The White House's Nuclear Push: What it Means for Uranium Opportunities

I'm Thalia Hayden with ETF Guide.

It's nice to see you again.

AI is becoming increasingly important for national security and it's driving an increased demand for electricity.

Although the US is already the biggest producer of nuclear power, it needs much more.

Helping us understand this renewed push to nuclear power and the uranium it runs on is John Champalia at Sprat Asset Management.

Welcome, John.

Thanks for having me.

Good to see you.

Great to see you.

On May 23rd, President Trump signed an executive order to rapidly deploy advanced nuclear technologies to support national security objectives, including powering artificial intelligence, computing infrastructure, and national security installations.

How would that impact uranium supplies, prices, and the uranium miners?

Yeah.

Well, this has been a long- aaited, I think, decree from the Trump administration in terms of their views and policies towards nuclear energy, which the market's been waiting for.

So, it's glad uh we're very glad to to see them come these executive orders come out.

And I think what's most exciting about is they really build on what the previous administration was trying to do, which is to reinvigorate an industry that was kind of forgotten about for a long time.

And these four orders really do that.

They take a very holistic approach.

Everything from upstream mining of uranium to the processing of fuel to building uh new plants and obviously there's a lot of permitting and and regulatory reform that needs to happen.

And so it's a very holistic approach that should benefit the sector and help the US uh reestablish its leadership position which it's held for decades.

Now, we know uranium prices have been under pressure since early 2024, but have started to recover in recent weeks.

What should investors make of the recent move higher?

Yeah, there was obviously a lot of uncertainty and unknowns with respect to how the Trump administration was going to view nuclear energy.

And we've always uh advocated that Republican administrations have been historically very pro- nuclear and and and that I think has been confirmed in that period of uncertainty and obviously a lot of the tariffs uh and whatnot uh really weighed on the uranium price because people just weren't sure which way things were going to go and we had a pretty meaningful correction in the in late last year.

That is starting to unwind.

We've seen much stronger uranium prices.

I think the the demand signal that we are going to be getting from these future builds is is clearly going to help the uranium price in the uranium sector.

And we've seen the price of uranium which bottomed at $63 a pound uh several weeks ago now at $72 a pound.

And we think the price has a lot more momentum to the upside based on this shift in sentiment that we're seeing right now.

Certainly makes sense.

Geopolitical tensions have been running high in recent months.

How have uranium markets been impacted by that?

Yeah, I mean I think it's fair to say that all commodity markets have been impacted in in one way or another by shifting geopolitical uh tensions and trade wars and obviously tariffs which have been on and off again.

Um uranium has actually done quite well uh relative to other commodities because uh is largely exempt from any tariffs and that's because the US is very dependent on other countries for this critical material.

The US is still a very small producer of uranium but still is the largest consumer of uranium in the world.

So this mismatch um is is is not surprising to us why tariffs are not applicable.

So it is I think u a very good signal to utilities.

They don't have to be concerned about buying fuel and whether it was going to be hit with these tariffs.

Uh, and that should help utilities come back to market and start buying uranium again.

All right, John, let's switch gears a little bit.

A lot of attention being paid to small modular reactors.

Are they for real?

And what is their significance to the continued growth in the nuclear industry?

Yeah, well, small modular reactors are basically an evolving technology.

They're often referred to as the fourth generation design, and they are for real.

I mean, they're still early stage in terms of their uh regulatory approval and and commercialization, but we are starting to get meaningful announcements from some governments.

There's where I live in Canada, we are starting to build three of these in uh Tennessee.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has just approved the construction of its very first.

And you're starting to see very meaningful announcements being made by hyperscalers, which are, you know, the likes of Microsoft and Google and whatnot that are viewing this technology as part of their energy solution to power these very energyintensive AI data centers.

And there are a number of different partnerships and and and announcements that have been made in the last 6 months that are going to help bring these new uh designs to market.

And one part of the executive order that is really important is about streamlining the regulatory process, making it less time inensive and costly to bring these new designs to market.

And that's very important when you're trying to get new technologies uh to market.

And the US clearly wants to be a leader here.

It's kind of wide open.

There is no, you know, there's no leader leading country here.

And the US I think has rightly determined that it needs to make these investments and incentivize the construction of these plants so that it will be a leader in in AI which is I think a lot of the application uh is targeted towards.

Final question before we go.

What should investors in uranium and uranium miners be paying attention to as we move through the rest of 2025?

Yeah, there's a few things that we're we're watching very closely for.

One is the spot price recovering. uh it it has recovered almost $10 a pound.

So that is moving in the right direction.

Uh the second thing is utilities contracting to buy more uranium for future delivery.

There was clearly a period with all of the uncertainty that they step to the sidelines and now you know you've got this pent-up demand that they need to cover.

Um we hope that utilities get back to buying more uranium.

And then there's one more short-term dynamic I'm going to mention and that is shorting the sector.

And what that basically means is some institutions and hedge funds have been taking bets against the sector thinking it would fall.

And for a period of time, they were right.

But in the last couple weeks, we've seen a very sharp V-shaped recovery.

And we think there's an opportunity here for a short squeeze.

Whereas where that means, you know, these short sellers need to buy stock to cover their exposures.

We're starting to see that and some of these stocks have gone up 40, 50, 70, 80% in the last few weeks as some of the this short interest is starting to alleviate.

So, that's another dynamic that we're watching right now, specifically with the uranium mining stocks.

John, thanks so much.

We learned a lot.

Great to see you for those timely insights.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Good to see you again.

And that does it for today's episode.

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To stay on top of the fastmoving nuclear and uranium opportunity, be sure to visit sprottetfs.com.

I'm Thalia Hayden with ETF Guide.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.