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The United States has ordered ten new nuclear reactors by 2030.
Which, in theory, sounds great. There’s just one problem: We can’t make the fuel for them.
Not “we’re behind on it” or “we’re ramping up.” This country has no commercial-scale facility producing the enriched uranium those reactors are designed to run on. We’ve made about one metric ton.
We need 40 tons by the end of the decade.
Russia and China make most of the world’s supply.
Every conversation I’m having about uranium right now is about demand. AI, data centers, executive orders, reactor targets.
But most of it is already priced in.
The one overlooked factor is the fuel problem.
Your power bill is about to become an investment story whether you want it to or not.
Data centers running artificial intelligence need electricity at 3 am in February, just as they do at noon in June.
Goldman Sachs figures those data centers will eat 8% of total US electricity demand by 2030, up from about 3% today.
That power has to come from somewhere. Solar and wind can’t do it alone, batteries can’t bridge it at continental scale, and gas means you’re burning something.
Nuclear runs 24 hours a day and emits nothing while it does.
A uranium fuel pellet is about half an inch tall. Roughly the size of a gummy bear.
That one pellet produces the same energy as a ton of coal, 149 gallons of oil, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. And before you roll your eyes, those are the Nuclear Energy Institute’s numbers, not mine.
A one-gigawatt reactor holds 18 million of them.
Our reactors burn more than 40 million pounds of uranium a year.
In 2024, American mines produced 677,000 pounds.
We import over 95% of the fuel that generates a fifth of this country’s electricity. Until recently the biggest single supplier was Russia, at roughly a fifth of it.
There’s a ban on Russian uranium now. Some companies got waivers to keep buying, and those waivers expire in 2028.
So we’re racing China on artificial intelligence, running on a fuel we don’t produce, that we’ve been buying from an adversary, on a clock that runs out in two years.
China plans to build 100 reactors over the next decade.
The United States has built three in the last thirty years.
Three.
Four executive orders in May of 2025. Quadruple capacity from 100 gigawatts to 400 by 2050. Ten large reactors under construction by 2030. The NRC ordered to review licenses in 18 months instead of three years.
Those are the plans. Then the there’s money.
$2.7 billion into domestic enrichment in January, $800 million to TVA and Holtec for small reactors, a billion-dollar loan to restart the shut-down Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
The government took a partnership position alongside Cameco (CCJ) and Brookfield on Westinghouse reactor technology. When Washington starts buying equity, it isn’t a hobby anymore.
They reopened Oak Ridge for enrichment. Same site as the Manhattan Project.
The new reactor designs mostly run on HALEU, which is uranium enriched further than standard fuel.
As I mentioned earlier, America has no commercial-scale HALEU enrichment. We’ve produced about one metric ton. We need 40 tons by the end of the decade.
Remember who makes most of the world’s supply? Russia and China.
You can order all the advanced reactors you want. Without fuel they’re expensive sculptures.
None of this is a recommendation, and uranium is not a distressed asset anymore. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Cameco has been my favorite name in this sector for years. It’s the largest Western producer, it runs Cigar Lake and McArthur River in Canada plus one of the world’s biggest refineries in Ontario. It produced 23.4 million pounds last year and it’s projected at 29 million annually through 2029.
It’s also $104, and it’s a volatile stock. It traded as high as $135 in the last year, so a quarter of that move has already come out while the headlines got louder. I’ve always wanted this one on a pullback, and I still do.
Uranium Energy Corp (UEC), Energy Fuels (UUUU), Denison (DNN), NexGen (NXE), and Ur-Energy (URG) come up constantly, with wildly different amounts of actual production behind them.
For the commodity itself, the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SRUUF) actually holds physical yellowcake.
For a basket, the Global X Uranium ETF (URA) is the most liquid and mixes miners with reactor names. The Sprott Uranium Miners ETF (URNM) concentrates on producers and holds the Sprott trust inside it. URNJ is juniors, which means more upside and a great many more ways to lose everything. VanEck Uranium and Nuclear ETF (NLR) and Range Nuclear Renaissance Index ETF (NUKZ) widen out into utilities and builders.
Constellation (CEG) is the utility that took that a billion-dollar federal loan.
That’s a lot of info right… but none of that is a reason to chase anything today.
Reactors that exist right now burn fuel this country doesn’t produce, the Russian supply has an expiration date stamped on it, and the federal government is writing checks. That’s real, and it isn’t going away in two years.
But the discount is gone, and the discount was always the whole trade. Wait for the pullback. There’s always another one.
