Nomi Prins — Nuclear Mega-Resurgence: 5 Charts On the Power Play Behind AI, Policy, and Clean Energy

Chart I — The AI & data-center power surge

Chart source credited to Investor's Business Daily.

• Data-center power consumption is projected to climb toward nearly 600 terawatt-hours by 2035. Natural gas anchors the near-term expansion, but nuclear plus renewables account for the lion's share of long-term structural additions.
• The binding constraint for hyperscalers is not just generating the power but round-the-clock reliability — which is what pushes them toward baseload rather than intermittent supply.
• What it means: hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta are named only as the counterparty class) will sign long-term, high-premium power purchase agreements (PPAs) directly with nuclear operators. Prins says to look beyond traditional utility valuations — past the typical nuclear operators and co-located assets, toward off-grid / behind-the-meter baseload power.

Chart II — Uranium's 5-year outperformance cycle

Chart source credited to Sprott.

• Over 2021 through mid-2026: physical uranium +166%, senior uranium miners +101.91%, junior miners +65.11% — versus the S&P 500 +83.10% and broad commodities +37.16%. The physical metal leads the equities, which Prins reads as evidence of a persistent supply deficit rather than an equity-cycle story.
• The tight physical market has created a strong floor under long-term contract pricing between utilities and producers; recent consolidation in mining equities has opened an entry point.
• What it means: the stated construction is to combine physical uranium exposure (to sidestep operational mining risk) with top-tier, low-cost senior producers — balanced exposure held for the long term, not a trade.

Chart III — The U.S. nuclear pipeline: SMRs, restarts and uprates

Chart source credited to the Wall Street Journal.

• U.S. development is diversifying across three distinct tracks: SMR development (concentrated in the West, around innovation hubs like Idaho National Laboratory), traditional plant restarts (Rust Belt and Mid-Atlantic), and capacity uprates / life extensions at existing facilities.
• The pattern reflects an urgent push to exploit already-licensed infrastructure while the regulatory and industrial groundwork for modular deployment is still being laid.
• What it means: the near-term opportunity sits with the engineering and utility firms that execute life extensions, uprates and restarts — they already have a regulatory pathway and credibility. SMR pure-plays and advanced-reactor developers are the longer-dated growth leg, screened on government backing (DOE cost-share awards) and commercial partnerships with industrial end-users.

Chart IV — Shifting tides in public and political sentiment

Chart source credited to Bisconti Research.

• U.S. public favorability toward nuclear is near record highs at 77%, opposition near historic lows at 23% — a reversal from the lows of the 1980s and 1990s.
• Nuclear is now framed not as an ideological battleground but as an economic, national-security and grid-reliability imperative, which is what makes the Washington moment bipartisan.
• What it means: favorable sentiment drastically lowers political and regulatory risk — the channel being legislative support, streamlined licensing, production tax credits and loan guarantees. Domestic nuclear supply-chain companies get de-risked capex and policy durability across election cycles.

Chart V — The critical fuel bottleneck: U.S. import dependency

Chart source credited to Bloomberg.

• Just 7% of U.S. nuclear fuel originates domestically — utilities rely on foreign sources for over 90% of supply, while import restrictions tighten around Russian enriched uranium.
• The squeeze is worst across the front end of the fuel cycle — mining, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication — not at the reactor.
• What it means: Prins calls Western fuel-cycle infrastructure "one of the highest-conviction themes" in energy, with the target list being domestic conversion and enrichment capability plus allied-nation (U.S., Canada, Australia) resource development.