All right, thank you very much. Thanks for attending. Appreciate your time. It is a presentation, but don't worry, I just really only have three slides. This isn't going to be one of the more punishing ones that we launch you through. I will invite questions from the floor, so put up your hand. I may have to repeat the question for those that are on the webcast, but I'll also reserve the right to say I'll answer it later if I genuinely was planning on answering your question later. So let's have a bit of a dialogue. What I want to do is give you a bit of a look through our eyes, and starting with the forward-looking information, getting through that. I'm going to nest my comments in trying to prove up something to you.
We've been saying for quite some time that the fundamentals in our industry have never been better. And of course, the onus is now on us to prove it. That's a pretty bold statement. So what do we mean by that? Well, let me take you through a couple of very simple slides that actually have a lot of information buried in them. These slides in particular are rooted in uranium, but it's a great analog for thinking about where the nuclear fuel cycle is at, and more importantly, where the nuclear reactor cycle is at. So I'm going to get you to turn your attention first to the right-hand side. So we see a demand, a base case demand, and this is basically just a consensus view across our industry. That red line shows that nuclear demand is up and to the right.
Why is nuclear demand up and to the right? Well, because we're bringing back reactors that were shut down. We're saving reactors we thought we were going to shut down. We're extending the life of reactors that were going to end up hitting their first terminal license date. And not only are we extending the life of those reactors, we're operating them. We're getting more megawatts out of those reactors. And that's all good for the demand story. And of course, the most exciting part of it, we're building new over 60 gigawatt-scale reactors under construction today around the world. And I would submit many more poised to start. In fact, one of the things we're going to talk about later in this presentation is 2026 could be a very significant year in terms of seeing FID in the Western world on gigawatt-scale reactors.
That is something we haven't seen for a while. We think that that begins to unleash a very significant demand profile, so you see a base case demand that is going up, and we believe it's actually understated. Why is it understated? Because it only includes projects that are FID. Some of you may have seen an announcement from last fall, Westinghouse, Brookfield, Cameco, U.S. government, $80 billion announcement to build 10 reactors in the United States. That's not in here. That's not at FID. That's 65 million pounds of demand over 10 years that just showed up for uranium. It's not in here. That's pretty interesting. What also isn't in here is there's no reference to data AI in here. This is the consensus industry view. It doesn't include using nuclear for hyperscalers and generative AI. If that actually emerges, that's all upside to here.
This is basically just the installed reactor base among the traditional users of nuclear. So there's upside from that perspective. What also isn't in here is naval propulsion demand. Naval propulsion demand has to come from the same uranium and the same conversion that commercial utilities want to buy. And that isn't in here either at a time where we know everybody's investing in their nuclear navy. That's the same uranium. It's the same UF6. Also not in here. So we often look at this base case and we say, it is really understated. And then from a uranium point of view, we look at the supply stack and we say, well, actually, unfortunately, it's overstated, meaning that that supply gap is bigger. So let's take through why we think that that supply line is overstated. Take first the big wedge, primary supply. Big blue wedge.
It assumes that every project and every mine is running at its full license capacity. It's not. Cameco today has 30% of its production either curtailed or in supply discipline because we don't think the uranium price is sufficient. So we're not running all our assets at full production. Neither is Kazatomprom, the world's largest producer of uranium. So that blue wedge of primary supply is bigger than it actually is. And then we look at the secondary supply line. The secondary supply line is a global secondary supply line. We know historically the biggest source of secondary supply has been Russia. And we know today that Russian supply isn't coming into the Western market. So the idea that the secondary supplies are there to absorb the shocks in our industry just simply aren't a reality in a bifurcated market.
So we know secondary supplies are not playing the role that they used to in the past. That's overstated. And then importantly, the planned production line is overstated. Why is it overstated? Because when these industry consensus views are put together, the folks putting them together don't know the difference between a preliminary economic assessment on a junior advanced exploration project and the technical report on an actual mine. They sort of treat them as equivalent. And so they take the time frame in a PEA and say, well, if it's going to come on in 2030, we're going to build it into the planned supply stack. But I think anybody who's followed the mining industry knows preliminary economic assessments are rarely delivered in the time that they initially propose. So we look at that and we say the supply gap is actually bigger than what's depicted here.
This is great news for an incumbent producer of uranium, by the way. This does not mean uranium supply is going to be a barrier to nuclear revival. I don't want anybody to conclude we shouldn't build nuclear because we're going to run out of uranium. It just means we've run out of $20 uranium, and we've run out of $40 uranium, and we're probably running out of $80 uranium. We just need a higher price to convert the next set of global resources into reserves. Because we all know the difference between a resource and a reserve is that pesky economic model you have to put in the middle of it, and higher prices are going to convert more resources into reserves. We have a higher price scenario that we're looking at here, so what does it mean from a utility contracting point of view?
Let's look at the left-hand slide. The left-hand side slide has a lot of information buried in it. Let's start with the two wedges, the dark wedge and the light wedge. This represents the demand of utilities that has not yet been covered. We call it uncovered requirements in our industry. This is the material utilities need to run the known reactor base. And of course, as I referenced earlier, it's based on a conservative demand forecast, which has a lot of upside. So the uncovered requirements, which could actually be bigger than what we're depicting here, but let's just put this uncovered requirements wedge into a little bit of perspective. It's never been bigger. Relative to requirements, we have never had more long-term demand yet to come to the market than we do today. That's a pretty exciting story for an incumbent producer. How did we find ourselves there?
We found ourselves there because this industry has not achieved replacement rate contracting since 2012. So some of you may have heard us use this term before. We use it as a bit of a rule of thumb to understand where we are in the nuclear fuel cycle. And all we simply do is ask, are utilities collectively coming to the market today and buying as much material as they're consuming off their contracts? And interestingly, they haven't done that since 2012. So last year in 2025, long-term contracting, 101 million pounds. Consumption in 2025, 190 million pounds. So where's it coming from? It's coming from drawing down the secondary supply stack, drawing down inventories. And the longer you stay out of the market from a replacement rate point of view, the higher the uncovered requirements wedge grows. It's as simple as that.
So we see a demand wave that's coming into the market. It can be delayed, it can be deferred, but it ultimately cannot be avoided. And this looks like a very good picture for an incumbent uranium producer. Again, why we believe the fundamentals are so strong. I do want to emphasize something on this slide too. You can see that we've drawn a line between spot and term. We often hear folks in our industry say, well, with this much demand, don't you want to be spot exposed? Don't you think this is great for the spot price of uranium? And the reality is the spot is not the market. And this picture shows why. There is not a utility on the planet loading a fabricated fuel bundle in the next 12 months or probably in the next 18 months that hasn't already procured the uranium.
They don't run their reactors that way. So here's a really interesting thing about the uranium space. There actually is no fundamental in-year demand for uranium. Unlike other commodities, nobody actually needs it in the next 12 months. You're always selling forward into a long-term market. If we reconvene five years from now and that graph started in 2030, it would look exactly the same. There would be in-year demand for the next 12 months. So this doesn't mean the spot's a great opportunity. It means position yourself for a long-term contracting cycle that's coming. And what we know in our industry is that real strong price formation happens when we're at replacement rate or above replacement rate. So let's go back to that notion of replacement rate. We haven't been there since 2012. We didn't get there in 2025.
Every year we're not there, that wedge keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, which means when replacement rate does come, we are expecting very strong price formation. What are we talking about? Today's long-term price is $86 a pound, up from $17 when we started our supply discipline strategy about seven years ago. Our market has seen $86 U.S. per pound before, but never on the front end of a contracting cycle. We've never been this early in a cycle already at $86 a pound. But what's also interesting about this market is $86 isn't the right price. And what I mean there is in our industry, and I think many in this room know this, but I'll just go through it in a bit of detail. The long-term price of uranium is only set by those who are willing to sell uranium forward on a fixed price basis.
It's not actually informed by market-related contracts. Those contracts that are signed where if Scott and I were negotiating a contract and he needed 200,000 pounds of uranium 2028-2035 and he insisted on it being market-related, we would be fighting over what the price indicator is in the future, not what it is today. He might want the spot price, I might want the term price. That's what we're arguing over. 70% of the contracts in 2025 were market-related. 30% were base escalated, meaning $86 is only being set by 30% of the activity in the market. What's the 70% telling us? Well, in those market-related contracts, generally, Scott would turn around and ask for a ceiling. And if he asked for a ceiling, I'm going to ask for a floor. And right now, Cameco is able to achieve floors that are $75 escalated.
We're now able to get ceilings that are $150 escalated. What's the midpoint of that? $115 uranium. 70% of the market is already telling us we're at three-digit uranium price, not yet reflected in the long-term price. But history tells us that long-term price will move to the midpoint of those market-related contracts. Feels pretty good to be an incumbent uranium producer right now with this fundamental story. I'm going to go to what does it say about our strategy? Given that this is a long-term market and given that there's strong demand coming that hasn't yet showed up, we remain in a very strategically disciplined stance. We are not running all our assets at full production. We wait to capture the demand at the terms and conditions that make sense to us. That demand is term demand, which means we don't have to immediately produce into it.
We typically don't start delivery into a term contract for two years, maybe three. That then gives us time to prepare our assets for production. We don't front-run demand with supply in the uranium industry. Nobody's ever delivered value to the owners of a uranium company by front-running demand with supply. You wait for the demand to form, you capture it, then you make your supply decisions. So you have to be very strategically disciplined with your demand, capturing what you want when you want it. You then have to make sure you're making the right production decisions. And then you have to back it up with a conservative financial position that allows you to deal with the time that utilities can take to show up. There are uranium companies that didn't survive long enough to see that uncovered requirements wedge come to the market.
You have to be disciplined enough to bridge through to that gap. So when you think about our contracting strategy, it's really important to understand how we do it. We know that utilities need uranium. And we know that that demand is coming to the market. And basically, every market that's out there is a customer of ours. And in this type of market environment, we really want market-related contracts. Base escalated contracts, $86 escalated, that's okay. But when the midpoint of a market-related contract is already $115 and growing, that's really where we want to locate a lot of our forward activity. So we're the ones who are in the market constantly pushing up the floors and constantly pushing up the ceilings on market-related contracts. And how do we do that? We do that because most of what we do at Cameco is off-market.
We very rarely compete in a competitive RFP. A utility puts out an RFP, invites competition. We typically don't even participate, or if we do participate, we don't participate to win. We just participate to find out where others are offering prices, or we participate to send a signal in the market. Most of what we do is off-market, and off-market, we have a lot of demand. A lot of demand from traditional utilities, a lot of sovereign demand. Some of you might have heard a rumor in the market that we were negotiating a very long-term contract with the Indians. That was a shock to the market that there was that much sovereign demand. There is that much sovereign demand in the market. It's a pretty exciting time, and when that demand comes to us off-market, this is the kind of market where we don't respond with full volumes.
A customer might show up, for example, Scott, and he wants his 400,000 pounds of uranium, and we might only offer him 100,000 pounds, and we'll price that first 100,000 pounds, and in six months, we'll price the next 100,000 pounds, and six months after that, we'll price the next 100,000 pounds, and that is how you construct up and help the market discover true production economic pricing, and then as we move to true production economic pricing, that's what then gives us the opportunity to move our tier-one assets to full production, and then that's what gives us the opportunity to move our tier-two assets into a production stance, but we will never move them into the market ahead of that demand showing up.
That does not add value because then it runs the risk that we have to move material through the spot market, which is not something we ever want to do. So there's a big pipeline of demand out there. Our off-market activity is very strong. And we're seeing pockets of demand that aren't being picked up by the industry consensus numbers. And it's very exciting for us, but it means we're still in a disciplined mode because we think at $86 long-term price, it's not sufficient for the next wave of uranium resources. So pretty exciting time. Fundamentals in our industry have never been stronger. Final slide is just a bit of a review of the assets that we have. It's really important to understand that Cameco is way more than mining.
We're absolutely proud of our mining assets, but we are way more than mining, and we have always been way more than mining. In fact, now we've never had a more diversified portfolio. We would say that we have an unparalleled nuclear asset base. If we just stop and think about it, the largest exploration program on the planet, over 700,000 hectares in northern Saskatchewan in the Athabasca Basin that we explore on. Some incredible advanced exploration projects, two largest uranium mines on the planet, largest uranium mill on the planet, largest uranium refinery, largest conversion plant on the planet. Our fabrication for our pressurized heavy water reactors, along with Westinghouse's fabrications, 65% of the Western reactors have our fuel, our fabricated fuel installed in it. Of course, now with the Westinghouse transaction, we are across the reactor new build space.
Our strategy is one about building our own demand, participating in the construction of gigawatt-scale reactors, supporting the construction of gigawatt-scale reactors, which then become the 80-100 years of core business that washes backwards across the fuel fabrication all the way through uranium production. We're building our own demand with our strategy, and we're building it at a time when the interest in gigawatt-scale reactors has probably not been this high since the 1960s or early 1970s. I want to talk a little bit about Westinghouse, jump from uranium all the way across to the reactor new build space. It is a pretty exciting space. It is a space that a couple of years ago, when we underwrote the Westinghouse transaction, we didn't have reactor new builds in the business case.
We didn't have reactor new builds because some reactor programs were finishing, but we were also evaluating the transaction at a time when the Russians had invaded Ukraine and had taken hostage the Zaporizhzhia units. And we've lived through Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima. We know what a nuclear crisis does to the industry, and we weren't willing to pay for a nuclear revival that could have been at risk if the Russians had done something foolish. So as a consequence, we had the Energy Systems , the new builds at zero, and things have changed dramatically. Things have changed dramatically because people have rediscovered the attributes of nuclear. And that not only does it help you underpin climate security, but it also helps you underpin energy security. Russians invade Ukraine.
Germany is faced with the situation that if somebody turns off that tap, those gas plants go cold very, very quickly. But if you have a nuclear power plant and it's been through a fuel outage and has fresh fuel in it, it's going to run for 18 months uninterrupted. And if you have a reload at your plant, you're going to get another 18 months out of it. You're going to get 36 months of continuous operations without a single fuel delivery. That is energy security. And then, of course, as we move into this environment of onshoring, remanufacturing, Generative AI, and the race to have supremacy over it, nuclear's attributes also fit into national security. So it's a complete climate, energy, and national security story underpinning this intense interest for gigawatt-scale reactors.
When a utility builds a reactor, they basically have five key risks that they're trying to manage. The first is design risk. Utilities do not like to take design risk, nor should they, because ours is an industry where there are lots of really bad examples of starting to build something before the design is locked down. So risk number one is make sure you're building something where the design is locked down. Risk number two, make sure you know where your fuel is coming from. Many of the new reactor designs that are out there today will run on a fuel mode that nobody currently makes commercially. It would be like buying an electric vehicle and having no place to plug it in. So you've got to secure the design, you've got to secure the fuel. Another big risk for nuclear new build is licensing risk.
You've got a new design, you've got a new fuel design, well, you're going to take it through a licensing for the first time, and that generally is an open-ended process and can take a lot of time and burn a lot of calories and burn a lot of money. The fourth risk is regulatory risk. Okay, you've got a design, you've got a fuel, you've got a license, but you've got to locate it now in someplace where it's never been located before, and that's going to take a regulatory risk, and then once you eliminate those four risks, you still have big project risk. You're still doing a big project. What we really like about the AP1000 reactor that Westinghouse has in the gigawatt-scale space is that it takes four or five risks off the table on day one.
This is a huge competitive advantage for a nuclear utility. It's a huge competitive advantage for anybody who needs electrons and needs electrons that are going to run for 80 to 100 years as soon as possible. It is a technology that's been deployed, it's been designed, and it's ready to go, and as a consequence, you see things like the agreement with the U.S. government, $80 billion to build 10 reactors to get the fuel cycle going, to get the supply chain going, and more importantly, to get the energy security and national security going, and no surprise, this kind of announcement creates momentum. It creates a contagion effect. A U.S. that's prepared to begin to build and stimulate the supply chain and take on those risks of going from Nth of a kind to nth of a kind encourages other jurisdictions like Poland, like Bulgaria.
And then on top of that, we at Westinghouse have been able to take what was a competition with the Koreans and turn that into a collaboration. And so now every Western country that's looking at a gigawatt-scale reactor, if they're not looking at an AP1000, they're probably looking at an APR1400, and we participate in that too. So a part of the business that we didn't think was going to grow for Westinghouse has now got an incredible forward business case. Now, there is obviously risk to it, and none of them are at FID yet, which is why they're not in the business plan going forward, but it is a very, very exciting time for nuclear, and it backs all the way up into the uranium supply chain. And maybe before I open it up to questions, just a final thought.
This vertical integration that we've established from building gigawatt-scale reactors to fueling them allows Cameco to be a part of a conversation years before we normally would have. A utility would have picked a vendor, would have started to build a reactor, and then somewhere maybe two to three years away from commissioning would start to look for the fuel. Now we can be at the table on day one. When people are contemplating long lead items, reactor pressure vessel, steam generator, reactor coolant pumps, we can put up our hand and say, "Fuel is also a long lead item, and you better start ordering the fuel now." And we're starting to see that urgency years before we would have. We have an unparalleled set of strategic assets. Nobody else has put together the assets in the way that we have.
We're excited about it, and we just think we're incredibly well positioned for this revival in the nuclear industry. I would love to take some questions with the last few minutes remaining. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about the enrichment strategy we've been talking about? Yeah. So the question was about enrichment. There's always something that gets left out when we do these presentations. I didn't leave out enrichment because we're not excited about it. Enrichment is a really exciting space, and we have a great project. It's a third-generation enrichment project. Everything being done commercially right now is second-generation centrifuge enrichment. And there is a Western demand for enrichment that is using a different technology from a different supplier. There's a real need or real desire to diversify, so Global Laser Enrichment plays a big role there.
Our concern about the commercial enrichment space is actually trade policy related. And that is, right now, if you look at enrichment from a global level, there's no shortage of enrichment because the Russians have a lot of it. The Russians control about 40% of the global enrichment capacity. And they do this in these incredible dual-use facilities. These are military facilities. When not being used for military purposes, will be used to serve commercial contracts. But as the world realizes, the motive here was not altruism. The motive was to make Western fuel buyers dependent upon Russian enrichment. Right now, the Western world has taken a really harsh stance against the Russians. They're supposed to be out of the U.S. market by January 1st, 2028.
But before we would advance a commercial case for enrichment, we would want to know that those sanctions are going to hold, that that prohibition is going to hold. We all hope for peace in Ukraine, but if peace in Ukraine comes at the cost of Russian enrichment being back in the Western market, there won't be any white space for a commercial enricher. In which case, we will focus Global Laser Enrichment on the one project that it is working on, which is to re-enrich depleted UF6 tails, which isn't an enrichment project. It's basically an above-ground mine. It allows us to take a liability of the Department of Energy's depleted UF6, re-enrich it up to natural UF6, and have an above-ground mine, four to five million pounds per year, disguised as a 2,000-ton conversion facility, sold into the uranium side of the market, but not an enrichment project.
So a lot of attention in the enrichment space right now is on the trade policy. Will the Russians remain out of the Western market? And if they do, there will be exciting opportunities for GLE and just straight down the fairway LEU enrichment. If the Russians are back in, we will see the enrichment price get bid down again, just like they did before. Any other questions? I saw another hand over here. Yeah. Just curious, the typical customer, how much enrichment do they keep? Maybe in days? What's the range? Are they just in time delivery? Are they typically? There's a couple of dimensions to that question. I see that we're just about at time.
We use, as a bit of a rule of thumb, North American utilities about a year and a half forward inventory, European utilities two and a half to three years, Asian utilities, generally a lot more because they just don't have access to a lot of material. But we will agree with the trade consensus in our industry that outside of China, with its strategic inventory and a couple of utilities in Japan that haven't restarted reactors yet, the rest of the utility base is at or below historic inventory levels, which is a natural consequence of not being at replacement rate contracting since 2012. The material had to come from somewhere, and it came from a drawdown of inventories. So the inventories aren't there to absorb the shock like they have been in the past. A very exciting situation for an incumbent producer like Cameco.
I think, folks, I'm probably out of time with that. So thank you very much for your attention.