The United States operates 93 nuclear reactors — the largest fleet on earth — and cannot fuel a single one with domestically sourced uranium. The country has essentially no primary uranium production. The mines that once operated in Wyoming, Texas, and the Colorado Plateau shut down decades ago when prices collapsed, and the supply chain that supported them — the skilled labor, the processing infrastructure, the regulatory pipelines — dissolved with them. In 2026, spot uranium is approaching $92 per pound. Analysts project prices reaching $100 to $120 per pound, with some upside scenarios targeting $135 if supply fails to respond. The U.S. government has committed up to $80 billion to build new reactors and reinvigorate the nuclear industrial base. The USGS added uranium to its 2025 Critical Minerals List for the first time in years. The IEA forecasts annual nuclear investment rising from over $70 billion today to approximately $210 billion by the mid-2030s. Roughly 65 reactors are under construction worldwide.
The demand story is real. The supply story is the problem.
Where the uranium comes from
Global reactor demand runs approximately 67,500 metric tons of uranium per year. Mine production has historically met only 74 to 90 percent of that, with the deficit covered by drawdowns from government and commercial inventories, recycled material, and secondary supply. Those secondary sources are depleting. The market is transitioning from an inventory-driven system to a production-driven one, and production isn’t keeping up.
Kazakhstan dominates. Kazatomprom, the state-owned producer, is the world’s largest uranium miner, operating primarily through in-situ recovery — a technique that pumps acidified solution into uranium-bearing rock formations underground and extracts the dissolved uranium without conventional mining. Kazakhstan accounts for roughly 40 percent of global production. Canada’s Cameco operates McArthur River and Cigar Lake in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin — two of the highest-grade uranium deposits on earth, with licensed capacity of 25 million pounds annually and proven reserves exceeding 457 million pounds. Australia, Namibia, Uzbekistan, and Niger round out the major producers. Russia controls a significant share of global uranium enrichment and conversion — the processing steps between mining raw uranium and fabricating reactor fuel.
The concentration is the vulnerability. A large proportion of uranium production sits in non-Western jurisdictions. Sanctions, export bans, and the war in Ukraine are constraining the nuclear fuel cycle. Niger — historically a significant supplier — produced no uranium at all in 2025 after a military junta seized power and disrupted operations at the SOMAÏR facility. Kazakhstan has announced lower production targets for 2026. McArthur River reduced its 2025 output due to development delays. In the United States, several in-situ recovery restarts have ramped up more slowly than planned. The net effect: tighter global supply for reliable primary production, at precisely the moment when demand forecasts keep getting revised upward.
The demand surge
Three forces are converging on uranium demand simultaneously.
The first is reactor life extensions and restarts. Existing nuclear plants that were scheduled for retirement are getting new operating licenses instead. Plants that were shut down are being evaluated for restart. The economics shifted when natural gas prices spiked, renewable intermittency proved harder to manage than projected, and carbon-free baseload generation became a policy priority rather than a political liability. Nuclear went from a technology that governments were phasing out to one they’re subsidizing.
The second is new reactor construction. The $80 billion U.S. government commitment includes Westinghouse AP1000 deployments and GE Hitachi BWRX-300 small modular reactors. Canada has broken ground on SMRs at the Darlington nuclear station with combined funding commitments of roughly CAD 3 billion and a target completion around 2030. The U.S. and Japan announced a framework totaling $550 billion, with up to $332 billion directed to energy and AI-linked infrastructure including new nuclear capacity. China continues building reactors at a pace no other country matches and purchasing uranium in large quantities to stockpile for its future fleet.
The third is AI data centers. This is the demand driver that didn’t exist in anyone’s forecast five years ago. Hyperscale computing facilities require baseload power — reliable, 24/7 generation that doesn’t depend on weather or time of day. Nuclear fits that requirement better than any other carbon-free source. More than 63 percent of investors surveyed by Uranium.io believe AI-related electricity consumption will become a material factor in nuclear planning over the next decade. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all explored or announced nuclear power agreements for data center operations. The AI demand signal is being treated as structural rather than cyclical — permanent new load on the grid that requires permanent new generation.
Why supply can’t respond quickly
This is the constraint that the nuclear renaissance runs into. Uranium mining is not a faucet. Mine restarts require years, not months. The lead time from decision to production involves permitting (often multi-year regulatory processes), environmental review, workforce recruitment (specialized uranium mining labor that largely doesn’t exist anymore in the West), facility construction or refurbishment, and ramp-up testing. A mine that was shuttered in 2012 can’t resume production in 2026 just because the price is right.
Beyond mining, the fuel cycle has its own bottlenecks. Mined uranium (yellowcake) must be converted to uranium hexafluoride, enriched to increase the concentration of fissile U-235, fabricated into fuel assemblies, and delivered to the reactor. Russia controls a significant share of global enrichment and conversion capacity. The U.S. ban on Russian uranium imports — signed into law in 2024 — created a scramble for alternative enrichment services. Centrus Energy is the only licensed producer of High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) in the Western world — the next-generation fuel that advanced reactors and many SMR designs require. Centrus is expanding its Piketon, Ohio facility, but scaling enrichment infrastructure is measured in years and billions of dollars, not quarters.
The structural reality: even sustained high prices may not resolve supply deficits within typical investment horizons. Producers have signaled that three-digit prices per pound — above $100 — are the minimum necessary to incentivize new mine development at a scale that reflects actual capital costs, permitting timelines, and supply chain risk. The market is in a standoff. Utilities want to buy at current prices. Producers want higher prices before committing capital to new production. China, meanwhile, continues buying at whatever price the market offers, building strategic reserves while Western utilities defer purchases and hope prices stabilize.
The SMR fuel problem
Small modular reactors are the technology that’s supposed to make nuclear faster, cheaper, and more deployable. The first SMRs won’t be operational until 2030 or 2031. The World Nuclear Association projects SMR capacity could account for roughly 7 percent of global nuclear power generation by 2040. But many advanced SMR designs require HALEU — uranium enriched to between 5 and 20 percent U-235, compared to the 3 to 5 percent used in conventional reactors. HALEU production capacity in the Western world is essentially nonexistent outside of Centrus’s pilot-scale operations. Russia was the primary commercial supplier of HALEU before sanctions disrupted the trade.
Building the SMR fleet without the fuel to power it is the kind of sequencing error that turns a technology roadmap into a bottleneck cascade. The reactors require enrichment capacity that requires enrichment facilities that require regulatory approval that requires years. Cameco’s $2.8 billion ten-year supply agreement with India and Centrus’s $1.2 billion in convertible note offerings and $2 billion in contingent utility purchase commitments represent the financial architecture being constructed to close these gaps. Whether the construction finishes before the demand arrives is the open question.
The investment case and the honesty test
Uranium is one of the few commodities where there is essentially no substitution potential. A nuclear reactor runs on uranium. Nothing else does the job. Demand is inelastic — utilities will pay whatever the market requires because the cost of uranium is roughly 5 to 7 percent of a reactor’s total operating budget. A doubling of uranium prices is a rounding error in the cost of nuclear electricity. This means utilities will eventually buy at higher prices because they have no alternative. The question is when, not whether.
Long-term contract prices have risen to $86 per pound, indicating that utilities are accepting elevated costs even as they resist spot purchases. The World Nuclear Association has revised its uranium demand growth forecast to a 5.3 percent compound annual growth rate through 2040, up from 4.1 percent previously. Analysts project a supply deficit building over the next decade as mine production continues to lag reactor requirements. More than 85 percent of surveyed investors anticipate higher prices into 2026.
The honesty test: every part of this demand story — reactor restarts, new construction, SMRs, AI data centers — requires uranium, and the supply chain to deliver it doesn’t exist at the scale the demand forecasts imply. The nuclear fuel supply chain is being rebuilt in real time, by governments writing checks and producers scaling operations, against a backdrop of geopolitical disruption, depleted inventories, and a workforce that needs to be reconstituted essentially from scratch in the West. The nuclear renaissance is real. The mining and enrichment infrastructure to fuel it is years behind.
We cover the uranium supply chain alongside gallium and germanium export controls, the helium shortage, and the full landscape of critical materials that modern technology and energy systems depend on across our Rare Earth Elements course — including why the largest nuclear fleet on earth can’t fuel itself, and what that means for a planet betting on reactors to keep the lights on.