Going Nuclear: How Uranium is Powering Portfolios with Trevor Hall & Justin Huhn

Key Takeaways:

• Current Price Levels: Huhn places spot at $85–86 and the long-term market at $89, with the forward curve near $100 per pound going out a few years. He frames the gap between spot and term as characteristic of a market where the real volume sits in future deliveries rather than in spot trading.
• Shift to Market-Referenced Contracts: Huhn says utility contracts have moved from mostly fixed-price five or six years ago to roughly 50/50 fixed and market-referenced today, and he expects that to reach 80% market-referenced within three years, with fully market-referenced contracts already being signed. He notes utilities procured 71 million pounds in Q4 of last year after roughly 18 months of near-total inactivity from early 2024 through mid-2025.
• Concentrated Supply Base: Kazakhstan accounts for about 40% of global production through low-cost ISR, Saskatchewan produces roughly 35 million pounds annually, and Namibia contributes 20 to 25 million pounds. Huhn argues that with so few production centers of size, any interruption carries outsized price consequences, and that historic price volatility — from $8–10 per pound to $134 and back to $40 — has kept the major diversified miners out of the sector, with BHP the exception via byproduct output at Olympic Dam.
• Life Extensions and Fuel Burn: Huhn puts the average age of the operating U.S. reactor fleet at about 44 years, with nearly all units already approved to 60 years and most likely to reach 80, and industry bodies suggesting properly maintained light-water designs could run to 100. He uses roughly 450,000 to 500,000 pounds per gigawatt of capacity per year as rough math for demand, with refueling every 18 months replacing about a third of the core.
• Shipping Routes and Geopolitics: Kazakh material has historically moved through Russia and shipped from St. Petersburg, but Huhn notes Cameco elected to route pounds from its Inkai joint venture via the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan after the invasion of Ukraine — a route he says took three times as long, cost ten times as much, and delayed shipments. He also points to China constructing 38 of the roughly 70 reactors under construction worldwide.
• New-Build Cost History: Huhn cites Vogtle 3 and 4 at $30 billion combined, split roughly $20 billion for the first unit and $10 billion for the second, a project that bankrupted Westinghouse and which he identifies as the primary source of U.S. utility hesitancy toward new construction. He notes $80 billion of the $350 billion U.S.–Japan investment fund is earmarked for ten new AP1000 reactors, with estimates near $8 billion per unit if the fleet approach holds.
• Hyperscaler Fuel Offtakes as Catalyst: Huhn describes utilities as holding only two to three years of inventory across a fuel cycle that itself takes two years to move material through, leaving little buffer. He points to Amazon's recent offtake directly from an Arizona copper mine as a template and says a right-tail catalyst over the next few years would be a hyperscaler signing a uranium offtake with a producer or near-term developer, most likely domestic or Canadian given that Chinese and Russian entities already hold the joint ventures in Kazakhstan.