NexGen Energy Ltd. Mining Forum Americas 2026

Yeah, it's always been a story about supply. Obviously, today you pick up the newspaper, you're hearing a lot about demand, whether it's AI-driven demand or just base load requirements. But it really is, in terms of the uranium thesis, it's really centered around supply and really a lack of supply. That's something that's been ongoing really since 2011 when Fukushima occurred, and then there was essentially no investment appetite for exploration, let alone developing anything.

So where we sit today with that coupled with demand now going a hockey stick up and to the right, it creates a perfect storm and something that investors are starting to pick up on certainly, and then utilities importantly are starting to really feel the bite of what has been over a decade of dramatic under-investment in the supply chain and, most importantly, the uranium side of the supply chain, because obviously there's a number of steps in the fuel cycle. Some people will highlight there's been bottlenecks in enrichment or conversion, and our point to that is really all other bottlenecks in the supply chain are actually very easy to address because you just need capital and permits.

The U.S. government right now with significantly constructive policy support and financial support across the board for critical minerals, and certainly that side of the supply chain, that's easy to fix, and it is getting fixed as we speak. It's never really been a bottleneck, but it was a perception of one, and there's no shortage of capital and permits going around to address that. On the uranium side, it's not just up to capital and permits as the world's starting to learn. If we take NexGen as an example, we found ourselves the world's best project in 2014, and we will be producing in four years from now, so 16 years all up from discovery through to first ore, and we didn't waste a day.

Having been there the whole time, I can tell you, we didn't waste a day or a minute of a day, and we had access to capital because we had the best project, we had focus of regulators, focus of communities, focus of investors. It's basically as fast as it could possibly be. Anything that's discovered tomorrow, you're talking about mid-2040s for it coming into production. This supply chain issue, which really underpins the whole constructive thesis of the uranium market, is persisting, and it's going to be here for many, many years to come.

It's really global now. Yeah.

If you go back five years ago, it was kind of mixed. There'd be certain countries that seemed to be really emphasizing nuclear as a key part of their energy strategy, then there were others that were pulling back and talking about shifting that policy around. Today, it's really hard to find a country that's not supportive of nuclear power. It's really because post-Fukushima, again, everyone took a step back and looked at safety and looked at all the other considerations. At the same time, there's what we like to call the renewables experiment, where people kind of leaned on those, the Greta Thunberg kind of policy, and it turns out it doesn't work. I'll save you all the You don't need to research it very much. It doesn't work. That period of time happened, so now you see what typically happens where that realization sets in a little bit too late, and then policymakers around the world go, "Okay, we need more nuclear now." The industry just goes, "Well, we're not ready for that.

We need a little bit of time to sort ourselves out and get the supply chains, get the workforce, and everything else." So it's a very good news story in that the policy support, whether you're talking about the U.S. here, where it's-- Pick an area of the nuclear uranium fuel cycle and you'll find policy that's constructive and supportive of it. You'll find financial support for it. You go to China, it's the exact same thing. You go to India, it's the same thing. You go to the Middle East, it's the same thing.

All over Asia, all these new countries coming into it. So it's really something that's global again. The policy is really, you can group them into buckets, but it's really around making it easier for permits, building them at scale. So not just doing one-off reactors, getting some kind of runway of reactors so you can leverage what you learned in the workforce to get some economies of scale, and then financial support for them in the form of de-risking cost overruns or anything else related to it.

It hasn't really changed from what they always care about, which is security of supply. That's the paramount number one over and above all else by orders of magnitude. That is the most important thing. Look, we're negotiating, so they'll say they care about price and things like that, but the reality is they don't. They don't for a number of reasons: A, a lot of their customers, a lot of the financial and policy support from countries like the U.S., and just the unit economics of producing a kilowatt hour of power. They're really constructive. We offer something that legacy producers don't, which is new supply coming online. They haven't seen that in a very long time, certainly not new material supply.

If you put yourself in a utility and you care about security of supply, and in order to feel secure, you need obviously reliable sources, but you also want to diversify to de-risk that. For the last 20 years, it's been essentially an oligopoly market where you've had kind of 2 to 3 incumbent legacy players. Now here we come along, no state ownership, no state history in terms of we're fully commercial enterprise, independent enterprise, that are here to support the industry long term. The discussions are very constructive. We could have sold all of our material already, certainly. We're the ones kind of holding back signing contracts because we're 4 years away from first ore.

We have signed some kind of relationship-building ones and I guess to some extent a proof of concept on our pricing structure that we're after, which is really uncapped pricing. For those of you not as familiar with the nuclear sector, the way that it's historically worked is our stage, so we're breaking ground, we're building our mine, we're 4 years out. Legacy producers have typically fully contracted their production, all of their production for 10 years plus out even more than they're capable of producing and all hedged. So no upside really. Obviously you see the consequences of that. Now they will tell you probably that, "Well, when times are bad, we keep producing, and so that's a good thing." We don't think that's a good thing. We think that's the market sending you a signal you shouldn't be producing, don't produce.