've got a number of Western European countries evaluating new build going on in the UK. But a lot of people, I think, look at the absence of new build in the United States and just assume that must be what's going on everywhere else. Well, actually, everywhere else is finding launch conditions and it's the U.S. that is lagging a little bit, but I would say the urgency to catch up is quite significant. So this is just adding to a base of growth that was already underway and a base of growth which is very exciting for an incumbent nuclear fuel producer like us.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And given this line of sight of new builds and given a question that we just had come in, the question is, and we'll jump ahead into Westinghouse, and then we'll come back to some macro, but the idea is, from the outside, things appear to have stalled on the $80 billion AP1000 agreement with the U.S. Are things still on the rails?

Grant Isaac, COO

Last fall, we announced an agreement to Cameco, Brookfield, Westinghouse with the Department of Commerce to really solve the challenge of new build in the United States. And I don't mean to use this as a pejorative term at all, but really the conditions in the United States were really to go after the bronze medal, not the gold medal. And what I mean there is you had utilities under a lot of pressure by the administration and past administrations to start building. But of course, the last build in the United States, I mean, we're not at first of a kind for AP1000s, but we're not yet at nth of a kind for AP1000s. We're still in that transition next of a kind costs working our way down to nth of a kind and there wasn't an appreciation for the challenge that creates for an individual utility that utility that stepped forward and put up its hand and said I want to build the next two AP1000s was effectively saying I want to build the next two most expensive AP1000s because we're not at nth of a kind yet so then the appropriate response from stakeholders was well why don't you wait and let somebody else go first, and even better, let somebody else go second. So do one and two, three and four, and why don't you be five and six? And so what we saw was the emergence of this really big order book for units five, six, and beyond, and a very small order book for one and two and three and four. And the Department of Commerce, I think, as well as the Department of Energy, so Secretary Lutnik and Secretary Wright, have really recognized that this is the challenge in the United States. How do you turn a race for the bronze medal into a race for the gold medal? And so whether it's the Department of Commerce looking at the next-of-a-kind funding, harnessing foreign direct investment pledges made to the United States by countries like Japan, South Korea, and others in order to buy down tariff rates, or whether it's using tools in the DOE toolbox, how do you shift that incentive so that the one who goes first, who, by the way, is going to stand up a supply chain and create very significant economic multipliers and very significant cluster multipliers that don't accrue to the first mover, they accrue to everybody else, how do you share in that? And that's the effort that's underway, and I would say a lot of momentum continues down these two tracks, both Department of Commerce and Department of Energy. I think the leadership understands the challenge and the hunger for the 24-hour baseload carbon-free electrons that come from these incredible industrial cathedrals that are AP1000s that are going to run for 80 to 100 years. That demand is there. It's just getting that coalition built in an industry-led, government-enabled model, unlike countries like Poland and Bulgaria where you have the state with a state-regulated utility taking the lead and taking on all those risks. We're trying to have the private sector drive those risks for the first time, which created that race for the bronze. So it's that race for the gold that we're trying to create here, and I would say lots of momentum.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And I think in your explicit guidance for 2026 is some moving forward, right? An explicit guide of not a deal, not a $10 billion, but something signed, something binding? Our current business plan for Westinghouse

Grant Isaac, COO

does have some preliminary work being done on evaluating new build in the United States. The way that new build normally happens in our industry is, and often it's a state that makes the decision to build new nuclear, and then tells a state-owned utility to do a reactor down selection. And so then we go through a process where they consider the technology that they can use. When the technology is chosen, that generally kicks off a series of engineering contracts, front-end engineering and design, not to change the reactor. If you think about our AP1000, it is the only gigawatt-scale reactor that's fully deployable today and fully designed to the construction level of design. Not just the engineering level of design, but the construction level of design because there are two operating in the United States, four operating in China, another eight under construction in China. So we know how to build those. We know where every millivolt wire goes in an AP1000. And so you have front-end engineering and design to locate that product in a place where it's never been before. So Westinghouse will often see in its energy systems business the pickup of that cash flow and earnings from that front-end engineering and design. So there's a feed one, a feed two. Feed two results in an estimate to complete. The estimate to complete then drives the final investment decision. And at final investment decision, then you kick off a very significant procurement part of Westinghouse's business to buy all the long-lead items, for example. So E, engineering, comes before P, procurement. What's interesting about the United States model is there's an effort underway to help go from a race for the bronze to a race for the gold by pulling the procurement out in front of engineering. And to say to utilities, we understand one of the things you're worried about is being the one who stands up the supply chain and takes on all that risk yourself. So what if we can find a mechanism where maybe it's the U.S. government that takes the lead on ordering the kit for 10 reactors all up front, and it's not a single utility taking that on themselves, in which case P, procurement, will come before E, the engineering part of it. And so it really is a shift to the business model for Westinghouse. But right now, nothing's at FID. There have been no agreements actually struck. So we're in that traditional model of there is some engineering in there, but we're not at an estimate to complete. We're certainly not at FID. And that's a precondition for us to start changing the growth rate of Westinghouse because if we started to make assumptions about where reactors are going to be, The reality is that when you tour around the world and look at the U.S. and look at Canada and Poland and Bulgaria, perhaps Saudi Arabia, maybe the UAE through Western Europe, you have about 70 AP1000s that are under serious discussion. None of them are at FID, but they're under very, very serious discussion. And if we make up a number and say, well, we think 15 are going to be started five years from now, the only thing I know for sure is that number is going to be wrong. And so for us, we wait for FID before we put it into the business plan.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And it's interesting. So if you think about that EPC framework, you flip the P and the E, someone can take that P risk, the government. They can effectively, you know, warehouse, stockpile materials. The other challenge is of that EPC contract, maybe 25% to 40% sits within the E and the P. That remainder sits in the C. the two challenges with construction and nuclear historically have been you know change orders and change orders can arise from two places a poorly designed workflow and that's mitigatable surprises regulatory surprises along the way or what can kill you suddenly you go back to a regulator and they said oh what do you mean six inches I should have been seven yeah talk about government support from that perspective on the construction side. Bruce Power in Canada is considering gigawatt

Grant Isaac, COO

scale new build and their CEO Eric Chassard is quite unique in the nuclear community because he's actually an active CEO who has built nuclear reactors. He came out of the French nuclear industry and he was responsible for finishing projects like the Tian Shan EPRs, like the Okoloto EPRs. Having played that role of having to fix projects that had gone off the rails, he's got a very clear vision of the risks that need to be managed by any utility making the decision for new build. And I'm simply quoting him, but he says there are five big risks that a utility has to manage. The first is design risk. Don't build anything that's not yet designed. This has actually been the number one mistake in nuclear new build over the years. When the U.S., from its base of 104 reactors, there were actually 55 different models. And of those, many of those projects began before the design was properly locked down. So don't start construction until something's fully designed. Number two is fuel risk. A lot of reactors that are being proposed today are not only novel in their design as a reactor technology, I can't tell you today where the commercial fuel is coming from. I have no idea where it's going to be made, and I have no idea what it's going to cost. And so, as Eric would say, that's like buying a fleet of electric vehicles and having no idea where you're going to plug it in. So have your design locked down, understand where your commercial fuel cycle is coming from. Then there's, as you say, a licensing risk. Licensing risk is often quite open-ended in the nuclear industry. So why take on that risk? Why start with a novel design and then have this open-ended licensing project? The fourth risk is regulatory, distinct from licensing. Regulatory is the idea that even if you have something that's fully designed, and you know where your commercial fuel is coming from, and you even have a license, you're going to locate it somewhere it's never been before. So you're going to be doing first-of-a-kind regulatory reviews. And then if you can take care of those first four risks, you still have big project risk. And so when you look at something like our AP1000, it's the only gigawatt scale reactor available today that takes four of five risks off the table on day one. And now you're left with just big project risk. And then this gets to Bob's point that when you think about a nuclear project, the unique nuclear stuff, the nuclear island, is only like 30% of the reactor. The rest of it is just a big civil engineering project. Lots of concrete, lots of steel, lots of steel buildings, lots of structure. The nuclear part is pretty well understood. And so what we see is when utilities talk about that fifth risk, and they talk about the big project risk, and they talk about the worries of cost overrun, they're actually not talking about the nuclear island. They're talking about the rest of the big civil project because, you know, it's been a while since somebody's done those big civil projects, whereas we know where all the long lead items are going to come from for the nuclear island. So putting that all together is the challenge, but we just, we love the AP1000 technology because it's designed, we know exactly where the fuel is coming from, it has a license basis, it has a regulatory basis. And in the hands of a utility like Bruce Power, which has been refurbishing all their reactors, they're going to be incredibly well positioned to self-perform. We think that's about as low-risk scenario as you could possibly find in nuclear.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

It's funny. I used to, in a past life, run a planning function, and you'd have projects come through. One of my favorite questions for engineers is, hey, are you doing anything cool on the project? And if their eyes light up and they give you three cool things they're doing, you know that project is a bust. And when they sort of sheepishly say, well, it's kind of like the thing we did last year, you're like, that's a project that's going to work. That segues me to, and I love the comments around building a new design with a new fuel. Put that in the context of SMR more broadly. Where are we in the SMR cycle? How bullish in accepting the fact that you have a model of your own for SMRs, small modular SMRs, normal 300 megawatt SMRs, how worried should we be that they come to market and beat the AP1000, for example?

Grant Isaac, COO

I'm going to reveal some very conscious and probably deeply unconscious biases on this topic, so bear with me. I think what we're seeing is the market is really starting to mature into appropriate use cases for different reactor technologies. And actually, we're seeing some shift in the nomenclature where people aren't saying a micromodular reactor or a small modular reactor or a large modular reactor. Because in reality, there's nothing small about a small modular reactor. The Ontario Power Generation right now is building a GE BWRX300 small modular reactor. An AP1000 is only 10% bigger than a BWRX300. The AP1000 produces 1,200 megawatts. The BWRX produces 300. The AP1000 is only 10% bigger. So actually, the notion of small and large is really quite blurred. The way we look at it is as folks have gotten closer and closer to making a nuclear decision, they've then fallen into this risk assessment we just walked through as a group. Make sure it's a design that's locked down. Make sure there's a commercial fuel available. Is there a license basis? Is there a regulatory basis? And is there some experience with big project development? And as folks get closer and closer to that face, we're seeing a real shyness towards novelty. I mean, novelty is not something our industry has done very well. And instead, it's being replaced by a mantra of we have to standardize, we have to sequence, and then we have to simplify the turn of each project. And that actually biases towards known technologies. It biases towards the conventional light water reactor technologies. And then in addition, we're seeing just the demand for power is actually outstripping some of those smaller platforms. And so you look at the size of some of the AI installations. Are you going to put, you know, a thousand micro reactors around an AI firm? Or are you going to host four AP1000s, for example? So the scale is moving away from it at the same time people being asked to make a risk-based decision are going back to kind of what's known and what's available. Now, I don't think that it crowds out the SMRs and the advanced nuclear reactors. I just think what it says is their place is probably to follow the establishment of a nuclear new build that's taking advantage of what we know today and what we already do very well today. And so as I look at it, I often say SMRs just kind of played this amazing Trojan horse role. They got nuclear back into conversations where people didn't want to talk about big reactors. But once nuclear was on the table, the reasons for going larger and larger 40 and 50 years ago are still here today. And then the conversation's increasingly going back up to big. So a couple use cases. Microreactors are still very attractive against the diesel price. So for remote industrial operations, remote communities, the idea of a transportable, movable reactor that's competing with the diesel price is still an attractive concept. And we have an Avinci reactor, a microreactor that we've slow walked a little bit, but there's still a use case. 300 megawatt reactors still have a use case around deep decarbonization. There are utilities around the planet that are looking to take down thermal generation and put up clean generation, but tap into all the existing switch gear and transmission and distribution. 1,200 megawatts doesn't fit on a site where there was 300 megawatts of coal-fired power, for example, but a 300 megawatt reactor fits very nicely. So the use cases are maturing, and I think that's probably what's going to drive the decisions around the type of technology people deploy.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

It's funny, because the unit of currency for a data center is one gigawatt. If somebody announces, oh, we're building a gigawatt data center, you're like, ah, pretty cool. If somebody announces they're building a 300 megawatt data center, you're like, ah, it's kind of small. And it's almost a bit of a strategy that, say, Tesla did, where you bring the shiniest, reddest, coolest model to market first, deploy that, learn from that, and then you kind of move down market, right? And so whereas I think a lot of people might have said it's the small little SMRs that come quickly and then the big dinosaurs. You know, maybe you start with big and then get smart enough on big that you learn how to do small. We'll see. Is there a winner-take-all? I could see a world where 6 to 12 companies are badly building SMRs, and that feels like a disaster. Does the world have to pick one or two designs and decide to get to nth of a kind on those?

Grant Isaac, COO

I think it's probably fair to assume there's going to be very significant consolidation. In our industry, if you go back to 70 years ago when Admiral Rickover made the decision to take nuclear power and convert it to civilian use, he had a series of criteria and principles that he was using to make that decision. At the time, there were molten salt reactors. There were high-temperature gas reactors. There were pressurized heavy water reactors available to him, and he chose light water reactors with enriched fuel up to 5% for a set of reasons that still hold today.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

You mentioned consolidation, and we have a related question. What is Cameco's role in consolidating that market?

Grant Isaac, COO

So if we're talking downstream and the reactor market, we would work through Westinghouse with our partner, Brookfield. We are just absolutely focused right now on the gigawatt scale market where we have the leading technology, the AP1000. It's deployment ready. There is not another technology that would compete with the AP1000 that we're interested in pursuing. We are in a partnership with a Gen 2, Gen 2 plus technology that the Koreans have, the APR 1400, like the units built in Baraka and the UAE. That is a partnership that they can only deliver those reactors under license with Westinghouse. That's a pretty good industrial arrangement for both us and for the Koreans. and we're happy with that position. When we look at SMRs, we have an AP300. We think it's a really elegant design. It's basically, instead of being a two-loop AP1000, it's a one-loop AP300. Instrumentation and control, fuel reactor pressure vessels, size of the reactor coolant pumps, identical to the AP1000, just delivers, just has basically a smaller turbine. We think that's the right way to go for a smaller reactor. And then I mentioned the Avinci already. We're waiting for that to be pulled into the market rather than try to push it. Our focus is really on AP1000s right now.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

That's sort of the nuclear downstream side. You're one or two and maybe three in almost everything in the nuclear supply chain except enrichment. Any desire to get bigger in that one or two spot? And then kind of answer that and then we'll talk about that enrichment opportunity.

Grant Isaac, COO

Just to level set on enrichment, I mentioned earlier pressurized heavy water reactors like the can-do reactors versus basically everything else. Pressurized heavy water reactors, about 8% of the global fleet, don't require enrichment. And we're fully integrated in that. We fabricate fuel. But that leaves 92% of the global market that's using some form of enriched fuel, and enrichment is part of the services that can be offered to our customers that we've never commercially been part of, but we've always said we would love to be part of enrichment. In Richmond today, if you exclude Russia and you exclude China, is in the hands of basically two state-owned enterprises. The French state-owned enterprise, Arano, and the multi-state enterprise, Uranco, the British government, the Dutch government, and two German utilities. They basically have the Western enrichment market. There's a small U.S. opportunity in Centris producing some levels of enrichment, but mostly a broker for other people's enrichment as opposed to producing their own. And so enrichment is not a crowded field. It is a field where utilities are very interested in not only supplier diversification, but also technology diversification. So what we have decided to do after years of trying to buy market share and discovering that our ability to be part of the incumbent enrichers would always require a price that would eat into the returns that our owners deserve for that kind of investment, we decided to pivot and explore our way into enrichment. So in 2008, we started working with a partner out of Australia, and GE at the time as well, on a third-generation enrichment technology called laser enrichment. And this is a very exciting technology diversification in the enrichment space. It uses the laser light spectrum to separate isotopes and keep them separated as part of the enrichment process. But right now, commercially, our focus is on proving up that technology, but waiting to see how the mainstream commercial enrichment market evolves. Instead, we're looking to deploy that technology to re-enrich a liability, which is the U.S. government sits on a very big inventory of depleted UF6. UF6 that's been through enrichment before. It doesn't have natural levels of the U-235 isotope. It's got much less. That material can be re-enriched. We can take all those canisters, which are a liability. We can run them through a plant, enrich them back up to natural uranium levels, and then have basically an above-ground U.S. origin uranium mine disguised as a conversion plant to sell into the UF6 market and watch how mainstream enrichment evolves. Now, why am I cautious on mainstream enrichment? Because right now, enrichment is only short in the West because we've decided to exclude Russia and not replace Russia with China. But at a global level, if you look at all the enrichment capacity available, the market's not undersupplied. It's actually oversupplied. So we want to make sure we know that the Russians are shut out of the Western market for the very long term. If they are, there will be a commercial opportunity. If they're not, if they come back into the Western market, they will oversupply the market like they always did. The Russian model is dual-use facilities. They're military facilities. When not being used for military purposes, they would just provide cheap enrichment service for Western customers who were happy to pay less and less and less for the enrichment every day, and then it develops a massive dependency. So there is a competitor out there who right now by legislation is shut out of the market, but if in the market, has completely distortive behavior, and we just want to make sure we understand that situation better before deploying capital. That seems like a pretty reasonable position. In the meantime, we'll get into enrichment through re-enrichment, play in the uranium and UF6 market that we think we know better than anybody.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And then that leaves the other parts of the supply chain. Mining, milling, processing, interest there. Again, you're one or two in most of those desires to get bigger?

Grant Isaac, COO

Yeah, it all starts with uranium. So as we work all the way back up to the top of the fuel cycle, the product for which there's no substitute is uranium. Now, it's not as sexy as enrichment, and other parts of the fuel cycle, but it is critically important. And it's also unique because it's the one part of the fuel cycle that you cannot build within the time frame of building new reactors. So if the world started building fleet-scale AP1000s, we can build enrichment plants, fabrication plants, conversion plants within the time it takes to build those AP1000s. But we cannot explore for, discover, prove up, construct, and commission new minds within that window. So we think it's the part of the fuel cycle that the market has fallen a little bit asleep on. We're very disciplined. We don't even have our own production running at full capacity waiting for that realization to come. We fully intend to remain, I was going to say dominant, but Corey's here. He's going to be really unhappy if I say dominant. We plan to remain dominant in uranium production. That is our goal. But right now, the market is so focused on other parts, they haven't paid enough attention to the uranium. So they're not sending the signal for us to be investing. But we're sitting here as Cameco with Tier 1 assets. We have 70% of our production running. 30% of our production is strategically either running at less capacity or is in care and maintenance. And we have brownfield leverage as well as greenfield leverage that we think nobody else has, but you have to have the demand in the market, and it's just not there yet. So uranium isn't something we have forgotten about, but we can't force the utilities to buy uranium, but we can wait when they show up. And to the extent that they believe it's scarce, they're willing to pay more for it, and those pounds will be worth more tomorrow than they are today.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And that brings me to the whole nature of uranium price. If I think about oil, if I think about natural gas, most oil producers barely hedge. They might hedge half of their volumes this year and a quarter next. And most takers of oil, airlines, have sort of stopped hedging. Maybe they hedge one, two, three years out. And same with natural gas. Uranium is that one commodity where hedging strategies from the purchasers, from the utilities, are significant. And therefore, it really does kind of bifurcate the market between a spot market and a long-term contract market. Can you give us a 101 on uranium price? What should people look at on their screen? And how should they think about price discovery and where that price is going?

Grant Isaac, COO

That is a terrific question. So let me unpack it a little bit. And I would start first with the great news, which is the cheat code for knowing where the uranium price is going is two things. One is the stock of demand that's out there. So in our investor presentation on slide 19, I don't happen to have it with me, but we show this thing called the uncovered requirements wedge. And what it is, is we basically track as an industry the amount of uranium that is required to run the existing nuclear fleet, plus plants that are restarting, plus plants that are under construction, but really no more than that. It's a pretty conservative view that has not yet been bought by utilities. And that wedge, that stock of demand between now and 2045 is bigger than it has ever been. So there has been no point in the commercial uranium industry where this much forward demand has yet to come into the market. That's pretty exciting. So stock of demand looks great for an incumbent producer. The second cheat code for demand is, what's the rate at which utilities have been coming into the market? What's the flow of demand? And this is also an interesting data point. Utilities have been borrowing time. Utilities, since 2012, have not bought uranium forward at replacement rate. They've been consuming more uranium off old contracts, taking delivery of old contracts, And coming into the market and buying less uranium, they've been below replacement rate in their contracting, which, by the way, is why the uncovered requirements wedge keeps growing. So what this means is not only is the uncovered requirements growing, the industry has de-stocked significantly. Because the only way to live below replacement rate since 2012 is to be chewing through inventories. It's the only way to do it. So we've had a massive de-stocking in our industry, and that's reflected in the fall of the secondary supplies to our market because those inventories have been chewed through. So that is absolutely great. And it means that a uranium producer has a lot of demand coming for its supply, but you have to be strategic and patient. So there is a great investment case for uranium. But what you always have to remember as an investor in the uranium space is it's always forward-looking. Uranium is a really unique commodity because it has zero in-year fundamental demand. There is not a reactor on the planet loading a fuel bundle in the next 12 to 18 months that hasn't already procured the uranium. That doesn't mean utilities don't occasionally buy in the spot market. But when they do, they're simply doing things like, well, building back up their inventory. You know, maybe they need a bit more material to put in an inventory. Or maybe they have a fuel outage coming in a couple years and want to buy a bit more material to put in process for a fuel outage or a reload. But the key to thinking about that is that utility demand on the front end, it's very small and it's highly discretionary. They don't have to buy today. It's not their requirements that they're buying for. So in our industry, people spend a lot of time looking at the spot market, but it is not a fundamental market. It has no fundamental in-year demand. And so we see this really weird result where the uncovered requirements is bigger than it's ever been. We're not even at replacement rate contracting yet, and we're already at a $93 long-term price of uranium, yet somebody shows up and sells 100,000 pounds, 200,000 pounds into the spot market, and it drops by $4. And investors go, well, what's going on here? Like, are we done? Is the run in the uranium price over? No, it's because the spot market has no fundamental demand. Somebody showing up with material that has no home and tries to jam it through a spot market basically creates the incentive where the intermediaries or the producers that might occasionally like to buy or the utilities that will buy. Just step back and they wait to find how cheap is that person willing to sell it for. And then they pick it up once we find the bottom of the market. So there's a volatility to the spot market that is almost completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the term market. So I'm not saying ignore the spot price, but don't think of the spot price as the indicator of where uranium is going. Spend more time thinking about that long-term price. That long-term price has been on a steady up until the right March. It's now at $93 U.S. per pound U.S. We have never seen uranium prices this high on the front end of a contracting cycle. We've seen uranium prices this high when we've been through an above replacement rate contracting cycle. We're not even at replacement rate. We haven't even been at replacement rates since 2012, and we're already at a $93 uranium price. That feels pretty good for an incumbent producer. I don't yet know when more demand is coming to the market, so we're in supply discipline waiting for it.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

So I think one of the remarkable things about – I've built supply-demand models across various dozens of commodities. The demand side for uranium nuclear is amazing because there's 440 reactors. There's a picture of every one of them. You know exactly how much they're consuming. Into that market, we're building 70-ish. In that market, there is the potential to restart perhaps two dozen and maybe more reactors. Specifically, if you think in a post-Fukushima world where Japan made the choice to take roughly 30-plus reactors offline, roughly two dozen of those can come back. There are reactors in Europe that can come back. There are certainly reactors in the U.S. that come back. The lead time for those reactors to turn on, talk to that. If I make a decision, if Japan makes a decision today and looks and says, we cannot obtain LNG for power, we don't want to pay the price of LNG for power, we don't want to subsidize utilities, we want to restart nuclear, what does that set of dominoes look like, and when does that show up in price?

Grant Isaac, COO

generally an announcement to restart a reactor that is shut down the demand for the fuel begins right away because as part of the shutdown process that utility probably worked through its strategic inventory so now it actually has a restocking demand so when when california announced that the diablo canyon units wouldn't shut down and they would extend And the poor fuel buyer for Diablo Canyon who just had sold off the last of their inventory at a cheap price then had to go buy back uranium at a much more expensive price. So usually that demand begins right away because of the lead times between procuring the uranium and then having it as a bespoke fuel bundle. In terms of the time it takes to turn on reactors, it just completely varies. It varies on the state at which that reactor is sitting. I'll just give you an example. Germany often makes a big deal about the fact that they turned off all their reactors as they said they were going to do. But actually, six of those reactors are sitting in the warm standby condition that they would be sitting in during a fuel outage. Because those are the power sources that will come back in a pinch. You know, if that tap gets turned off completely, those reactors are coming back. That's different, for example, than Three Mile Island that's restarting with Constellation. You know, that had been completely defueled. It had been completely cooled down. So it really depends on where that reactor is sitting. And we have a bunch of reactors in Japan, in Western Europe, that are sitting basically in a warm standby of readiness and could come back relatively quickly. Others are going to need a lot more capital or not a lot more work. But compared to a greenfield nuclear, it's a pretty exciting prospect.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And then talk to financial strategy. Your balance sheet is extremely strong. Net debt versus market cap is extremely low. You're generating free cash flow. Your capital programs are modest and funded. Ultimately, what's the right balance sheet? What's the right use of cash flow? And maybe over what time? Like, how do you think about that?

Grant Isaac, COO

Yeah, I've mentioned a few times that because the Iranian part of our business hasn't hit replacement rate contracting yet, we're still in supply discipline. So while we're in supply discipline and we only have 70% of our licensed and permitted production up and running, it means that we're still conservative financially. We can't control when utilities bring their demand to the market, and we have to set our financial strategy to be at least as patient as they are, if not slightly more patient than they are. So that's what really is driving the conservatism. As we look for opportunities through the fuel cycle, we generally fund our growth out of our forward contracts. So things like growth in the uranium segment is going to come from uranium contracts. Growth in the conversion segment is going to come from conversion contracts. So where we're seeing an opportunity to deploy capital is maybe an enrichment. We don't have a contract book for enrichment. So that is something we're looking at quite closely and seeing if the right conditions are there. At some point, if AP1000s take off on a fleet scale, Westinghouse is going to have to deploy more capital. And I don't mean Cameco putting capital into Westinghouse, but maybe we let them hang on to more of their capital for reinvestment and take a smaller distribution. We don't intend to put fresh capital into them, but that is, in effect, a capital allocation decision. We used to be in power generation as a company. We were an owner of Bruce Power until 2013, and as we see different markets look for funding structures to build, we will assess, is that a good investment for us? It generally isn't. It generally isn't. Our cost of capital can't typically compete with those infrastructure-like funds, but it is something we're not afraid of if the right opportunity came along. So ultimately, we're going to be in a return of capital mode. You know, we will find ourselves with a cash generation that exceeds our ability to invest in it over the time frames of nuclear investment and exactly what that looks like. It's probably going to be a bit of an all-of-the-above strategy.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

And maybe in the last minute or so, what's ultimately the value proposition for buying Cameco shares?

Grant Isaac, COO

We think that probably the best way to think about us is we have assembled a collection of incredibly scarce strategic assets. Assets that are in sovereign safe jurisdictions, assets with incredible brownfield leverage, and I'm talking spanning exploration all the way through to the reactor space. assets that are in regulatory environments which means competition isn't going to pop up overnight it would take takes a long time for people to replicate what we have we have unique capabilities and unique technologies and ultimately if you look jurisdiction after jurisdiction a lot of lights are on because of what we do a lot of factories and jobs are are there because of what we do, and we think it's at that strategic core of unique, scarce assets that drives the valuation of Cameco, and we think more and more people are starting to realize that fundamental role we play from cradle to grave across the nuclear industry and we just continue to hunt strategic assets when they're available.

Bob Brackett, Analyst — Bernstein

With that, I thank you, Grant, I thank you in the audience, and thank you very much.