Title:  Denison Mines Moving Toward Uranium Production | David Cates
Show:   Jimmy Connor (YouTube) — interviewer Jimmy Connor; recorded in London during WNA Symposium week
Guest:  David Cates — President & CEO, Denison Mines (DNN: NYSE American / DML: TSX)
Date:   2026-SEP-10 (YouTube publishDate, Pacific)
URL:    https://youtu.be/GeNXLTzSJX0
Length: 18:44
Note:   YouTube auto-captions pasted by Stephen. Fillers (um/uh/you know/look-less stutters) and false starts removed; wording otherwise verbatim, every (mm:ss) cue kept. Caption garbles left as spoken — "Dennis Mines / Dennis and mines / Dennis's" = Denison Mines; "nextgen" = NexGen Energy; "Al Dorado's got the former for copper project" = Eldorado's (Eldorado Gold, which bought Foran Mining) McIlvenna Bay copper project; "Kamico" = Cameco; "Sky Harbor Resources" = Skyharbour Resources; "KOSA resources" = Cosa Resources; "ISO" = IsoEnergy; "Aabaska / Atabaska" = Athabasca; "NYSC" = NYSE American; "realer wheeler" = Wheeler; "£8 million / £7 million" = 8M / 7M lb U3O8 (pounds of uranium, not sterling); "156 million pounds" is a caption garble (most likely "15 million", i.e. the 8M + 7M lb contracted/advanced book) — left as captioned.

(00:09) David, thank you very much for joining us today. So 2026 has been a transformational year for Dennis Mines and the big news is you're moving ahead with construction at the Phoenix ISR mine. Tell us what's happening at site right now. Oh, Jimmy, it's an incredibly exciting time to be leading this company and for our company when it comes to the grand scheme of nuclear energy and uranium.
(00:32) So few projects have been advanced over the past few years with all these terrible years and low commodity prices. We're really in an exceptional situation to not only have been approved for construction, be financed and immediately execute on our construction plans at Phoenix. And so this year already so many milestones.
(00:54) In February we received our license to construct from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. In March we or actually at the end of February we made FID right away. And then in March we started site preparation and early works. That program continued through the spring. We were overall very successful in executing some of the key initial work, site clearing, before migratory bird season which could disrupt our timeline.
(01:23) We're able to clear the site before that time of year hit and then start initial site civil works. And so we reported that by July we were roughly 20% done on site civil works. And while that may not seem impressive, what's really critical is that we were effectively 100% on subgrade civil work for key project areas like our process plant, the phase one of the well field and some of our areas on the site for power transmission.
(01:55) And we've also added capacity from our camp facility standpoint through the summer or early or late spring to the point where now and at the end of July we announced we had transitioned into a fullscale construction environment. Basically workforce is swelling. We've introduced a night shift so that we can make the most of the summer season where we have long days, reasonable weather conditions and now we are in full scale construction advancing into concrete work which is quite critical for the project for
(02:29) our process plant so that we can complete that concrete work before we get too deep into winter. And that's just so many fronts of activity right now. But generally on track for our key construction milestones for this year. And if I were to just kind of unpack that, it's process plant foundations so we can get our pre-engineered structure up, keep working in the winter.
(02:56) It's established our power infrastructure on site. We already have power at site, but we have our transformer to install and distribute. And it was starting the freeze wall in the Wellfield area. So overall all of those things are progressing nicely. And really yes the story has transformed. We are executing on what will be the first new large scale uranium mine in the region since Cigar Lake.
(03:22) >> You touched on the labor market and I'm curious because Dennis and mines and nextgen are both in the construction phase. So I can only imagine the labor market must be very tight. Do you have any problems finding skilled labor? >> Well and it's not just Dennis and NextGen. Saskatchewan is an incredibly successful province right now because of the government's commitment to supporting sustainable resource development.
(03:46) So we have projects like BHP's Jansen project in the province of Saskatchewan, Al Dorado's got the former for copper project in the region and Kamico's active in the region as well as Orano. Look, the province is not big. It's 1 and a.5 million people in Saskatchewan when you're being generous. And so there is generally a tight labor market in the province.
(04:11) We are partnered with a number of local and indigenous owned businesses. Most of the work on our site is being done by indigenous owned businesses. And so that is helpful in that they already have business platforms that exist, accessing a labor force that is present in that region. But anyone who tells you that it's an abundance of labor in that province is probably not being totally truthful.
(04:39) It's tight. We have the capacity at our camp. We are trying to increase the headcount but it's not easy. >> And the mine life at Phoenix is 10 years. It will produce 6 million pounds annually on average over those 10 years. But what's the timeline associated with production? Best case scenario.
(05:00) >> Well, Phoenix has one of the shortest timelines to production or another way to put it, short construction timeline because of its mining method. So it'll be the first insitu recovery uranium mine in Canada. We're not sinking a shaft or opening a pit. We're not building a mill even.
(05:22) We're drilling a series of wells into the ground and we're building a process plant, quite a small, quite simple process plant in the grand scheme of things because of the grades that we've got in our deposit. But all that to say that we're expecting roughly 2 years of construction timeline. So this positions us to be into production or first production in the second half of 2028.
(05:45) And just as a matter of the projects that exist globally that could bring meaningful scale in that range of 6 million pounds a year, we would be one of the largest uranium mines operating in the world. But in terms of new projects that can come to the market, we're certainly leading the pack.
(06:05) There's not a great depth of projects in that scale that are coming to the market before the early 2030s. We expect again to be in production towards the second half of 2028 which gives us quite an advantage when it comes to new entrance or new projects entering the market >> and the capex is $600 million.
(06:26) Maybe you can discuss some of your financing options. >> Yeah, so we updated the project capex the beginning of this year. 600 million's the post FID. There's a little bit of accounting that we do in our MDNA around PFID and whether we kind of got all the way we expected to pre FID versus post FID.
(06:45) So we're really looking at capex in the range of 700 million when you combine 600 post FID with what we were planning to spend prefid. Look, our company's well funded. We raised funding through a US style convertible bond. And we have our physical uranium holdings. So the company and the project are well funded.
(07:09) Some capital needs still for our growth projects. But overall the risk of significant equity dilution in our companies is quite low. We are monetizing our physical uranium. That has always been the strategy from when we acquired it in 2021 and we've been very successful realizing on that strategy to minimize the need for outside capital for the project.
(07:33) And your second project is Griffin and this is going to be a traditional underground mine when it's up and running. But what's happening there? >> Yeah, Griffin is definitely moving forward and in our mindset. With Phoenix into construction, our focus, our project evaluation team's focus has shifted.
(07:51) We have our construction and operations teams focusing on executing on Phoenix, and we're now able to divert some of our project evaluation and technical services skills towards bringing Griffin into the pipeline and that's quite exciting for us. We really wanted to focus on Phoenix from a regulatory standpoint, a capital standpoint, but now that we're executing on Phoenix and it has that short construction life, we absolutely have to be advancing Griffin so that when Phoenix generates all that
(08:22) cash flow, we're expecting we have the next project ready to redeploy that cash flow. So you will see that we have meaningful budget this year for technical de-risking at Griffin and really setting ourselves up to make a decision to go to feasibility study and ultimately start the permitting process for Griffin in the not too distant future.
(08:42) >> And the capex is a little bit more, 737 million. What's your intent? How are you going to finance that project? >> Yeah, it's an underground mine. So it does have higher estimated capex. It does really benefit though from the fact that it is on a site now that we brought infrastructure to for Phoenix.
(09:03) So while it's not a brownfield development, it has some of the features of that. For example, we brought road, we brought power, we have camps. All of that's already there for Phoenix, Griffin's about 3 km away. So it leverages some of that. And some of the work we're doing this year is around optimizing the ways in which we can find synergies between the two.
(09:26) But overall the concept is to fund it through internally generated cash flow from Phoenix. And so the sequencing is important. We need Griffin to be ready so that we can be permitted and ready to execute construction in a way that's coordinated with the cash flow we're generating from Phoenix. Redeploy that cash flow into Griffin.
(09:46) And now we take that 10-year mine life for Phoenix and turn it into more of a Wheeler River 15 16-year mine life that produces over a 100 million pounds. That's the concept. >> I want to ask you about your exploration program. You work with a number of other companies to help you in the exploration phase. Maybe you can just speak to these companies and what they're working on.
(10:07) >> Well, look, exploration in the Aabaska basin is quite challenging. You think about the number of firms that have been operating in the region and while we have a few high-profile discoveries over the last call it two decades, it's actually quite tough to make a discovery. High-grade deposits are small and hard to find.
(10:30) We see the value in adding growth potential to our company but we know that our focus needs to be on Phoenix. And so what we've done is while we will always have a robust, I call it domestic Denison, exploration budget for spending on our own properties, we've partnered with a number of juniors in our region where we like the teams or the vehicle and we've taken in several cases our non-core properties that we were not going to work in the next 3 to 5 years but that have excellent exploration potential and that
(11:06) deserve curve work and have the potential to result in a discovery. And we've put these into companies that we trust or that are good vehicles so that the projects can access capital that doesn't take Dennis's capital off of Phoenix or our focus away from executing on Phoenix, but allows these properties to be worked.
(11:28) So right now I'd highlight that we're invested in three companies in the region that really have exciting stories. We have a long-standing relationship with Sky Harbor Resources. They are our neighbor with properties just east of Wheeler River and recently we've worked together with them to increase our interest in that company but also to help them consolidate the Russell Lake property and then deconolidate that property.
(11:53) An enormous property at Russell Lake and now we've broken it up into four different JVS with Sky Harbor. Some Sky Harbor's operating, some were operating. Our focus there is on a property called Wheeler North which as you can imagine is proximal to our Wheeler River property where we're able to earn in and spend our funds there while Sky Harbor is also then working some of the other properties that are proximal.
(12:19) So that Russell package together with wheeler has great potential. And then from our non-core properties we've invested in two different companies. won KOSA resources, a number of exenison folks at KOSA and they've had some good success. They were also number of the folks that were at ISO when they made the hurricane discovery.
(12:38) So we put two properties into ISO. We own 19% of KOSA. We sit on the board there and KOSA's working the Murphy North property and a DRA in the Derby property where we have direct project interests as well. And then the last one is a company called Foremost Clean Energy. Really unique story here. They have an option on 10 of our properties.
(12:59) They've already vested 51% interest in those properties and have an option to get up to 70% of Dennis's ownership. So we'll still be minority on the properties and we again own 20% of that company or just under and foremost is listed on the NASDAQ. So we've not really tapped the potential there, but Denison has an incredible following through our DNN ticker on the NYSC.
(13:24) And so the potential for there to be an Atabaska focused uranium explorer with Denison sponsorship also US listed with foremost, that really has future potential there. We see so much potential for cross promotion with the US shareholder base. >> So you're in London and of course you're meeting with Fuel Buyers this week and I want to ask you about your contracting book.
(13:46) According to the last press release, you've contracted £8 million. You are in advanced negotiations on a further £7 million. Has anything changed? >> No, nothing has changed. We're really pleased with the response we've had from the market over the last 2 years. Our commercial activity has been measured.
(14:08) We're certainly not looking to place all of our production rapidly. We want to see market progression. And I think what the investors and market participants could appreciate from our strategy is that with the contracts that we've disclosed and the ones under advanced negotiation, we have an excellent foundation to be able to deliver on Phoenix.
(14:30) And now the focus is starting to evolve, where we really are being more selective about the way we're approaching the market. We've seen the way the market has progressed over the last decade. We've seen where there's instances of significant supply being made available to the market, the market reacts and absorbs that supply whether it's actually being placed or not.
(14:55) And we really want to be clear that our life of mine production is not on sale right now. We're pleased with the contracts and the agreements we have and now we want to see the next phase of market progression before we're too aggressive, and we don't want to hit on everything that's in the market.
(15:16) It would mean that we're offering our material too low a cost. So we want to see our market activity slow down a little bit now that we've got that foundation, but most of that foundation is market related. And so it's not that we've locked up even that first 156 million pounds. It's not locked up in fixed prices.
(15:37) It's primarily market related and now we want to see how the market responds to the fact that the rest of the material is being carefully placed over the next several years. So utilities are very interested and that gives us the confidence to be cautious with our commercial activities. We are not chasing again every utility that is putting an RFP out.
(16:03) We are very focused on making sure that we hit on contracts that are in our interest rather than just seeking market share or wins. We want to make sure that the market can progress and that we're not stopping that from happening. >> David, before we wrap it up, I want to ask you about your uranium holdings.
(16:23) In 2021, you acquired 2.5 million pounds of uranium. You press released earlier this year that you sold 750,000. Has anything changed? Have you made any more sales since that time? >> Yeah, Jimmy, the uranium was acquired always to support execution at Phoenix. And so now here we are building Phoenix and we are drawing down our physical uranium to fund execution.
(16:47) We acquired that material at a price just under $30 US per pound. So it's done quite well for us. We ended the second quarter with just over a million, 1.1 million pounds in inventory. We do have 600,000 of that already placed for delivery over the next year roughly and about 350,000 of that the price is already fixed and it's fixed at a price around $95 US.
(17:13) So it's an excellent return from our purchase price, but it's also at a price higher than where we've seen the market trading in recent months. The other 250 that's committed is floating market related. So it'll participate in where the market progresses over the next year. And then we have about half a million pounds uncommitted.
(17:31) And so that remains for us to place over the next 1 to two years to support project financing. >> David, as we wrap up, what can investors expect in terms of news flow from Dennis Mines in the coming months? >> Well, we certainly will be news flow rich as we execute on construction. And when you have a 2-year construction timeline, there's a lot of milestones that get achieved in each 12-month period.
(17:58) So certainly I would be watching for us to update on the key construction milestones for our first year of construction. Some of the things we talked about earlier in terms of executing on concrete work and the process plant and power infrastructure. Those are all things that will be critical updates towards the end of this year.
(18:17) We are also of course working on Griffin and updating technical studies and trade-offs there and our exploration portfolio as well as our commercial activities. So no shortage of potential milestones and catalysts for our stock. >> David, great update and thank you for making the time. >> Yeah, thanks Jimmy.