Uranium’s resurgence has been one of the resource sector’s most durable stories of the past five years, but as prices hover near multi-year highs, investors are increasingly asking the same question: How late is it?
At the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC), panelists Rick Rule, Lobo Tiggre and Standard Uranium (TSXV:STND,OTCQB:STTDF) CEO John Bey suggested the answer is more nuanced than simple price charts imply.
While uranium equities have already delivered substantial gains since 2020, the speakers argued that structural changes in the market, not speculative enthusiasm, continue to underpin the bull case.
“This doesn’t feel like a mania,” Bey said, pointing to projections from the World Nuclear Association (WNA), which estimates that global nuclear capacity must roughly triple by 2050 to meet decarbonization and electrification goals.
The US, meanwhile, has floated ambitions to quadruple domestic nuclear capacity, a narrative that has recentered uranium as a strategic fuel rather than a legacy commodity.
Despite those ambitions, supply has struggled to keep pace. Global uranium production remains below pre-Fukushima levels, while years of underinvestment have hollowed out the project pipeline.
According to the WNA, primary mine supply currently meets only about 75 percent of annual reactor demand, with the balance filled by inventories and secondary sources that are steadily being depleted.
For Tiggre, CEO of IndependentSpeculator.com, that imbalance remains the core driver, and it has yet to be resolved.
“The idea that high prices would quickly cure high prices just hasn’t played out,” he explained. “Projects haven’t come online on schedule, and some never got funded at all.”
Even at a spot price above US$80 per pound, major producers such as Cameco (TSX:CCO,NYSE:CCJ) and Kazatomprom have been cautious about committing capital to new large-scale developments.
Rule, proprietor at Rule Investment Media, sees that hesitation as telling. “If the incentive price were really US$80, they’d be building,” he said. “They’re not. That tells you the real incentive price is higher.”
A subtle but powerful market shift
Rule also argued that many investors are still missing the most important development in uranium — a quiet structural shift away from spot pricing toward long-term contracting.
While uranium equities continue to trade off a thinly traded spot market — which accounts for roughly a quarter of annual transaction volume in a good year — utilities are increasingly locking in multi-year supply agreements.
“Unlike almost any other commodity, uranium producers can pre-sell material under contracts that specify price and terms,” Rule said. “That changes everything.” Those contracts, he explained, can serve as collateral, lowering financing risk and enabling projects that would have been unbankable five years ago.
The impact is already visible. Utilities have been steadily re-entering the term market since 2022, with Cameco reporting an expanding contract book and higher realized prices year over year.
Meanwhile, physical uranium investment vehicles, particularly the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (TSX:U.U,OTCQX:SRUUF), have removed tens of millions of pounds from circulation, tightening availability even further.
That tightening is occurring alongside geopolitical fragmentation.
Sanctions and self-imposed trade barriers have effectively split the uranium market, with Russian and some Central Asian material flowing east, while western utilities scramble to secure non-Russian supply.
As Bey put it, “That uranium isn’t coming back west.”
Supply, risk and the Athabasca advantage
The question, then, is where new uranium supply will come from. Canada’s Athabasca Basin, home to the world’s highest-grade uranium deposits, remains central to that answer.
Several advanced projects, including Denison Mines’ (TSX:DML,NYSEAMERICAN:DNN) Wheeler River operation and NexGen Energy’s (TSX:NXE,NYSE:NXE) Rook I asset, are both approaching key permitting milestones, potentially clearing the way for construction later this decade.
After decades without a new uranium mine approval in Canada, momentum appears to be shifting.
Bey said regulators are becoming more familiar with uranium-specific permitting, while First Nations partners are increasingly vocal in their support for project development.
Exploration also remains critical, though not without challenges. Bey noted a shrinking pipeline of trained uranium geologists, with graduating class sizes sharply lower than a decade ago. “Teams matter more than ever,” he said. “A good discovery today will get bought — and at a multiple that will surprise people.”
Rule was blunter. Of roughly 125 uranium juniors globally, he expects only 10 to 15 to generate meaningful returns.
“The rest go to their intrinsic value, which is zero,” he said.
Success, he added, comes down to people, geology and jurisdiction — in that order.
Jurisdictional risk itself sparked debate. Rule argued that political risk is often misunderstood, noting that supply disruptions in places like Niger tend to reroute material rather than remove it from the global market.
Tiggre, while broadly agreeing, said investors are justified in demanding a discount for higher-risk regions. “If I need a military escort, that’s not a positive check mark,” he said.
Volatility is the price of admission
Despite their bullish long-term outlooks, all three panelists emphasized that volatility is unavoidable.
Narrative-driven selloffs, whether tied to artificial intelligence (AI) hype, data center demand or broader risk-off sentiment, can whipsaw uranium equities even when fundamentals remain intact.
“That’s when opportunity shows up,” Tiggre said, pointing to sharp pullbacks in 2024 that preceded new highs later in the year. “Fundamentals and narratives aren’t the same thing.”
Rule offered a starker reminder. “If you aren’t willing to accept a small probability of catastrophic loss, don’t be here,” he said, referencing the ever-present tail risk of a major nuclear accident.
For investors willing to accept that risk, the panel’s message was clear: uranium’s bull run appears to be maturing, but is far from over. The easy money may be gone — but, as Rule put it, “the sure money may still lie ahead.”
AI, energy security and the case for uranium’s next leg higher
If the first half of the uranium bull market was driven by supply discipline and long-overdue utilities contracting, the next phase may be shaped by something far larger: electricity itself.
That was the gist of comments from Uranium Energy (NYSEAMERICAN:UEC) CEO Amir Adnani at VRIC.
He framed nuclear power, and by extension uranium, as a central pillar of the emerging AI economy, not merely a decarbonization tool. What stands out, Adnani argued, is not just the scale of demand that’s coming into view, but also the political and corporate alignment forming around it.
At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, global leaders, including US President Donald Trump, publicly identified grid fragility and electricity shortages as national security risks in the AI era.
For Adnani, the shift in tone was telling. “When leaders stop talking only about inflation and start talking about power and electricity, that’s a sign of the times we’re in,” he said.
Crucially, nuclear energy has become one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus in the US.
While Democrats often emphasize decarbonization, Republicans increasingly frame nuclear as a strategic asset tied to energy independence and security. “This isn’t a four-year story,” Adnani emphasized to the audience. “We’re talking about multi-decade growth underpinned by bipartisan political support.”
The urgency, however, collides with reality.
AI-driven electricity demand is accelerating far faster than new generation can be built. Adnani cited a Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) estimate calling for roughly 150 gigawatts of additional power capacity globally over the next three years from data centers alone — equivalent to powering more than 150 cities the size of Philadelphia.
“One gigawatt is a city of 2 million people,” he said. “And we’re talking about adding more than 100 of those.”
That buildout could require as much as US$3 trillion in investment. Governments, Adnani noted, cannot shoulder that burden alone. Instead, balance sheets from tech giants such as Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) are increasingly being deployed to secure reliable, long-term power — a dynamic that favors baseload generation over intermittent sources.
“This isn’t just political signaling,” he said. “This is the private sector committing real capital, as fast as possible, to infrastructure that works 24/7.”
For uranium, the implications are direct. Global pledges now call for nuclear capacity to triple by 2050, while the US has set its sights on quadrupling domestic capacity. That ambition implies a parallel expansion in uranium supply, something the market is currently ill-equipped to deliver.
At the same time, the supply picture is already strained.
The US consumes roughly 50 million pounds of uranium annually, but produces less than 4 million pounds, leaving it more than 90 percent dependent on imports, much of them from geopolitically sensitive regions.
In Adnani’s view, reshoring critical mineral supply chains — uranium included — has become a strategic imperative.
“This bifurcated world is a total game changer,” he said. “The US wants control over its supply chains, and uranium is now squarely in that category.”
Room for growth intact
Adnani also pushed back against the idea that uranium prices have already peaked.
The spot price spiked above US$100 in late January and has since stabilized near US$96, a level that remains well below the 2007 high of US$140, even as the market is structurally tighter than it was nearly two decades ago.
Adjusted against gold’s performance since that peak, Adnani argued, uranium remains historically cheap.
“On a gold equivalent basis, uranium would be closer to US$1,000,” he said. “That’s the headroom.”
Positioning for that upside, he explained, requires scale, patience and balance sheet strength, qualities Uranium Energy has spent two decades assembling.
The company built its asset base during the downturn, acquiring more than US$1 billion in projects when uranium traded near US$20. Today, it operates as the largest US-focused uranium producer, with ambitions to become vertically integrated from mining through conversion — a capability that does not currently exist domestically.
Uranium Energy’s unhedged strategy underscores its conviction. “We don’t put ceilings on our upside,” Adnani said. “We want maximum exposure to what we believe will be an unprecedented bull market.”
Overall his message echoed that of others at VRIC: commodities — and energy in particular — are entering a new cycle.
“This is another industrial revolution,” he said. “And it’s an energy-hungry one. We’re still in the early innings.”
Securities Disclosure: I, Georgia Williams, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.