Why Hasn't AI Power Demand Changed the Uranium Market Yet?

Scott Nolan says the AI power buildout has not changed the uranium market yet. Most fuel contracts an enricher signs are still with the existing reactor fleet and the utilities, for low-enriched uranium, not with new data-center plants. Small modular reactors should grow over the next decade, and they are still a small market today.

Power for data centers in the next couple of years can come from those small reactors or from natural gas. Either way, near-term uranium demand stays with the existing fleet. His five-year view is a push off natural gas toward true baseload, and he expects that baseload to be nuclear. Whether the plants are gigawatt-scale or small reactors comes down to which design is deployed faster and cheaper per megawatt.

He also says nuclear is the cleanest and safest baseload, safer than wind per terawatt-hour and lower in carbon dioxide than wind or solar. The contest it has not won is cost.