Uranium Discord — Paul Mann's helium deep dive at the Emerging Growth Conference

0:08 The company in one slide — two enrichment processes, four verticals, three end markets

• The framing: "a differentiated isotope enrichment platform to strengthen global supply chain access to critical materials used in nuclear medicine, next generation semiconductors and nuclear energy."
• "We have two processes to make isotopes economic: separation process and quantum enrichment — and we have a large helium project in South Africa as well to bring helium to the market."
• The stated objective is a step-change in kind, not degree: "the goal over the next six months is to bring most of these divisions into commercial production, start generating revenues and free cash flows and then start to grow, build new plants" (1:23). The four verticals — PET Labs, the stable-isotope plants, Renergen and Quantum Leap Energy — are laid out at 1:46, with the note that "today we're actually going to take a different step… a deep dive into Renergen and helium."

2:13 PET Labs — 50%+ H1 growth, revenue doubling, and first drugs into humans

• "We achieved over 50% revenue growth during the first half of the year. Revenue should double in 2026 versus 2025."
• The lag matters for reading the numbers: "when we invest in PET Labs, we typically don't see the pick up in revenues for a couple of years. And so we're really at this point now where revenue is starting to accelerate and build momentum over the next three or four years."
• AlphaNostics, inside PET Labs, "has developed a number of proprietary drugs to treat cancer and they will go into clinical trials later this year" — Mann positions the whole unit as "right at the start of a new therapeutic cycle in pharmaceuticals where we use radioisotopes to treat cancer."

3:04 Three stable-isotope plants in commissioning — and the six-month milestone list

• "Within ASP Isotopes, we've built three stable isotope facilities in South Africa: one for silicon-28, one for carbon-14 and one for ytterbium-176/178. These are all in the process of starting up and being commissioned at the moment."
• Silicon-28 is the near-term focus: "we've put together the first 48 stages. We're putting together the final 48 at the moment and that plant is enriching silicon-28 at the moment."
• The dated checklist (5:09): first Si-28 shipment in H2; carbon-14 "currently producing carbon-12" and waiting on sufficient C-14 feedstock; the ytterbium continuous processing vessel built during September and "a fairly quick enrichment from that point"; helium and LNG shipping in Q3; Phase 2 construction starting in H2. "Phase two is 13 times the size of phase one."

4:33 Quantum Leap Energy — S-1 filed in November, spin-out targeted "later this year"

• QLE "focuses on nuclear fuels for the future, specifically HALEU, lithium-6, lithium-7, LEU+ and the kind of nuclear fuels the world needs to build to double its nuclear capacity over the next 25 years or so."
• "Our goal is to spin Quantum Leap Energy out later this year, ideally in the third quarter, and we filed the S-1 for that in November and I think we're pretty much there with the review process."

6:31 The asset's one differentiating number — 3% helium

• "When we drill for helium we get about 3% helium in the gas, and typically when you drill for natural gas in the United States you get about 0.4% helium and in Qatar you get about 0.04% helium."
• That is roughly 7× a US gas stream and 75× a Qatari one — grade, not scale, is what makes a small field economic here. "We have the only onshore petroleum production right in South Africa."
• It is "a designated strategic asset by both the South African government and the United States government," which is what gets US development-finance money into the capital stack.

8:21 The helium market — $3bn, semiconductors and rocketry, and a reserve that emptied

• The physical properties that make it non-substitutable: chemically inert, zero viscosity as liquid and gas, very low density, boiling point of −270°C.
• "What's driving significant growth right now in the helium market is really semiconductors and rocketry. You can't launch a Falcon 9 or a Starship without a large amount of liquid helium… You can't make a semiconductor without liquid helium."
• "It's about a $3 billion market and you'll see over the last 10 to 15 years or so the US strategic reserve has dropped from being about a third of global supply to almost zero. And coincident with that the prices have escalated from about 200 up to more like $400 or $500 per MCF." Demand growth he calls "GDP-plus."

9:55 "The fifth helium supply crisis" — half the world's supply is off the market

• The concentration: "about a third of the world's helium production comes from Qatar, about 15% or so from Russia." America is "broadly balanced"; Asia and Europe are "significantly out of place in terms of their needs and the supply."
• Both big sources are impaired at once. "Iran has damaged Qatar's gas processing facilities and so Qatar had to shut down its LNG and helium production. The strait is also closed so they can't get anything out of Qatar to the rest of the world… we do understand that some of those facilities are impaired for a number of years rather than just a number of months." And "Russia has introduced helium export controls. It will no longer be exporting helium to the rest of the world."
• The conclusion: "almost 50% of the world's helium supply is currently not available for customers." What he heard in Asia is a volume panic rather than a price one — "some very nervous semiconductor companies… Not so much about price, more concerned about the quantity."

11:39 Two meteorites, a US-federal-reserve-sized 1P, and why the Cape is the right port

• The geology, as told: two asteroid impacts at the same point three and two billion years ago left "a large concentrated source of uranium about five miles below the earth's surface" whose radioactive decay produces helium "trapped in the upper portion of the rock."
• Scale: "our 1P reserves are basically about the same size as what the US federal helium reserve is" (13:24), and Phase 1 plus Phase 2 combined "use about half the yellow box in the middle" — leaving acreage for phases three, four and five, with exploration and a reserve analysis on the outer acreage later this year.
• Logistics is a margin input, not a detail (13:48): "about 1% evaporates or turns off into a gas every day you're shipping it. So shipping distances matter. Cape of Good Hope is a great place to ship to all four corners of the world… when customers receive their helium in liquid form, there should be more liquid versus gas and they want the liquid."

14:39 Phase 1 economics — and the operating leverage sitting on top of them

• "Phase one, we expect to produce about 70 MCF a day of helium, about 2,500 gigajoules a day of LNG… if we can achieve a sales price of say $600 per MCF on average and say 13 to 14 per gigajoule for the LNG, phase one should generate revenues of somewhere close to $27 million and gross profit of about $11 million."
• The leverage is the point (15:13): "right now we are talking to customers where the price is more like 800 to a thousand and actually the spot price is north of $2,000 I'm told by industry participants… if we can achieve a higher price at 800 to a thousand this asset can do 15 to 20 million in gross profit from just phase one."
• Note the shape: volume is fixed by the plant, cost is largely fixed, so a ~40–65% move in realized price lands almost entirely in gross profit — $11m becomes $15–20m. Also note that only the $600 is contracted; $800–1,000 is in negotiation and $2,000 is hearsay spot.
• "One asset, two products, but actually four markets" — LNG into gas-to-power, industrial and transport; helium mainly export, to semiconductors and rocketry.

15:47 Phase 2 at 13× — $370m revenue, $300m gross profit, and a 44-month clock

• "Phase two is significantly larger, about 34,000 gigajoules a day of LNG and about 900 MCF a day of liquid helium, and at $600 per MCF and $14 per gigajoule this is more like a $370 million in revenue type plant and $300 million in gross profit."
• Funding: "a significant amount of debt at half a billion dollars from the US DFC, about a quarter billion dollars from Standard Bank" — the same $500m + $250m package the Red Chip readout describes as gated on Phase 1 nameplate output and 50% of Stage 2 contracted.
• Timeline: "it takes about 44 months to build and we are building this plant in a turnkey contract with an EPC… so 2030 we should start to see the first production with 2031 being the first full year of production." Note the honesty on price: "we've got no control over where gas prices go and where LNG prices go, but both kind of feel biased to the higher side."

16:59 The electronics division — Si-28, fluorinated gases and helium at multiple steps

• The pitch is breadth across one supply chain: "isotopes are used in many steps here. So silicon-28 we expect to get used in the first couple of stages and then other unique isotopes we expect to be used in the packaging… and throughout the process we're using fluorinated gases and helium."
• Why Si-28 (17:27): "if we enrich silicon-28 to say 99% or 99.9% we'll see a 20 to 30% benefit in terms of thermal conductivity in these chips." The 48-stage plant reaches those levels; "we're expanding the plant right now to 96 stages and that will produce products for quantum computing… it's important to have zero-spin atoms in quantum computing. And so enrichment of silicon-28 to 99.995 should provide that kind of efficacy" — with carbon-12 a possible second quantum material.
• Fluorinated gases (18:21): three PhD fluorination chemical engineers and a plant that "can fluorinate heavy rare earth metals," with "significant demand for things like tungsten hexafluoride and germanium tetrafluoride by electronics customers."

19:38 The 2031 target — $300m of EBITDA, and where it is meant to come from

• "Our goal is to generate $300 million of EBITDA in 2031." The build-up he gives: electronic gases $150–300m, LNG / natural gas $100–200m, medical isotopes $40–100m (Yb-176, C-14, gadolinium-160 — "much harder to predict"), radiopharmaceuticals $40–100m (PET Labs, where he has "more visibility").
• Worth noticing the internal check he applies: "LNG and helium alone, we think can probably do 300 at the current kind of prices we're talking about" — i.e. the group target is roughly one division's worth at today's prices, with everything else optional.

23:04 The Si-28 delay, root-caused — 400 compressors and a Swiss supplier's O-rings

• Asked directly what engineering changes were made and why the issues won't recur: "the main issue we've had is with the compressors. This plant has over 400 compressors in it and they were purchased from a compressor manufacturer in Switzerland and they failed to meet the specifications set."
• Why it is fatal to the spec: "the compressors have to be hermetically sealed which means they're helium tight. If they're not hermetically sealed then the plant won't be able to enrich to 99.9999% chemically pure. And one of the things we found is that the O-rings the compressor manufacturer put into the compressors are faulty."
• The remedy is manual and slow — each compressor taken apart, O-rings changed, in a clean room, passivated — but the diagnostic claim is the important one: the failure is in a bought-in component, not in the process or the engineering team. "The compressors we have on the plant are working very well. And the enrichment is happening as we expect it to. We just need additional compressors to make the cascade longer."
• The scaling answer follows the same logic (29:06): "our current plant at 100 stages can probably produce about 80 kilograms a year of silicon-28 at 99.995 and several hundreds of kilograms of product at 99% enrichment. We could build an additional plant in about 12 months from starting construction… most likely somewhere like Iceland which would benefit from cheap energy." And why no sales yet (30:06): "we're at nameplate capacity for the 48 stages… we really need to get to 96 to 100 stages before we can really start producing large quantities."

25:52 Contract tenor — 5 to 15 years, inflation-linked, LNG fully contracted

• "For helium and LNG our contracts are typically between five and 15 years and they have an inflation-linked mechanism within them. So you expect the price to increase at South African PPI kind of inflation every year."
• The contracted share is the financeability signal: "about 100% of our LNG contracted under long-term 5 to 15 year contracts and about 50 to 75% of our helium contracted on 5 to 15 year contracts, balance being sold in spot." Leaving a quarter to a half of helium on spot is deliberate exposure to the shortage.
• Carbon-14 is different again: "a multi-year take-or-pay agreement there with the Canadian customer who happens to be the supplier of the feedstock. It's more of a tolling agreement" — no commodity price risk, just a conversion fee. Ytterbium and Si-28 are "more kind of spot purchases or short-term contracts."

26:58 Ytterbium-176 — Pluvicto's growth curve is the demand curve

• "Novartis has recently launched a drug called Pluvicto. I think it's doing about three to four billion dollars a year now. Market expectations for it to grow to kind of six, seven, eight billion dollars per year by the end of the decade. And there is a new category of drugs emerging. There's about a 100 therapeutics in development phase one, phase two, and phase three for radiotherapeutics."
• The supply side is a single point of failure: "Russia is the only country that can enrich ytterbium-176 today in commercial quantities and our messaging from customers is that there's a significant supply shortage and it's taking a long time for patients to get therapy."
• Third-party corroboration (28:14): "I believe Bristol Myers and Eli Lilly recently announced delays to their phase three trials because of the isotope supply chain."
• His own capacity and the linkage: "we believe we can do about a kilogram a year once we have the continuous processing vessel working," and because lutetium-177 "has a half life of a few days… you have to manufacture it every week," the relationship to drug demand is "probably a one-to-one."

21:02 What "commercial production" actually means — units, ramp and price per gram

• Ramp: "we typically run these plants at nameplate capacity. So I would expect by the end of the fourth quarter we're running at nameplate capacity" — the gating item being well tie-ins, "the final few wells will be connected between now and say an October kind of time frame."
• Units and prices (22:13): carbon-14 in grams at ~$24,000/g; silicon-28 in kilograms at "a few hundred dollars a gram"; ytterbium-176 at ~$20,000/g; LNG and helium in tons, at $14–20/GJ and "north of $600 per MCF."
• On purity headroom (25:13): "the way we enrich doesn't change as you enrich to greater levels… if you can enrich from 1% to 2% you can enrich from 1% to 99.999%, just takes a lot longer" — more time, more energy, more cost, but no new physics.

30:42 Why the QLE spin-out slipped — a shut SEC, stale financials, and a convertible cleaned up

• "The S-1 was filed in November and the SEC was shut for something like four to six weeks during the fourth quarter last year because of the government shutdown. And so it took a long time for the first S-1 to get reviewed. The financials went stale on February 15th. So we couldn't file the second review until early April. Had a couple more reviews."
• "Now after the recent share exchange for the convertible loan note, we feel in a really good position to be able to spin out a substantial amount of Quantum Leap Energy between now and the end of the year."
• Read against the same-day Red Chip readout, which adds the constraint Mann does not mention here: the spin-out cannot occur before 13 September (the IPO anniversary, for US capital-gains reasons), and the exchange ratio is decided but undisclosed and not one-for-one.
• He closes by pre-announcing the next appearance: "next time back we'll do a deep dive into PET Labs and medical isotopes."