The Growing Chorus Singing Nuclear Power’s Praises - podcast episode cover

The Growing Chorus Singing Nuclear Power’s Praises

May 02, 202535 min
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Episode description

Not long ago, it was seen as too slow, too expensive and too controversial to play a major role in the future energy mix. Not anymore.

Nick Lawson, chief executive of investment firm Ocean Wall, and Jake Jurewicz, CEO and co-founder of modular reactor startup Blue Energy, join this week’s Merryn Talks Money to explain why they think nuclear power is becoming one of the most compelling long-term energy bets.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Welcome to Meren Talk's Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I'm Meren zum zet Web.

Speaker 2

Now.

Speaker 1

This week we are focusing on a topic that you know, John and I are both very interested in nuclear paramount role it will pay or should pay in our future energy systems. We talk about this a lot on this show. As we push ourselves towards a world where we hope to see better economic growth, better productivity, and as the use of energy intensive technology such as AI increase, our need for a better, more efficient, more secure energy supply

is only growing. So when we think about more energy, we really do have to think very carefully about where it is going to come from. According to report from the World Nuclear Association, electricity demand is now increasing about twice as fast as overall energy use and is going to increase by good fifty percent, probably possibly between now and twenty forty. So almost all reports on future energy supply from all major organizations suggest that we do have

to think about an increasing role for nuclear energy. So here to help us unpack that. Unpack what the world looks like now, what it will look like or should look like and what that means for your portfolio. We have two brilliant guests. We have Jake Durrowitz, co founder and CEO of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is commercializing an innovative modular reactor agnostic power plant architecture to house the next generation of nuclear reactors, and that we definitely have

to unpack that bit. And we have Nick Lawson, who we have spoken to before, is CEO and co founder of ocean Wall, which has three businesses corporate advisory, investment and research. Nick has twenty five years of experience in finance and is particularly interested in niche alternative investment opportunities. And one of the things he is most interested right now and here and I talk about a reasonable amount is UCLAR energy. Nick, Jake, welcome, thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 2

Thank you lovely to be marrying and hijake you and Nick?

Speaker 1

Right, Nick and Jake, Noick's other already which is extremely useful.

Speaker 2

Right.

Speaker 1

What we want to do is we want to set the scene here. So Nick, let me ask you, can you lay out for us as simply as possible the case for nuclear energy in our changing energy world? And I suppose the key thing to start with here is just to say that abundant energy is the key to pretty much everything. We talk a lot here about how all economic activity is energy transformed. So the more abundant we can make the energy that we survive on, and

the cheaper we can make it, the better. So how can we make the case for nuclear in that context?

Speaker 2

I think the point you made at the start merit of the technological needs. I mean, the demand now on a single request through an AI chat consumes two point nine what hours? Now that's ten times more than a Google search. Now, we as a country ten years ago would have about fourteen percent of our power come from nuclear. It's now about a little bit less than that. But the reason there is a need for it is is

that stable and continuous energy source. And that's crucial. And although I'm a big fan of wind and solar, the intermittency is the issue. Now. The thing with nuclear is there's no greenhouse gas emissions, so compared to fossil fuels, it's a big plus there for combating climate change. But I'd say in this very fragile world with so much

geopolitical risk, nuclear power offers domestically controlled energy. I mean we're on big net importer now, particularly from Norway and France of energy and this allows us that element of national energy security. Also the safety issue. I know people often conflate nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, and obviously the memories of things like Chernobyl and through Mind Island for

Kushima still exists. But it is incredibly incredibly safe, efficient, viable form of power and also at the same time for the UK it drives technological innovation. I mean, we have a company in Rolls Royce and other SMR developers really really pushing forward to advance nuclear technologies which will be good in terms of jobs, innovation and within their overall UK supply chain. So I think for the UK's long term sustainability, nuclear is the only answer.

Speaker 1

All right, let's just unpack a little bit around the use of renewable and low carbon energy sources. You say that you're not against wind and SOL look great. But the advantage that nuclear has over that, as I understand it, is that a it's not intermittent, and B it can be a nuclear plants, but whether they be big or small, can be constructed where energy is required. So one of the big problems with SOLO, which is mainly in the

south west of the UK. I'm just looking the UK at the moment, and wind, which is mainly in the very north of the UK is it not only as intermittent, but it's far away from the areas where electricity demand is the highest. And our grid is designed originally to receive energy from a few large power plants relatively close to where energy is required. Right, So renewables come with two problems, distance and intermittency. I can see Jake wanting to interrupt their Jake, Oh.

Speaker 3

I add to that, I like wind and solar for a lot of use cases, but in addition to the reality that you have to build them where the wind is, where the sun shines, and it's intermitute, it's not producing twenty four seven through sixty five, which you need for a modern economy. It's also low density, which means it

just consumes a lot of land. You need a lot of acreage to put down a lot of solar panels, a lot of winterbines, particularly in an increasingly advancing, modernizing economy where we're inventing new ways to consume power like large language models, data centers, but also as we deal with climate resiliency, and increasing installation of air conditioning, in electrification of space eating electrification of industrial loads. We need a lot of power in a growing economy, and we

have been very thoughtful about our use of land. You need a lot of land to put down a lot of win turbines and solar panels. You also need a lot of land to connect all the transmission and battery is required to harden that intermitted generation. So just it. It kind of balloons some of the infrastructure costs and balloons some of the space requirements to the entirely reliant upon wind and soilar.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and it is one of the big conversations in the UK at the moment is that cost of infrastructure and the problems of building new pylons in particular, and new substations and the you know, I'm speaking to anecdotal bit to friends the other day who suddenly find that, having brought a nice house in the country, they're about to be surrounded by ions, which was a surprise because until recently that is not something that most people would have considered to be a major risk when they buy

an isolated farmhouse, for example, I.

Speaker 2

Don't mind pylons. I always think of the ted Hughes poem iron Man. When I see them now, I actually quite like them.

Speaker 1

I'll let them know that, I'll let them know that's an available buyer for their house.

Speaker 2

Well, I went, I shot a shot the other day at someone's estate. And apparently to bury a pylon cost just shy of a million pounds.

Speaker 1

Well it's not just burying them. The cost is later to you know, if they need fixing, you've got to dig them up. So it's an awful lot more efficient to have them above ground, even if it is uglier. And obviously some people believe it leads to health concerns. We are getting sidetracked. We're getting side tracked. So what nuclear does. It solves for all these problems. It solves

for the intermittency, and it solves for the distance. It solves in large part, not completely, for the infrastructure problem and the need to build out a grid in a very expensive way. So it solves for those problems. But many would say that it comes with its own problems. There is, as you said, Nick, a lot of ern about safety, although I think we do know if we look at the numbers, that it's one of the safest ways of generating electricity. In terms of actual death right.

Speaker 2

That forth absolutely absolutely right. The big issue back in the nineteen fifties when you had Haitiam and Hartley Pool and the big reactors getting built was the nimb issue. People really didn't want them. And now if you go back to the sites of with the old British Energy Fleet is even side. Well the benefit has been huge. I mean you've got the movement of brilliant people to the area. But again it becomes a legacy thing. Now what we have is these sites with the permissioning on

them where we can add these small modular reactors. The issue in the UK is we have seven bodies that effectively are responsible for making a decision on Britain's nuclear policy. It's nuts now. I gave evidence to the Energy Select Committee last year around the decarbonization of power wack paper and you know they listen and they hear, but very

little action. I feel very worried and luke. When we were at this dinner recently, the representatives to the National Grid spoke and said there's no point us thinking about having an AI strategy when we can't supply domestic households. Now, there was a power surge in January of this year where power hit six thousand pounds of megawatt hour and we are reliant on Norway for the import of power.

We have the lack of whether it's government guidance, but we just do not have the infrastructure to supply our domestic needs, let alone those of a data center. And Microsoft's Stargate Data center, which is a five gigawa data center that takes down the power of five New York boroughs, five New York boroughs twenty four to seven for one five gigawatts Stargate center, and that's going to be that's going to be around eight percent of their total data

center nees. So you need to have this ci of capacity. And you're seeing now deals like Microsoft buying through Mile Island that's eight hundred and nineteen megawatts, you know, buying these states of themself. So you're going to have this issue that's going to take place where who do you prioritize. It will become an issue of moral turpitude if you're not supplying your households but you are allowing Microsoft to run a joint data stem.

Speaker 1

Well, it's interest, I mean, there was I don't know if you saw a little while back, there were some mutterings in the EU about banning or limiting AI and limiting the building and use of data centers specifically because of the energy use. It's dangerous stoughf to talk about in the UK because next thing you know, a Middle vand will be out there banning data centers.

Speaker 3

That's one of the things that kind of frustrates me, is like since the nineteen seventies in the oil embargo, there's been this big movement movement of energy efficiency. And energy efficiency has been great for increasing the productivity of certain technologies like refrigerators in your helm, but it's gotten a little too far in the minds. I think of certain politicians where they think, oh, we should just energy efficiency our way out of this climate challenge, out of

this energy consumption challenge. People start to conplaine the idea of oh, consuming more energy is bad, and that's just

a fly way of thinking. There's many countries around the world that are just now installing air conditioning, refrigeration for food, putting in hospitals, putting in modern infrastructure based standard of building requirements that are going to increase their energy intensity per capita from developing nation levels just to European levels, which are still which are of the energy conception per capital of the United States. For Canada, who are we

to say that they shouldn't consume energy? And let's look at ourselves. The UK needs to continue to grow its economy. Europe needs to continue to grow it's economy. It can't afford to fall behind on key technologies like AI, It can't afford to not electrify, transportation, industry, chemical synthesis, all the new capabilities that are coming out from our universities and labs. Are we going to say that we should not invest in that infrastructure. Are we going to start

turning off people's hot showers. No, we have the technology, We have the capability to build an energy supply infrastructure that is both a zero carbon and affordable, liable enough to meet the expectations that we've grown accustomed to over the last one hundred years. So I get very frustrated when I hear this rhetoric of oh, we should cut things off because they consume too much energy. The water desalination consumes a lot of energy. Should we not have clean water?

Speaker 1

Yeah, so we should affect it. We should celebrate increasing energy use because with increasing energy use, comes economic growth and improve lifestyles. So we should celebrate it and find a way to make it work. Right, absolutely, Jake, Let's talk about what you do. When I described it in the introduction completely incomprehensible, accurate, but incomprehensible. So will you explain to us what your product is, how it works.

Speaker 2

Yeah?

Speaker 3

Shall I'll describe in very simple terms. What we're doing is designing a modular plant architecture that is compatible with multiple nuclear actor vendors that allows us to basically cut the costs and cut the deployment time roughly in hats. And the way that we're doing that is that we're designing the plant so it can be entirely prefabricated in offshore oil and gas fab yards, offshore wind fabyards and shipyards from around the North of Britain, North and Europe,

and other facilities around the world. The advantages for the same reason a prefabricated home can be built on a more predictable cost schedule and at lower price and on a faster schedule than a stick built home on site. We're just taking advantage of the big factories that already exist that have done this for large energy infrastructure before, particularly for north sea oil and offshore wind. A little

known fact about nuclear power. If you look at Hinckley Point C or Flamanville, oklode O, Vogel, or any other major nuclear plant that's been built in the last forty to fifty years in the West, about only about seven percent of the cost of that plant is the actual nuclear actor. Ninety three percent of the cost of building a nuclear plant is the accrude interest on debt because it takes so long to build it, usually about ten

to fifteen years. Hence the construction overhead. It's the cost of training and relooking about ten thousand skilled workers to a place like Inkley Point and hosting them and their families, retaining them, mobilizing large thousand ton cranes, putting in performance bonds, how contingency, the litigation that happens between trades. It's all that overhead. And it's the same overhead that occurs when you try and build a big international airport or other

big SIBL infrastructure projects. So if we're trying to make nuclear look less like building a big international airport and more like buying an airbus a three forty, we can do that using the existing supply chain from off for wind and offshore oil and gas, using the existing labor force that is already skilled and trained to do heavy steel fabrication. So we've designed the plant to minimize the amount of what's called kind of nuclear QA nuclear grade work so that we can have most of it done

by the labor that's already trained. There's a big labor challenge for building nuclear and for building a lot of large infrastructure around the West. So part of the exercise here is thinking about how the best leverage the supply chain and the labor resources we do have so that we can go faster. It's critical that we think about

how to move quickly onto playing new nuclear. If we were to starting clean Point C you know today, we wouldn't and we built it the same way, we wouldn't be seeing the power come online until maybe twenty forty, and that is just too far for most companies to make investment decisions. The Microsoft's Googles Amazons in the world who are thinking about where the put Ai data centers, they're making shorter time scale decisions. They need power sooner.

Governments every need to make decisions sooner. So the way that we're designing this plant is specifically to attract project finance so that commercial banks can get back into the business of investing in nuclear power infrastructure instead of relying on government substitutes, which has been the process to date and tends to be very slow.

Speaker 1

Okay, so you can make one of these things in Aberdeen and ship it out to wherever it needs to go.

Speaker 3

Yep, that's the idea.

Speaker 1

How much space does it require? How much power does it provide?

Speaker 3

So the reactors we're working with can range in size from approximately seven to seven megalots to three hundred megalots per reactor. Per unit, each unit takes up approximately two to three acres when you take into account the full system, the steam plant, the balance of plant, switch yard. So it's a very space efficient, very power dense way to

produce power. We are designing it so that it can tuck into places along the coast, rivers, lakes, canals, or go further offshore, out of sight, out of mind, over the horizon line. Most of our design is below the water line, so you don't have a large two hundred meters mast sticking above the horizon line taking up your whole shed. If you own some property on the coastline and you're like looking at them to see we're designing it to blend into the environment.

Speaker 1

Okay, just to remind everybodycuse we're not talking to an expert audience here. The reason that all these plants are on the water is because the water is used for cooling, so they're automatically on a lake on the sea, et cetera.

Speaker 3

Well, yeah, particularly in the UK, you know, the UK's and islands, so a lot of the tower plants are along the coast. We like to have water for cooling the condenser, so yeah, it's used for cooling.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

And price wise, that Hankley is costing as what thirty four billion or something after being ten years late and seven thousand changes, etc. That's the kind of price point we'd really really like to avoid all of us everywhere, isn't it.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think thirty four billion and growing. We don't know what the final number is until it's all said and done. It's just not a sustainable number for any sort of financing for anybody to kind of buy an ass. It's even challenging for the government to do it. You're getting basically a negotiation between the UK government and the French government to try to figure out how to get

that thing financed. We're doing is designing a plant where you can build a unit for on the order of about half a billion so far less than a billion dollars, which enables private sources of capital to come in and tryance it.

Speaker 1

Okay, well, this sounds absolutely fantastic. When can we have them? It went outside every small town in the UK immediately, when's the first one going up?

Speaker 3

And where we're targeting a commercial operation for our first unit of twenty thirty one, it's specifically chosen a site where it can have a more accelerated path to permitting. I would say permitting and regulation that Nick brought up earlier is probably the main source of friction for moving faster. If we had a more stream aligned permitting process for nuclear not just in the UK but other parts of the world, we can deploy it much more quickly using

this supply chain method that we're pursuable energy. So twenty thirty one, we're in discussions about possibly pulling that's forward a couple of years with with an AI data center partner who has a lot of appetite for power and then once the first one's online, everybody wants to be in line for the second, so it's very quickly, very quick to ask that.

Speaker 1

Okay, so it is It really is the AI providers who are transformation all in the space, isn't it. They're the ones who are going to provide the finance to get this kicked off. And once the first couple are up, every other industry and every government is going to go, wow, why didn't we do this before? I'll have one of those two, and then Nick, we run into a problem, don't we, because everyone's going to want the same bit of uranium.

Speaker 2

Correct, And that's the premise of our thesis for the last five years. What Jake was saying about the timeline, I mean it's the same for Bill Gates and samill On with their SMR designs. But a lot of this is permissioning, as Jake says, I mean, Russia already has a floating swarm water to reactor academic loominofs which provides energy for remote locations. The Chinese also have them as well. The issue now is the size of the not just the swarmwer directors, but to have these sort of one

plus gigawatt reactors, and all these require fuel. That fuel is uranium. Uranium is the only the only inputs to a nuclear fuel rod. And I often give analogies to people that it's a little bit like a glass of water. What price would you pay for a glass of water? Now, well, probably a pound? What price would you pay in a week if you haven't had any well edit all your wealth, then you'll probably kill me and everyone around you to

achieve it. And that inelasticity that exists within uranium means that if a power plant doesn't have uranium, they have to shutter, and that shuttering can take years to restart. But also it costs an excess of a million dollars a day. But the most important issue is, and particularly in areas like the US, we're one in four households on the Western seaboard take power from nuclear is societal unrest.

If you turn off the nuclear power station, it doesn't take much in the US get people on the streets with guns anyway. But you know, we saw in two thousand and six the price of uranium spike seven times in six months. And that was the time when you

had half the world was against nuclear. You didn't have iPhones or AI data centers and the price because fuel buyers will pay anything, and I mean anything, because the input of the fuel in the oval cost of nuclear power plant is between three and five percent, which means they will pay anything to secure the fuel. The issue we miss in the West is is this whole idea of the inelasticity of demand but also the issue of supply.

There is one country that is responsible for forty percent of the output, and that is Kazakhstan, and that effectively makes it in uranium terms, the equivalent of OPEC plus one country. And that country is bordered by two other countries Kazakhstan Russia to the north and China to the east. And if you look at the history of Kazakhstan, it

never had its colored revolution from Russia. I won't use the word apparatchic, but if you look at the way in which the fuel rights took place in twenty twenty two and Astana, they were quelled by Russian paratroopers. We study trade data that comes out of Kazakhstan, and eighty percent of their uranium exports in the last quarter went to Russia and China. We are seeing a bifurcation of supply from the world's biggest producer away from the West and to the east. We study and track all the

MIT state visits that take place. President She's first trip after COVID was to see present Tokev of Kazakhstan when Makron took Framatone and Arano out to Astana to meet Present Tokerev last November, who turned up the following week. Putin, this is the hottest, hottest person at the disco Kazakhstan, and everyone wants them now if you can't. The only way in which uranium moves properly out of kazakhstanis through Russia, so Petez on the Baltic and then it goes out.

We've looked at other roots to see if it can move out through the East. It can't through to China, and whether it can move through the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea and the Bosphorus. It's almost impossible to do so. Putin owns all the cards in this in this trade at the moment, and Russia has been pioneering Uranian enrichment using gas interfugia since the sixties. They're responsible for fifty percent of the world's enrichment. So you take the fuel

out of the ground in Kazakhstan as the oxide. Then you have to turn it into a gas. Then you turn it into the pellets that go into the fuel rods. That is done by Russia, but.

Speaker 1

Not only Russian. It because you say forty percent comes from the Kazakhsan where's the other sixty percent? I mean, I love Canada. We like Canada.

Speaker 2

Yeah, well it's really it's a really good if you look at the world. So Russia have a policy called Near and Beyond are very similar to the Wings Belt and Road initiative in China, which is to take control of people that have or to go and build the plants, run the plants, fuel the plants in countries that mine

the uranium. So if you look at the coups that have gone from West to East Africa, Niche is the fourth biggest producer of uranium that now is under the qu Daeta and the friendship being kicked out and the Russians are now in there. If you look at the other big producer, the Mibia is really controlled by China through the Wings program. The other biggest producers Uzbekistan. So you can get a picture. Now, Yes, Canada is a producer of uranium habi Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan. It produces

twelve percent of the world's uranium. But to give you an example, we financed the company that found discovered uranium in twenty ten. They get it out to the ground in twenty thirty two. Because everything in uranium exactly the same is what Jate was saying around building plants is glacial. Everything is glacial. Nothing moves quickly, and so the idea of being able to ramp up production in uranium is dis impossible. So uranium has gone up three times in

the last four years, and the supply response it's gone down. Now, what other commodity can you think of with a supply response to a tripling in the price is going down. I think the price of uranium could be moving so exponentially that there will have to be almost like a forced measure from governments, and that won't stop the price going higher.

Speaker 1

My worry here is that one of the things that we started talking about was energy security and how we don't really get much of that from renewables, and we certainly don't go much better from fossil fuels given we refuse to explore and produce our own but I had thought that maybe nuclear was a place we could get a little energy security from. But from what you say, absolutely not.

Speaker 2

Not So the advice I gave to the government and I still live to the government cause I advised the treasury and number ten is the idea of having our own sort of sequestering vehicle for uranium. Now, we are very fortunate that with Urenko we have enrichment facilities in the UK, and they do exist, but it's not the

amount of the levels of enrichment that we need. And there's a fundamental reason for this is that after nineteen ninety three, when Yeltsin and Bush signed the mega tons to megawatts program, this was the idea of the down blending of Russian weapons grade uranium to be sold as an energy source. The world became hooked on cheap down blended Russian uranium, which meant that they stopped investing in their own centrifuges and enrichment facilities, and so by dint

of that, we don't have them. So Russia controls that game. So there is only one operational conversion facility in the US that's in New Mexico, and it's run by Urenko, Right.

Speaker 1

We've really got to stop getting hooked on Russian gear, haven't we. We have to Jaco, Are you worried about the supply of uranium to your plant?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I guess I want to add a few things here, so don't want to in an inaccurate or so mystic picture. I got to work with one of the largest nuclear fuel park camroutines at Excellon when I was there on the corporate strategy for six years. Excellent owned well now constellations about I think it's twenty two to twenty three reactors in the US. They'd buy a more nuclear fuel than pretty much anybody, and we would buy pretty far out in the future. As part of the supply chain.

Uranium has not been a huge concern, largely because there are major uranium supplies in the US, in Canada and Australia, and not just in Kazakhstan. It's just that it's been such a steady state supply and demand that there hasn't been a lot of investment in new supply, and over the years the supply is just slowly shuttered. If the price really spiked, just like anything, you'd see a lot of new supply come online. In uranium mine.

Speaker 2

Way would you? But Jake, I hear what you're saying that a uranium mine is not like you don't take it out of muffball and restart it. The inflatory break even costs of restarting a US miners around ninety dollars a pound, But then you've got to go through the permissioning. I mean, we the US mine five hundred thousand pounds of uranium a year. The global need is fifty million. You know, this is almost impossible. And all the rigs that were used in Why I'm in Utah have all

moved to oil and gas. The people, the geologists, the scientists, they've all disappeared. It sounds so obvious to restart production, but it's impossible to do in actual effect.

Speaker 3

I fully disagree. I complete.

Speaker 2

Why Why do you disagree? Why do you disagree? Tell me in mine that you can restart now?

Speaker 3

Well, so mining uranium isn't like mining most stays. And that's because like a lot of people think about, oh, it's a fuel, like it's like like coal or like gas, and they think about roughly the ratio of how much of it you need? You need to feed a lot of coal a lot of gas, a lot of other kind of manner into these types of enter production for nuclear nuclear is about one hundred million times more energy

against premium mass than anything else. You don't need you to very much uranium to make a maguad hour, which means that you can actually it's valuable to pour uranium out of extremely dilute sources. You can extract uranium out of seawater.

Speaker 2

How much does that cost?

Speaker 3

The Japanese have shown you can do this for about four hundred dollars a kilogram, four.

Speaker 2

Hundred dollars a killer so four hundred dollars a killer one. What's the price at the moment? It's sixty three dollars a pound the cost of extraction from seawater. So that means the price of uranium is going to have to absolutely raw to make the extractional costs from it.

Speaker 1

Isn't that part of your point?

Speaker 2

It doesn't.

Speaker 1

Isn't that part of your point. It doesn't matter if it rules, because it's such a tiny part of the process that it doesn't matter if your uranium cost you four hundred dollars. It's just a matter of it. Is there uranium out there that we can get to keep the plants rolling.

Speaker 2

I'm going to play the expert here to uranium in terms of the world needs two hundred million pounds as it stands at the moment of side. When you mind uranium at one hundred and fifty meters below ground, it has non conformity. It's a bit like a pearl necklace with different sized pearls. The absolute amounts are tiny. The way in which geologists find it is they look for radioactive samples in small boulders and they triangulate them from where they would have moved from the thawing of the

last ice Age ten thousand years ago. They then have to vector into very very very specific areas to find those scenes. There's two big seams that run radioactive seams that run through the Athabasca basin. Then the timing of being able to extract it, permissioning from indigenous people, finding the geologists, the cost of the rigs, everything about it has to have a break even price to know that you can sell that uranium at a future point in time of ninety dollars a pound. The current price is

sixty five. So we're now in a point where no way is going to restart. If you wanted to restart any mine in the world, it's going to take you four to five years of permissioning from an existing site where broke US to uranium Nager Corporation, who are the biggest US producer at the moment, they are waiting. They sit on pounds and they're waiting. Of course they're waiting because they have to be contracted at something norms of one hundred to make it economically viable.

Speaker 1

Okay, So I think we can agree on one thing, which is that uranium price will probably go up.

Speaker 2

Okay, yes, yes, okay.

Speaker 1

So we can disagree about how the supply demand imbalance may or may not be solved over the next five to ten years, but we can agree that in the short to medium term we would expect to see the uranium price rise significantly. And we can also agree that that shouldn't make any difference to the ongoing process of producing a SMRs and bumping up the production of nuclear energy globally.

Speaker 2

Is that fair? I'm going to say one thing, and I think the issue that we're seeing with Bill Gates and Sam Altman securing the fuel, as Jake said, is because when they started modeling the cost of small modulary actors buck. In twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, the cost of enriched uranium was around six one thousand dollars a kilogram, that IRR was around fourteen to fifteen percent. It's now thirty two thousand dollars a kilogram, which means that IRR

is zero. They need to find a way to secure in rich uranium and a cost that brings the irs back up to where they were when they started modeling. Small modulor reacted.

Speaker 1

Jake, anything that we've missed? Do you think that you would like to add this conversation.

Speaker 3

As a species, we need to figure out how to come groupes of nuclear power pretty much every every power source in universe. Ultimately it stems from nuclear. Wind and solar are just indirect ways of extracting energy from the Sun. And then if we're going to embrace this future of energy abundance, not just for AI, but for any other innovation that we're going to drive forward in our economy, we've got to figure out how to build how to build more nuclear power, and how to build out the

supply chain for nuclear power. Fuel included, labor included, still included, and.

Speaker 1

That is the path to cheap, abundant energy and fastising living standards around the world, which of course is everyone's ultimate.

Speaker 3

Aim, right, Absolutely brilliant.

Speaker 1

Thank you both so much, Nick, anything else you want to add.

Speaker 2

I'll say this, China have built thirty seven one gigawatt reactors since Fukushima. They're building one hundred and fifty reactors over the next decade. Now. That is effectively their demand is to create two hundred gigawatts, which is twelve Beijing's of power. So I think if when we look at what the UK is doing and contextualize it, it's the command economies that are really really going to drive this further forward because they are building at a rate that we can't even conceptualize.

Speaker 1

Yeah, and we should start thinking more about that. Thank you, Thank you, Nick, Thank you, Jake, very very kind of you both too, join.

Speaker 3

Us, Thank you, Thank you.

Speaker 1

Right before we go, As you know here on Marrin talks money, we like to leave you with a takeaway or two. So I know that after all this discussion about uranium, uranium mining and uculear power, you will want to know how you can invest. Now, obviously there is not investment advice or anything remotely like that, but we just wanted to let you know roughly where you can look. There are a couple of investment trusts in the space.

There's Yellowcake and there's Giga Counter. Yellowcake actually holds physical uranium oxide concentrate. Geiga Counter investment in exploration development production companies in the sector. You can also look at the ETF. There are quite a few of these. There's the Sprott Uranium Miners ETF and there's the Global x Uranium ETF. That's just a couple. There are several more, and the performance of everything that I just mentioned should of course

be pretty closely linked to the uranium price. Thanks for listening to this week's Marin Talks Money. If you like us, show, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and keep sending questions or comments some Merri Money at Bloomberg dot net. You can also follow me and John on Twitter or xim marins w and John is John Underscore Step. Episode was hosted by Mimare and some Upweb. It was produced by Somesadi Moses and Amantala Amadi. Sound designed by Blake Naples.

Special thanks to Jake and to Nick

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