The World’s Biggest Uranium Producer May Ship Little to the West, Says Scott Melbye

Uranium stocks have been sold off alongside AI stocks, but Scott Melbye says the case for uranium doesn’t depend on a single new data center. With 440 reactors running worldwide and 70 more under construction, he sees a 1.7 billion pound deficit over the next 20 years, and he calls the gap between those fundamentals and share prices “an incredible dislocation.”

At the New Orleans Investment Conference, the executive vice president of Uranium Energy Corp and CEO of Uranium Royalty Corp tells Kitco News anchor Jeremy Szafron that the inventories that once tamed price spikes are gone. The next pound now has to be mined, and utilities still haven’t contracted enough to cover what’s coming. Meanwhile, Russia controls half of Kazakhstan’s output, and Melbye says there’s no chance the U.S. ban on Russian uranium, fully in effect in 2028, gets waived.

New buyers are lining up. Defense planners are seeking 4 million pounds a year of U.S.-origin uranium starting in 2030, and Big Tech is spending billions to restart shuttered reactors. Melbye calls American uranium “Louis Vuitton,” not Coach, and says small modular reactors have moved from concept to construction. Nuclear power, he adds, en…