Uranium Insider — July 2026 monthly newsletter

Uranium has two prices, and they are telling different stories. The "spot" price is what a pound costs today for immediate delivery — it went nowhere in June, sitting at $85.12. The "long-term" or term price is what utilities agree to pay under multi-year supply contracts, and that is the number that actually matters for miners, because that is how nearly all uranium is really sold. The term price kept climbing: UxC's reading rose to $94 and TradeTech's to a record $97 — the highest ever recorded. Huhn's point is that a rising term price puts a floor under the spot price, because no producer will sell cheaply into the spot market when a utility will sign a contract at $95.

Two details he keeps repeating are worth internalising. First, TradeTech tends to move 30–60 days ahead of UxC, so when the two disagree, the higher TradeTech number is the leading indicator. Second, the forward curve is in the triple digits — UxC's 3-year forward is $101 and its 5-year is $108 — which means the market itself expects uranium meaningfully higher than today's spot.

The rest of the fuel cycle is even tighter. Conversion (turning uranium oxide into the gas that gets enriched) and enrichment (raising the concentration of the fissile isotope) are both at or near all-time-high prices, up 200–285% since the start of 2022 — far more than uranium itself. That is a symptom of a Western fuel supply chain that spent decades depending on Russia and is now rebuilding from scratch.

SPUT is not a mining company — it is a closed-end trust that simply buys physical uranium and stores it. Own a unit and you own a slice of 81.45 million pounds of uranium oxide sitting in licensed facilities. That makes it the purest way to bet on the uranium price without any mining, permitting or geology risk, which is why Huhn makes it his single largest position: 20% of the Focus List and 25% of the more actively traded Dynamic Model.

The interesting part is the discount. Because it trades on an exchange, SPUT's unit price can drift away from the value of the uranium it holds ("net asset value" or NAV). At the end of June it traded 10.25% below NAV, which is another way of saying the market was pricing SPUT's uranium at $76.51 a pound when the actual spot price was $85.12. You are effectively buying uranium at a 10% discount to what everyone else pays. Huhn treats this as both an entry signal and a safety cushion — "limited downside risk and substantial upside potential."

One mechanic to understand: SPUT raises money by issuing new units and then spends that money buying uranium in the open market, which historically has been a major source of demand pressure on the spot price. When the units trade at a discount, that machine switches off — SPUT cannot issue units below NAV without hurting existing holders. That is exactly what happened in June: zero capital raised, zero pounds bought. So a persistent discount removes a buyer from the spot market, which is part of why spot has been stuck.

NexGen is building Rook 1 / Arrow in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin — in Huhn's view "the best undeveloped uranium project globally" and therefore "a must own." It is not producing anything yet; it is a construction story with first output around 2031.

The near-term thing to watch is unglamorous: the first 12–18 months are spent digging through 150 metres of loose "overburden" before the shaft reaches solid rock. That is the highest-risk engineering phase, and any trouble there pushes out the whole 48-month build. Huhn is telling subscribers to judge the timeline on that, not on press releases.

The most commercially interesting disclosure is about restraint. Arrow's nameplate capacity is about 29 million pounds a year — enough to move the whole global market — but management told a room full of utility buyers it only needs roughly 5 million pounds a year to break even, and anything beyond that will only be produced if utilities pay up in contracts. That is a deliberate message: the market should stop assuming 30 million pounds automatically arrives and floods the price. Separately, hyperscalers (Big Tech data-centre operators) have approached NexGen about financing the project and buying its uranium directly — and, per management, they arrived "very well educated" on the fuel cycle.

Huhn's phrase for the current stage is "the boring part of the Lassonde Curve" — the well-known mining pattern where a stock runs hard on discovery, then drifts sideways for years during construction when there is no news, then re-rates when production actually starts. Boring is the point: it is when you can buy it.

Denison is the other Athabasca construction story — building the Phoenix deposit at Wheeler River using in-situ recovery, where instead of digging rock out you dissolve the uranium underground and pump the solution to surface. First production is targeted around 2028–2029. Like NexGen it is in the quiet construction stretch, and Huhn calls it "a core holding" at 10% of the Focus List and 12.5% of the Dynamic Model, with a balance sheet "in excellent shape."

What he singles out is Denison's land strategy. Rather than paying full price for nearby ground, Denison takes minority stakes in small exploration companies drilling around Wheeler River and funds its share of the drilling — cheap optionality on someone else's discovery. The current example is Murphy Lake North, where partner Cosa Resources (70%, and the operator) restarted drilling in June with the largest program in its history, chasing mineralisation just three kilometres from IsoEnergy's Hurricane deposit. Huhn's read: "if any of these efforts develop decently large deposits, they will ultimately be absorbed by Denison."

IsoEnergy's crown jewel is Hurricane — 48.6 million pounds grading 34.5% uranium, a grade so extreme it is roughly a hundred times what most uranium mines dig. But the company's strategy is broader than one deposit: it is assembling a geographically spread portfolio of development-ready uranium assets so that a rising uranium price has several ways to pay off.

June's move was completing the takeover of Australia's Toro Energy, adding the Wiluna project (112.7 million pounds across Toro's deposits). The bet there is regulatory, not geological: Western Australia has banned new uranium mining approvals since 2017, but four projects were permitted before the ban — and Wiluna was one of them. IsoEnergy is wagering that a previously-approved project has a better shot at reviving its permits than starting from zero, in a policy climate that is warming toward uranium.

Meanwhile an 8,000-metre drill program at Hurricane South started in June (briefly paused about a week for Saskatchewan wildfires), following winter holes that hit 4.21% uranium over 3.5 metres. The company is well funded — C$130.5M cash plus C$52M of securities — and Huhn's structural view is that IsoEnergy is "a very accretive rollup candidate" as consolidation sweeps the sector, i.e. a company that gets bought or does the buying. Canaccord's analyst lifted her one-year target to C$24 against a C$14.14 June close.

Silex is not a miner. It owns 75% of Global Laser Enrichment (GLE), which is developing a laser-based way to enrich uranium — separating the fissile isotope using tuned lasers instead of the spinning centrifuges everyone else uses. If it works at scale it is cheaper and less energy-hungry, and it matters strategically because Russia still dominates Western conversion and enrichment.

The share price lagged this year for a specific reason: the US Department of Energy handed out three US$900M contracts to build domestic enrichment capacity, and GLE was not one of them — Centrus and General Matter won those, Orano took the sole low-enriched-uranium award, and GLE got a consolation US$28M. The market wanted much more.

Huhn's case rests on two things the awards did not change. First, technical progress is gated on "TRL" milestones — a standard scale for how proven a technology is — and GLE hit TRL-6 in 2025, with TRL-7 due mid-2027. Cameco holds an option to raise its GLE stake from 25% to 51%, expiring April 2028, and Huhn "fully expect[s]" it to be exercised once TRL-7 lands: a large, informed buyer voting with money. Second is the Paducah project (PLEF), which would re-process roughly 150 million pounds of uranium sitting in old enrichment "tails" — waste from decades of past enrichment — back into usable fuel. That is effectively a 5-million-pound-a-year uranium mine with no mining, at a cash cost under $30 a pound, in Kentucky.

X-Energy is this month's new position — a half-sized 5% stake bought on June 11 at $18.62. It designs the Xe-100, a small modular reactor cooled by helium rather than water, which lets it run much hotter and therefore sell industrial process heat as well as electricity — a market conventional reactors cannot serve.

The differentiator Huhn emphasises is the fuel. X-Energy makes TRISO pebbles: uranium kernels wrapped in ceramic layers that contain the reaction physically rather than relying on operator intervention, and its first commercial fabrication plant is licensed and under construction in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Owning the fuel supply is a moat, because every reactor sold becomes a customer for refuelling over a 60-plus-year life.

The business model is the other half of the appeal. X-Energy licenses technology, supplies fuel and sells services — it does not build or own the plants, so it avoids the construction cost overruns that have historically destroyed nuclear investors. That is what "capital-light" means here: upfront technology fees now, recurring high-margin fuel and service revenue later. Real customers already exist — a four-reactor project with Dow in Texas (permitting expected Q1 2027), a 5 gigawatt commitment from Amazon which also anchored a funding round with $500M of equity, and interest from Britain's Centrica.

The honest caveat, which Huhn states plainly, is timing: the first reactors do not run until the early 2030s, and meaningful free cash flow arrives mid-2030s. This is explicitly "not a short-term trading opportunity but rather a core, multi-year position."

Cameco is the Western world's dominant uranium company, and Huhn's framing this month is that it has quietly become something bigger than a miner: a "turnkey" supplier that mines uranium, converts it, fabricates finished fuel, and — if Cameco exercises its option over Silex's laser venture — may one day enrich it too. Owning every step of the fuel cycle is rare, and it means a utility can buy the whole package from one counterparty. He holds it at 6.25% in the Dynamic Model.

The catalyst discussed here is government money. The US Department of Energy conditionally committed $17.5 billion in loans for ten Westinghouse AP1000 reactors across five two-reactor projects. Cameco owns 49% of Westinghouse, so it captures both the reactor economics and, later, the fuel: as Huhn puts it, "the buildouts of new AP1000's will undoubtedly be followed by new Cameco long term supply contracts." Each project's sponsors must commit $500M of their own equity before drawing loan funds, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright says the program could pull construction timelines forward by up to three years.

The near-term wrinkle is operational and not Cameco's fault. Cigar Lake ore is milled at Orano's McClean Lake facility, and that mill's sulfuric acid plant broke down. With almost no ore storage at the mine, Cameco simply stopped mining until acid supply returns. Huhn flags that Cameco deliberately left the effect on 2026 production guidance open-ended — while noting a similar flood-related halt in May was resolved without changing guidance.

Global Atomic is building the Dasa mine in Niger — a genuinely good deposit and one of very few new uranium mines actually under construction anywhere. The problem is money. For more than two years the company has been trying to close a loan from the US Development Finance Corporation, and it still hasn't; in the meantime it has funded construction through one dilutive equity raise after another, meaning each existing shareholder owns a steadily smaller slice.

Huhn is unusually candid that this is a contested call: "some would debate our wisdom of even maintaining an ongoing 3.5% allocation." He keeps it because he thinks the mine ultimately gets built and the DFC loan is more likely than not to arrive — but he also states flatly that another raise is needed in the near term and that it will dilute shareholders further. That combination — a good asset, a broken financing process — is why this reads as a held-but-flagged position rather than a recommendation to buy.

One genuine positive: Niger and neighbouring Benin have concluded border talks ahead of schedule, and reopening that border would restore the cheapest, most efficient export route to the port of Cotonou — a real cost item for a landlocked mine.

F3 is the lottery ticket in the portfolio, sized accordingly at 2.5%: "our only pure exploration holding and therefore is of higher risk." It has no mine and no revenue — it drills holes on the Patterson Lake North property in the western Athabasca Basin, the same corridor that hosts NexGen's Arrow and Paladin's Triple R.

It has already found something real: the JR Zone holds 11.8 million pounds at 4.41% uranium, an exceptional grade. But 11.8 million pounds is too small to justify building a mine on its own. The entire question is whether the newer Tetra Zone can add enough pounds to show that the property hosts a system of deposits rather than one isolated pod — which is what would make it a takeover target for a neighbour with a mill. A roughly 4,000-metre drill program started in early July, so news flow is imminent.

Yellow Cake is SPUT's London-listed cousin: a company whose only real activity is holding physical uranium — 24.4 million pounds of it, plus about $60.7M of cash. Huhn tracks it monthly but does not hold it on the Focus List.

Its discount to the value of its uranium is even wider than SPUT's — 14.9% at the end of June, implying a uranium price of $70.29 a pound against $85.12 spot. Its response was to announce a $10M buyback, which Huhn approves of for a precise reason: when a company holding uranium trades well below the value of that uranium, buying back its own shares is the cheapest way it can possibly acquire more uranium per share. It is buying pounds at $70 instead of $85.

Kazatomprom is the world's largest uranium producer, and this section is more important for what it says about the uranium price than about the stock. Kazakhstan mines uranium cheaply by pumping acid underground, and for years that cheapness was the market's ceiling — Kazakh pounds could always be turned on to cap a rally.

That has changed. Costs have gone from about $10 a pound in 2012 to $17–18.50 in 2025, with 2026 all-in costs guided to $35–36.50, driven largely by a new Mineral Extraction Tax. And the tax is tiered by output: 9% now, rising toward 18% for the largest mines, with an extra 2.5% if uranium goes above $110. Read that carefully and you find a perverse but powerful incentive — the only way Kazatomprom can hold its tax bill down is to produce less. As the research Huhn cites puts it: "rising prices increase the value of the volume restraint, volume restraint supports the prices driving the bill, and Kazatomprom's interests as a producer become progressively more aligned with a tight, high-priced market."

The investment conclusion is split. This is unambiguously bullish for uranium: the world's swing producer now has a tax reason not to swing. It is more ambiguous for the shares themselves, and Huhn quotes the warning directly — "KAP is a different company than investors invested in three years ago." He doesn't hold it.

This is the failure, and Huhn doesn't dress it up: "Lotus is a 'blow-up'." Lotus was restarting the Kayelekera mine in Malawi — usually the lowest-risk way to add uranium supply, because the plant already exists. It has gone wrong on the most basic input imaginable: sulfuric acid, the chemical that dissolves uranium out of the ore. Deliveries were delayed and the new on-site acid plant was damaged during commissioning, so production has been paused.

The consequences stack up. The shares have been suspended since June 18 at A$0.66 pending a funding outcome. The treasury is down to US$26M. And roughly 1 million pounds of 2026 deliveries already sold to utilities are "impacted" — meaning Lotus may default on contracts unless customers agree to take delivery later. Raising money in that position means accepting whatever terms are offered: Huhn expects a deeply discounted, heavily dilutive offering "assuming they are successful in garnering interest."

The instructive part is the damage control. Because Lotus was sized at 5% and has decayed to 1.24% of the portfolio, even a further halving of the share price costs the Focus List only about half a percentage point of annual return. That is position sizing doing exactly what it exists to do: "we are just grateful that we were underweighted in this position… as compared to our profitable overweighted positions like NexGen, Denison, and SPUT."