Vladimir Putin has made the world a worse place in many ways, but nuclear fuel stocks aren’t one of them.
Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Western powers, and the United States in particular, have been doing a lot of soul-searching on the topic of reliance on hostile states for the supply of strategic materials.
One of those materials, something often overlooked in arguments over where we get our lithium or our rare earth elements, is nuclear fuel.
The United States is the world’s biggest producer of nuclear energy. Though we only get about 20% of our total power supply from nuclear reactors, that’s still enough to account for about 30% of total world production.
Surprisingly, the principal fuel that powers these reactors, uranium, is something we haven’t produced in the states in substantial quantities, in decades.
Nuclear Fuel Production… Forgotten Since The Cold War?
For the purposes of all-mighty cost-cutting, we get our nuclear fuel from all sorts of places, with our next door neighbor and airspace defense partner, Canada, accounting for 23% of it.
The problem is that spots 2, 4, and 5, which together account for about half or our supply, belong to Khazakstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan.
Just think what that means to not just our civil nuclear reactors, but to the reactors driving our carrier fleets themselves, all directly being dependant on a sworn enemy.
Russia, as of March of this year, has officially been cut off from the U.S. market. But the other two former Soviet member states continue to present a political risk given Putin’s sphere of influence.
The bottom line, and it cannot be more clear at this point, is that we need to be our own supplier of such a critical product.
The story is no different with lithium and rare earths, both of which were weaponized against us by the Chinese in a concerted, long-term effort.
We’re paying the price for that, but we don’t have to pay the price for this particular bit of money-grubbing short-sightedness.
The U.S. is expanding its reactor inventory over the next several years, and the private sector, headed up by the likes of Bill Gates, is stepping into the business of fission-generated electricity.
Who Will Supply The Uranium?
There is a company operating from within the Capital Beltway that’s recently become the first firm to add new Uranium refining capacity since 1954.
If you’re an American, you should be embarrassed to have had to read that, but also relieved. You see, this marks a first and critical step towards strategic independence.
It also marks an excellent investment opportunity, because unlike many of the other segments of the energy market, nuclear is often forgotten, overlooked, or dismissed as too dangerous.
But the reality is, nuclear is our only legitimate shot at decarbonizing our economy.
It is, by virtue of its practicality and feasibility, the greenest of all the green energy sources.
The problem is that the mere mention of the word brings up images from places which have become famous for the disasters they’ve hosted.
3 Mile Island. Chernobyl. Fukushima.
Reputations are unfortunately built off the most memorable moments, not necessarily the most substantive, which is why the retail investment community views nuclear power with skepticism.
Nuclear Isn’t Just Our Best Chance… It Could Be Our Only Chance
Regardless, it’s coming.
The time of aesthetic moralism, which we’ve seen rise over the last decade or so, is finally starting to burn out as the general public starts to realize that we don’t live in easy, stable times.
With government mandates, plans to start implementing dedicated reactors to power military installations, and now, the emergence of microreactors, demand for domestic fuel is going to explode in the coming decades.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been writing to my readers about this one-of-a-kind company in an unprecedented moment in history.
It’s undervalued and continues to fly under the radar at a $700M market cap.
Putin’s war and the general tide of negativity from previously friendly partners is pushing a new bull market
Want to see the best way to leverage it to your gain?
Check out the presentation my subscribers got to see. Fortune favors the bold, Alex Koyfman His flagship service, Microcap Insider, provides market-beating insights into some of the fastest moving, highest profit-potential companies available for public trading on the U.S. and Canadian exchanges. With more than 5 years of track record to back it up, Microcap Insider is the choice for the growth-minded investor. Alex contributes his thoughts and insights regularly to Energy and Capital. To learn more about Alex, click here.
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