Good morning, and welcome again to the 42nd Annual Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. We are not expecting a fire drill, and so if you hear an alarm, please take it seriously. Your primary path of exit is straight out the back door. Escalators will take you to the ground floor. You'll exit to the street and await further instructions. If, for whatever reason, it seems hard to believe that that path would be blocked, there is an internal staircase just to the left where I'm pointing, and you'll choose that. Go down, follow the lights there, and again, exit out onto the street. I am Bob Brackett, Bernstein's Co-Head of Energy and Transition and Global Metals and Mining. 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 then the iPad up here. With that, I will adjourn, and we'll begin our conversation. First of all, Grant, thanks very much for joining us.
Yeah, thank you very much. 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. Introduce yourselves, and then we'll jump in from there.
Yeah, absolutely happy to do that. 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. Please, would 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. We find ourselves in the fuel fabrication space for reactors, and between what we do as Cameco for pressurized heavy water reactors, the Canadian CANDU reactors, and what Westinghouse, which we own half of with Brookfield, does for the rest of the global fleet. About 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. 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 80-100 years of demand for our core business. It really is about taking control of the main drivers of our industry and then bringing that back into the core of our business. 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. 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. 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. Thank you for that opportunity.
Fantastic. I'm going to start with a very short-term question, and then I'm going to ask a very long-term question. 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, on uranium cycles. Has anything around today's energy crisis changed your thinking of how we should consider uranium and nuclear?
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 U.S. 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. 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. That began a real focus on energy security. That combined with the climate security attributes of nuclear.
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, 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 reliable. 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.
The very long-term question, amidst that backdrop, if we think about net zero ambitions, if you go back five or 10 years, and we had a number of countries around the world pledging or directing themselves to do less of something. Frankly, the results might've 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 AP1000 reactors. These are countries from China, from the U.S., goes down through the developed Europe, 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 5% CAGR in reactor builds out to 2050. How real is that? Can it be achieved?
The tripling nuclear pledge really was, I think, the result of the factors that we just discussed. A couple of years ago at COP28, it was the recognition of nuclear's attributes for climate security, of course. It was at COP28. 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. What I think a lot of people lose sight of is actually there's 73 reactors under construction today. 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.
Slovakia just brought on two brand-new reactors in the last two years. 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 U.K. 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. I would say the urgency to catch up is quite significant.
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.
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. 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?
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 U.S. I don't mean to use this as a pejorative term at all, but really the conditions in the U.S. were really to go after the bronze medal, not the gold medal. What I mean there is you had utilities under a lot of pressure by the administration and past administrations to start building. Of course, the last build in the U.S., 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. 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. The appropriate response from stakeholders was, well, why don't you wait and let somebody else go first? Even better, let somebody else go second. Do one and two, three and four, and why don't you be five and six 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.
The Department of Commerce, I think, as well as the Department of Energy, so Secretary Lutnick 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? 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? 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 base load 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 a 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 that's what created that race for the bronze.
It's that race for the gold that we're trying to create here, and I would say lots of momentum.
I think in your explicit guidance for 2026 is some moving forward, right? An explicit guide of not a deal, not a CAD 10 billion, but something signed, something binding.
Our current business plan for Westinghouse does have some preliminary work being done on evaluating new build in the U.S. The way that new build normally happens in our industry is, often it's a state that makes the decision to build new nuclear, tells a state-owned utility to do a reactor down selection. 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. We know how to build those. We know where every millivolt wire goes in an AP1000. You have front-end engineering and design to locate that product in a place where it's never been before. Westinghouse will often see in its energy systems business, the pickup of that cashflow and earnings from that front-end engineering and design. There's a Feed 1, a Feed 2. Feed 2 results in an estimate to complete. The estimate to complete drives the final investment decision. At final investment decision, you kick off a very significant procurement part of Westinghouse's business to buy all the long lead items, for example.
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. 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. 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. It really is a shift to the business model for Westinghouse. Right now, nothing's at FID.
There have been no agreements actually struck. 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, they're under very serious discussion. 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's going to be wrong.
For us, we wait for FID before we put it into the business plan.
It's interesting. 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 warehouse, stockpile materials. The other challenge is of that EPC contract, maybe 25%-40% sits within the E and the P, that remainder sits in the C. The two challenges with construction in nuclear historically have been change orders. Change orders can arise from two places. A poorly designed workflow, and that's mitigatable. Regulatory surprises along the way are what can kill you. Suddenly, you go back to a regulator and they said, oh, what do you mean 6 inches? Should've been 7 inches.
Talk about government support. From that perspective on the construction side.
Bruce Power in Canada is considering gigawatt scale new build. 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 Taishan EPRs, like the Olkiluoto 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. 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. Of those, many of those projects began before the design was properly locked down. 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. 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. Have your design locked down, understand where your commercial fuel cycle is coming from. There's, as you say, a licensing risk.
Licensing risk is often quite open-ended in the nuclear industry. 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. You're going to be doing first-of-a-kind regulatory reviews. Then if you can take care of those first four risks, you still have big project risk. 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. Now you're left with just big project risk.
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. 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 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.
Putting that all together is the challenge, but 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. 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.
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? If their eyes light up and they give you three cool things they're doing, you know that project is a bust. 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, accepting the fact that you have a model of your own for SMRs, small modular SMRs, normal 300MW SMRs?
How worried should we be that they come to market and beat the AP1000, for example?
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. Actually, we're seeing some shift in the nomenclature where people aren't saying a micro-modular reactor or a small modular reactor or a large modular reactor, because in reality, there's nothing small about a small modular reactor. Ontario Power Generation right now is building a GE BWRX-300 small modular reactor. An AP1000 is only 10% bigger than a BWRX-300. The AP1000 produces 1,200 MW. The BWRX-300 produces 300 MW. The AP1000 is only 10% bigger. 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? Is there some experience with big project development? As folks get closer and closer to that phase, we're seeing a real shyness towards novelty. 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.
In addition, we're seeing just the demand for power is actually outstripping some of those smaller platforms. You look at the size of some of the AI installations. Are you going to put 1,000 microreactors around an AI firm, or are you going to host four AP1000s, for example? The scale is moving away from it. At the same time, people being asked to make a risk-based decision are going back to what's known and what's available. 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.
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. Once nuclear was on the table, the reasons for going larger and larger 40 and 50 years ago are still here today. The conversation's increasingly going back up to big. Couple use cases. Microreactors are still very attractive against the diesel price. 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 eVinci reactor, a microreactor, that we've slow walked a little bit, but there's still a use case. 300 MW 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 MW doesn't fit on a site where there was 300 MW of coal-fired power, for example, but a 300-MW reactor fits very nicely. 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.
It's funny because the unit of currency for a data center is 1 GW .
If somebody announces, oh, we're building 1 GW data center, you're like, pretty cool. If somebody announces they're building a 300 MW data center, you're like, it's kind of small. It's almost a bit of the 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? Whereas I think a lot of people might have said it's the small little SMRs that come quickly and then the big dinosaurs. 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 six 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?
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.
You mentioned consolidation. We have a related question. What is Cameco's role in consolidating that market?
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 II, Gen II plus technology that the Koreans have, the APR1400, like the units built in Barakah in 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 vessel, size of the reactor coolant pumps, identical to the AP1000, just has basically a smaller turbine. We think that's the right way to go for a smaller reactor. I mentioned eVinci 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.
That's sort of the nuclear, the 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? Kind of answer that, and then we'll talk about that enrichment opportunity.
Just to level set on enrichment, I mentioned earlier pressurized heavy water reactors like the CANDU 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. That leaves 92% of the global market that's using some form of enriched fuel. 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. Enrichment today, if you exclude Russia and you exclude China, is in the hands of basically two state-owned enterprises, the French state-owned enterprise Orano, and the multi-state enterprise Urenco, 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 Centrus producing some levels of enrichment, but mostly a broker for other people's enrichment as opposed to producing their own. Enrichment is not a crowded field. It is a field where utilities are very interested in not only supplier diversification but also technology diversification. 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. 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. 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. Right now, commercially, our focus is on proving up that technology but waiting to see how the mainstream commercial enrichment market evolves. 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 U235 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. 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. At a global level, if you look at all the enrichment capacity available, the market's not undersupplied, it's actually oversupplied. 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.
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.
That leaves the other parts of the supply chain. The mining, milling, processing interests there. Again, you're one or two in most of those. Desires to get bigger?
Yeah, it all starts with uranium. 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. It's also unique because it's the one part of the fuel cycle that you cannot build within the timeframe of building new reactors. 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. We cannot explore for, discover, prove up, construct, and commission new mines within that window. 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 Cory'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. 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. We have brownfield leverage as well as greenfield leverage that we think nobody else has. You have to have the demand in the market, and it's just not there yet.
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.
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. Most takers of oil, airlines have sort of stopped hedging. Maybe they hedge one, two, three years out. 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. Now, 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?
That is a terrific question. Let me unpack it a little bit. 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. 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. What it 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. That wedge, that stock of demand between now and 2045 is bigger than it has ever been.
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. 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? 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.
What this means is, not only is the uncovered requirements growing, the industry has destocked 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. We've had a massive destocking in our industry, and that's reflected in the fall of the secondary supplies to our market because those inventories have been chewed through. That is absolutely great. It means that a uranium producer has a lot of demand coming for its supply, but you have to be strategic and patient. There is a great investment case for uranium. 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. Maybe they need a bit more material to put in an inventory, or maybe they have a fuel outage coming in a couple of years and want to buy a bit more material to put in process for a fuel outage or a reload. 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.
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. 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. Investors go, well, what's going on here? 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. They wait to find how cheap is that person willing to sell it for. Then they pick it up once we find the bottom of the market. There's a volatility to the spot market that is almost completely disconnected from the fundamentals of the term market. 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 and to 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 have seen uranium prices this high when we have been through above replacement rate contracting cycle. We are not even at replacement rate. We haven't been in a replacement cycle since 2012. We are already at $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 are in supply discipline waiting for it.
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+ reactors offline, roughly two dozen of those can come back. There are reactors in Europe that can come back. There's 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?
Generally, an announcement to restart a reactor that is shut down, the demand for the fuel begins right away. As part of the shutdown process, that utility probably worked through its strategic inventory. Now it actually has a restocking demand. When California announced that the Diablo Canyon units wouldn't shut down and they would extend, 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. 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. Actually, six of those reactors are sitting in the warm standby condition that they would be sitting in during a fuel outage. Why? Because those are the power sources that will come back in a pinch. 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.
That had been completely defueled. It had been completely cooled down. 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 a lot more work, but compared to a greenfield nuclear, it's a pretty exciting prospect.
Talk to financial strategy. Your balance sheet's extremely strong. Net debt versus market cap's 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? How do you think about that?
Yeah. I've mentioned a few times that because the uranium part of our business hasn't hit replacement rate contracting yet. We're still in supply discipline. 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. That's what really is driving the conservativism. As we look for opportunities through the fuel cycle, we generally fund our growth out of our forward contracts. 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.
Where we're seeing an opportunity to deploy capital is maybe in enrichment. We don't have a contract book for enrichment, 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. I don't mean Cameco putting capital into Westinghouse, but maybe we let them hang on to more of their capital for reinvestment.
Take less out.
a smaller distribution. We don't intend to put fresh capital into them. 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. 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. It is something we're not afraid of if the right opportunity came along. Ultimately, we're going to be in a return of capital mode. We will find ourselves with a cash generation that exceeds our ability to invest in it over the time frames of nuclear investment. Exactly what that looks like, it's probably going to be a bit of an all of the above strategy.
Maybe in the last minute or so, what's ultimately the value proposition for buying Cameco shares?
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. 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 takes a long time for people to replicate what we have. We have unique capabilities and unique technologies. 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 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.
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.
Fantastic. With that, I thank you, Grant. I thank you in the audience. Thank you very much. Thank you.