Title: Uranium prices headed to $200? Show: The Oregon Group (YouTube) — World Nuclear Symposium (WNA) week; hosts Christian and Anthony Guest: Mike Beck — investor; co-founder of UraMin (2005–2007, sold to Areva for ~$2.5bn); involved in Extract Resources; co-founder of Skeleton Resources (Namibia uranium exploration) Date: 2026-09-13 (YouTube publishDate 2026-09-13T23:54:06-07:00) URL: https://youtu.be/5eHGmh-M22M Length: 20:29 Note: YouTube auto-captions pasted by Stephen; fillers (um/uh/you know, stutters) removed; wording otherwise verbatim. Caption mis-hearings, left as spoken: "Eurin/Eurom/Yurman" = UraMin; "Tricopi" = Trekkopje; "Ariva/AEA" = Areva (now Orano); "Kamako" = Cameco; "NextGen" = NexGen; "Swakup" = Swakopmund; "Walish" = Walvis Bay; "Alaska alley" = the alaskite alley of Namibia's Erongo region; "Shusip" = Husab; "Langanger Heinrich" = Langer Heinrich (Paladin); "Rossing" = Rössing; "Dells" = Beck's UraMin co-founder (surname not given); "DPL" = unclear in captions.
00:00 All right, ladies and gentlemen, it's World Nuclear Symposium Week and we have a special guest with us today, investor Mike Beck. Welcome, Mike. >> Christian, thanks very much. And I should ask, I know this isn't part of the podcast, but are you coming to Beaver Creek? >> Who? Me or Anthony? >> No, you >> I'll be there for sure.
00:24 >> I don't think I'm coming this year. >> Okay. I didn't know. Well, I knew Anthony for sure because I've given him a lift [laughter] >> from the airport. So, >> thank you if you're about to offer me one, too. >> Absolutely. So but I mention that just because I think even though it's billed as a precious metals conference I think the two main topics or probably three of discussion will be uranium, critical minerals and in particular rare earths, and third, so that's the second
00:59 category critical minerals rare earths, and the third will be copper, but I think you're not going to hear that much about precious metals because it's been with us for some time, but everybody likes the new new new thing and one of the new new things which is not so new to me or many others is uranium and the consensus view is that we're entering into sort of the mother of all bull markets for uranium.
01:39 And as a guy who's been in and out of the sector now for 30 years, I've never seen stronger fundamentals than I see at the moment. We're hearing out of WNA this year that term contracting is happening at 105, so all-time high. We had that initial sell-off after the war started in the spot market driven by financial investors.
02:09 But what we have been hearing that's been really exciting about WNA this year is the presence of hyperscalers, Google, Meta, you name it. All of the AI adjacent companies who need tremendous amounts of power have been at the conference this week and you had Rolls-Royce a couple days ago hold a meeting where they told everyone they're going to be ready to rock in 2030 with their SMR.
02:35 So it seems like historically what's driven uranium, and you can tell us, is the supply demand imbalance and now what's going to be driving it is just the overwhelming energy demand and reorganization of the global order around east, west, Russia, China, the geopolitics and energy demand seem to be what's going to be driving this going forward.
02:57 >> I think that's right. And if I go back to our first involvement in the sector, this is back in 2005, and just contrasted with today. So in 2005, Dells and I founded a company called Eurin, which is a longer story, but we bought the asset for call it $4 million give or take and put it into a listed vehicle and sold it two years later for $2.5 billion.
03:36 And to be honest, we didn't really add to any of that. That deposit is called Tricopi and it ended up getting purchased in 2007, roughly two years after we acquired it, by Ariva, which is now called Orano. And to be candid, we didn't add anything in resource. What happened simply was the underlying uranium price went from $8 to a high tick in I think it was the first week of July of 2007 to $142.
04:15 And if you look at what was driving that bull cycle of uranium and compare it to the fundamentals today, there's no comparison. The supply deficits today are real. They were not real back in 2005. They were perceived to be emerging. If you look at the number of reactors under construction then compared to now, I mean now you have something like 76 reactors under construction, 35 in China alone and then second to that in India. The number of reactors under construction in 2005, if I
05:01 remember correctly, was more on the order of 32. So everything has intensified and amplified since 2005. And my only surprise in this market environment with the supply demand fundamentals that exist at the moment for uranium is that the uranium price is not much higher. And what that tells me is that for lots of reasons, many of which I don't really fully appreciate and I don't think anybody really does,
05:38 there's been sort of a lid on the price. And you mention the current contracts are going out the door at 105 and that is absolutely true. I think in the not too distant future, meaning in the next 6 months, you'll be seeing and hearing of term contracts being signed at 150, 180, and probably in excess of 200, because the nature of the business, if you look at the fundamentals of nuclear power generation, it's all fixed costs and fuel represents such a small fraction of the operating cost
06:22 compared to the capital cost that's gone into building the reactor facility. The price inelasticity is off the chart. You will pay whatever you have to pay because whatever it is, $200, $300, $150 is nothing compared to the cost of having to shut that reactor down.
06:48 And so this is an interesting dynamic, this price inelasticity that doesn't really exist to this extreme in the case of end use applications for any other industrial metals. So the big question mark in my mind is not how much higher it will go, because I think the sky is the limit, and I think without sounding like a maniac you can make a reasonable case that we'll be seeing uranium above $200 a pound, and it's just when, and why has it not exploded thus far? And
07:40 then you're going to see, in that sort of environment, the sort of opportunities to make money, as was the case with the Eurin big rally which was 2005 through 2008, like Energy Fuels. I mean the list goes on and on where you had one year a uranium stock trading at 5 cents and, like us, 18 months later it was being taken out at $4 either for cash or for shares of a bigger company.
08:24 So I think it's a really exciting time to be in the uranium sector and I think that anybody who's an active investor in the metals business has to have in their portfolio a reasonable amount of uranium exposure. And you can do it like we do, which is we own some of the safer seniors like Kamako and NextGen.
08:56 But the real money and the real juice in this business is trying to find those basket of juniors, and they all won't work out, but where you can pick them up for five cents and with a little bit of luck and good timing they'll be worth a dollar or $2 a share in 12 to 18 months.
09:19 >> One of the things that's come out of these meetings has me reflecting a little bit and comparing it a little bit to rare earths. What we've seen in rare earths, as you know, is that for a lot of these things upwards of 98% of global capacity is refined in China.
09:40 And so even if you mine it in the US, you have potentially a capacity issue around refining. Talking about minor metals and mirrors right now, the geopolitics of uranium and jurisdictions for investing it seems to be increasingly important. You had all the enrichment out of Russia that's stopped.
09:58 I think in the next 12 months are the last uranium enrichments from Russia coming out. That's what Fletcher Newton told us. So what does that mean for jurisdictions? You've got the Athabasca basin. You've got the sandstones in Wyoming and maybe Utah that they're working on. What other places, the US, Europe, and Canada, Canada has the Athabasca, but what other places are they going to be able to source uranium from and feel comfortable funding and financing mines? >> I think that's a really interesting
10:33 and important question because, and you referenced it there, China continues to aggressively buy long-term optionality in terms of uranium supply. And if you look at the 76 current projects under construction, more than 80% of the vendors slash sponsors are either Chinese or Russian.
11:06 And these guys have got such a jump on the west in terms of locking up long-term supply. It doesn't leave many other established uranium jurisdictions open for the west to try and play catch-up. The problem with Athabasca is those deposits are really, really tricky. They're extremely high grade, which is good news, bad news, because many of them the rock is so hot you have to mine it with a robot in water with scuba gear, right? And then also those deposits are usually
11:53 high-grade but narrow vein structure. So it's really expensive and time consuming, particularly because of the winter summer seasons. You have to have a 10-year drilling program to drill out enough of a resource because they're almost always underground as well.
12:17 So they're extremely high grade, but they're extremely high cost. And the lead time from a new Athabasca promising uranium exploration play until first production, if everything goes well, is 15 to 20 years. So what can you do and where can you go is really the question, to fill in the gap between now and 15 or 20 years.
12:45 And there aren't a lot of places. One of the I think most attractive jurisdictions and maybe the most overlooked, given its relative potential, is Namibia. Namibia is currently the world's third uranium producer and they have three existing operations and they have arguably another three that are in development phase.
13:28 They have DPL, they have the Tricopi project which was the Yurman project which Orano, or in those days AEA, purchased, and then when uranium prices collapsed, they suspended production. They're looking now at restarting that and actually just yesterday closed another financing which is part of their construction financing. But there's so much potential in that so-called Alaska alley and it is really low-cost, quick exploration and production.
14:04 And why do I say that? I say that because almost all of that uranium jurisdiction, which has just really been scratched, most of those uranium concessions are a one or two hour drive from Swakup, which is sitting on the coast next to Walish, which is actually the biggest deep water port in West Africa. So you've got really easy access to bring heavy equipment in, your exploration teams.
14:38 It's a very benign environment in terms of exploration. The deposits generally are surface deposits and they're normally surface expressions. So identifying prospective ground is not that difficult, and then drilling it out, as opposed to Athabasca Basin, is quick and cheap. In many cases, you can just base your exploration crews out of Swakup and they can drive.
15:08 They can have their breakfast in the morning at the hotel or the guest house in Swakup, hop in their vehicle, be at the site in an hour, put in a full day's work, and then drive back. You don't need an exploration camp, you don't need a labor camp, you don't need a construction camp. All of the service contractors are sitting there.
15:29 And so it's always been a little bit of a mystery to me as to why more people haven't gone to that jurisdiction. It's a lovely country. It's a stable jurisdiction. It's an established producer. I mean, for God's sake, it's number three. And it's really cheap, fast exploration to delineate a deposit with a little bit of luck.
15:52 And then permitting is a dream compared to some place like Canada. And all of the mines are open pit. So again, easy, fast to develop. So the only thing that's held it back is grades tend to be a little bit on the lean side. So you always needed a more robust uranium price, but there's no doubt we're coming into that now and it's just going to get stronger.
16:21 So I think the early movers in terms of getting exploration ground and positioned in Namibia are going to be well rewarded. And in fact, that's why we've gone back. That's where we had the great success, both in the case of Eurom, which again went from $4 million to $2.5 billion in two years on the back of an incredible rise in uranium price,
16:49 but also we were involved very heavily in Extract Resources, which, even though we weren't the co-founders of that, after our involvement got sold for $2.2 billion again in cash. And by the way, all those deposits are within 20 kilometers of each other. And any probe you put in the ground in that Alaska alley is going to register background radiation far in excess of what you would normally expect.
17:30 So it is a thoroughly world-class uranium mineralization district. It's just, for reasons I don't quite understand, but I'm happy to benefit from it, been slightly overlooked. So we created a company called Skeleton Resources last year to go back in. We picked up five concessions all within easy driving distance from Swakup in the main fairway.
17:57 Some of the concessions are actually adjacent to existing producers, specifically the Rossing mine, which has been in production now for probably 42 or 43 years, maybe longer, and Shusip, which was the old Extract which the Chinese went in and built and has been operating now for 15 years, and one of them is adjacent to Paladin's Langanger Heinrich.
18:23 So there's still open ground there. But I suspect, as this rally continues to get underway, that there won't be much open ground six months from now, just because it is, in my estimation from firsthand experience, a really great jurisdiction to work in.
18:45 The government is very efficient. They follow the rule of law and there's no issue with tenure. And it's an established producer, right? So you're not trying to explain why producing uranium is not going to be a problem or a health or safety risk to the local community, and all the specialized contractors and service providers are sitting right there and well established.
19:19 The drillers, the airborne guys, the exploration crews, and I don't know where else in the world you can go where you can base yourself in a really pleasant city like Swakup and you can be every morning at the site, typically within an hour, before your coffee gets too cold, and do your exploration and then call it a day and head back to town.
19:52 >> That's great. Well, look, Mike, I appreciate your time. I know it's a busy week with everything going on. Always great to hear your views and we'll have to have a look at Skeleton, take a look a little bit closer, but really appreciate your time and maybe look forward to talking for Beaver Creek. >> No, likewise.
20:08 And Christian, if you come and you need a lift, you know who to call. >> I'll give you a call. Cheers, Mike. >> Thanks. Thanks for the podcast. Thanks, guys. Nice chatting as always. Cheers.