What the Nuclear Power Revival Means for the Price of Uranium
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Hello and walk to another episode of the odd ts podcast.

I'm jeans though, and i'm Tracy other way trace.

are we calling IT a nuclear revival? No, I mean for real like is is that a thing?

You know it's onna happen as soon as you start calling IT that it's gonna like Peter out.

Don't say that. Don't say that. Some people would say, we saw the recent for my island news.

We've seen some other things of that nature. Some people would say that at least in the U. S. There is something of a nuclear revival going on.

yes. You know what I find kind of funny is if you look at one of the Price impacts of a nuclear revival, it's uranium right? Yeah but your range um started to go up, I think right after the pandemic and now it's come down a little bit from its hights, its recent hights. So it's kind of funny like a sort of acting like a mean stock.

Yeah, you is literally I was I was going to say for a certain portion of the public, uranium is like bitcoin. There are certain assets out there that have these sort of cut like things where it's not just the people are bullish, but they think that like in the future, if they're smart and severe enough to get in now, they are going to make this huge fortune.

And I put cyp to in there and I would put the people who who play those like stub equity of vanion fredy in that category. And then there's like the uranium called on the social media who thinks like we're going to buy uranium. And one day everyone will wake up and realize that nuclear is the future of energy, that all electricity will be powered by nuclear. And those of us who are smart to get into uranium now will be the new inheritance of the earth. You know.

the this thing I saw witness became a thing back in twenty twenty one. So there's a uranium markets subject .

course yeah and someone .

posted on there that there a broker for physical your rainy. So if you're interested in buying physical uranium, you can buy IT in like hundred thousand pound increments. So I don't even know like who the target is for this. Who is the retail trader that is buying a hundred thousand pounds of uranium and storing IT somewhere?

One day that person will have the Mandate of heaven. But the question is, when will that be even if there is a nuclear revival, even if all across the rich world are like nuclear is the way to go, what does that actually mean for the Price of uranium? I'm not really clear.

You mean neither?

Well, i'm really excited to say because we do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking to someone who knows everything about every commodity in the world. As far as I can tell, this related to energy commodity is maybe medal commodities to see someone on the sale side.

You know, Tracy, there are a few people on the cell side. Not many, many people on the cell side are worth reading. There are some people whose writing I considered to be a crime that they are locked up within sale because it's so good and so interesting. That is you shouldn't be the type of thing that traders click on for five seconds and we're going to be speaking to one of them.

Yes, actually this analyst, I think their research does get published in a book or yeah, every once in while I have some of those some old ones and they stand the test of time, which is something that you can say for all outside research.

No, you absolutely can't. So we are going to be speaking with the one and only bob bracket. Literally the perfect guest had him on the podcast before. He is the head of america's energy transition IT burn steam research.

But what's your deal? Because like I said, you know you know, like when I read your report on uranium, you're going into the science of how it's mine. You're going into the science. You have a copy of pace of einstein letter to roswell, talk about how this uranium thing could be big for bombs and electricity. And so worth, they really looked like typical of analyst reports.

yes. So I think the chAllenges, i'm a geologist living in manhattan with a handful of jobs, and I think i've had two of the best. I was working with his CoOperation for many years.

I've been a burnt y now more than a dozen. And so the answer is, my whole lens of this planet is a signal commodity investor. And how do I think about cycles? And it's always depletion based. So anything that depletes naturally, other people run away from my tender on towards. And uranium is right .

in that wheel. okay? I have a really basic question.

What is uranium and also what is enriched anim? Because when I hear that, I always think, are we adding b vitamins to IT or something? And then also, what is yellow cake? And why does that look so delicious?

We will start with the yellow cake because that's where we start geologically. And the funny thing about uranium as a mind commodity is most of IT is drill for, and most of IT looks more like an oil and gas Operation. So the majority of uranium yellow cake u 3o comes out of the ground through insight leaching， drill a well pump fluid down to a sandstone reservoir and pump up and treat the yellow cake.

So yellow cake is u three O A uranium oxide. IT looks nice, and yellow IT is not terrell dangerous, because IT is mostly a very stable form of uranium. So uranium has isotopes, if we go back and remember our our nuclear chemistry.

And so most of the allocation is u two thirty eight. I sent that to an enrich ment facility. I spin IT up.

I get rid of the oxygen and replace IT with fLorin for chemical reasons, and then enriched to power planet grade. And then I can keep and riches IT to two weapons grade. But hopefully we don't go that far.

Hopefully the person buying one hundred thousand pounds on red IT isn't doing that really. You know, you mentioned depletion is being the Collins for which you maybe view the entire world. And I remember the one time we talk to you before was very high opening conversation because I think the thing I took away from IT is and I I think the way away from IT disruption does not exist within commodities the same way we think of in tech and commodities. They basically never disappear.

They never go, maybe with the exception of, well blaber, which I don't think we use for lighting anymore, but by and large, this seems to be like a courage of already. Remember you, you rode a great thing on the co existence of, I think, with synthetic rubber and regular rubber. But this idea, like they just stay, we'll be with us here forever.

Yeah, we were using whale based luu brick ins in the space age. We stopped. Okay, yes, but yes. So the answer is if you're in the depletions based business, imagine COVID where everybody on the plane that started holding things because they worried that I was going away and I couldn't be replenished. We did IT again with the most recent couple.

If you're in the natural resource business, you wake up every day knowing your business is going out of business ah and think out crazy behaviors where a in in a holding sort of world and and that's the business model. And so IT want IT creates the strong desire to go replace resource. And if incentives are bad, that kind of crazy. But too, it's a constant trade mill. If the industry stops the market rebaLance.

Ces, so what is the supply of uranium look like right now? How much is out there and how accessible is IT?

So a roughly there's about two hundred million pounds of uranium a year. And I do want to say that we didn't really talk about what we were are going to discuss.

And so oh, sorry.

little cold but happy because uranium is something that's been in my head ah and it's had this a lot of client interest in the last year and that sort of inflected IT up just in the last months OK.

So we reading your lives here, you sense the all yes OK okay.

And so IT is a small Marks, so it's two hundred million pounds. When you never hear million that sounds like a lab but then he divided by two thousand pounds per turn in its a hundred thousand killers. And to put that into context, i'm going down next month to scan da, the world's largest copper mine.

IT moves a million tones a year of just copper and so you could fit ten of the entire uranium industry within a single cover mine. So it's a very small industry. It's an industry that sells to one customer. A lot of common like copper goes into all parts of the economy. Uranium goes into nuclear power, but it's very small, it's very regulated.

And there's been this chAllenge between local esg and global esg in the energy transition, which is to say i'm going to go into your remote community in south amErica and say, for the good of mankind, we need a hundred thousand thousand a year of copper so that we can electrify the economy and reduce emissions. And in the middle, your backyard, there's gonna a several thousand foot open pit mine. And that local community says, not a chance.

I don't want that. That's hard enough to do with copper right now. Think about uranium.

Think about trying to pitcher a local community. This will be great for jobs. That will be great for investment and will be great for tourism. We're gonna ind for uranium ah and so as a result, the ability to rapidly bring on uranium is pretty chAllenging, which kind of suggest market tightness.

Joe, I love that we didn't actually tell bob that we are gona talk about urania, but you've already given us so much interesting and knowledge able stuff.

So thank you for that. I don't know I realized some time this morning that we actually never told about, but I also knew just from reading bob, that I wouldn't be an issue at all and that you had to have to be totally comfortable you can keep among his to a little. But now I really is.

We're working in the audio medium of podcasts. So this is going to be a little bit a but to the extent that you can, can you summarize essentially like you have a chart in your recent uranium note that I read, give us the sort of medium term history of the uranium pricing. White went up and down over time.

The the most important thing about uranium. When we think about commodity Prices in general, i'm pretty good about picking the middle of the cycle of the marginal cost of commodity, and I can find the bottom of the cycle very well. Miners refused to give medals away for free.

So in the ebitda of a marginal zinc mine or nickle mine goes to zero, that mind goes to Carry mainland and stops producing and Price recovers from there is the the top of the cycle where pricing is the hardest to figure out. But historically, what happens for other commodity sectors, its demand, destruction and or substitution. So those are the two things you look for.

So when copper Price flies up, then aluminum becomes substituted. And if aluminium Price doesn't move well, just use aluminum and wiring in this transportation with uranium one that power plant. The cost of uranium into the power plant is a rounding era. Once spent the billions.

This is all the cost of construction. Uranium itself basically never comes up.

It's under one hundred box of pound OK. And and if you think about running a coffee power plant, you are moving millions of tones of material into that plant every year when the radio mates thousands, right? So it's a remarkably dense, obviously source of fuel.

And so once that plant is built, there is very little evidence that that plant ever shuts in an uranium Price. And then you combine that with the structure of the industry. If it's a utility and I can pass Price onto the rate base, well, then it's not taking the full run to that Price straight to the head.

So we don't see substitution on fire up for uranium. We don't really see demand destruction. And it's also one of these markets that is very difficult, physically short or commercially short. And so those are the three bugging men at the top of the cycle. They don't seem to be obvious 嗯。

who are the actual players in the uranium market because I remember again, like going back to twenty two, I think people who are talking about the Price going up because there was a new physical etf that came out and was buying a lot of IT into your point is a relatively small market. So presumably that kind of action could also push Prices.

Yes, are two thoughts there. So there, there was this investment vehicles. There was a sput uranium physical trust, that is. But I always go back to o eight. O nine, where the Price of oil shoots to one hundred and forty boxes barrel.

And there were investigations from congress and was IT the speculators, was IT wall street that caused the Price to skyrocket. So and there was never a perp walk. And I figured even if there was have an excuse for a perp walk, that would have found somebody to walk out of a building somewhere in our neighbors.

Od, all those years ago. And so in my head that I don't believe that the speculators can move for any sustained period of time. The commodity, sometimes they can see the trend and get into IT before IT takes off. I think they just saw a fairly obvious trend. I should say the fourth thing that can kill uranium Prices and IT is the one out there that if you're kind of a long uranium, uranium stocks, you have to be aware of are our nuclear disasters or nuclear accidents. And so if we look historically, yeah, the Price corrections down on uranium always came on the back of foot, shame, or they came on the back of three, my island.

right? So when were the big peaks in uranium Prices? What what was going on in the world mean, even setting aside we know what caused them to go down, but what was going on in the world at the time, in which is that there is a really uranium bull run.

they just kindly drift up. But so in real terms, they never get much above where we are now. So our Price text about one hundred box of pound, so you never see thousands or two hundreds pound. And you just have a market that absorbs uranium regularly at a Price that doesn't care of and then record CT on disasters where shuttles and fear of future plants causes the market to cope. And then you'll typically fall to twenty, thirty, forty pounds, which is the cash cost where somebody says i'm just going to leave .

IT in the ground. How is that actually stored if i'm that redit or who's interested in buying a hundred thousand times of physical or i'm brought, what am I actually doing with this uranium?

So once it's enriched, there are extremely strict guidelines on the types of organizations and the type of regulators that watch you store IT. In theory, yellow cake is stored at mind mouse and can be stored in the supply chain but enrich durani um is extremely heavily regulated so companies like chemico, for example, might have regulatory authority but not joe uranian wall street on redit.

what causes demand to change lish in the shorter? So I if the U S. Was like we're going going to really go nuclear crazy and we're going to get to all that about your prospect for nuclear, but I imagine demand would go. But in the course of a year twenty twenty four, where we see what's out there and we see the utility I S. And what they need, we know there's not suddenly going be a new nuclear plant tomorrow.

What what is the demand picture look like? So two ways to create uranium demand one. And we've seen a bit of both. One is to build new p our plants. And the second is to turn the old ones back on.

And so if if you think about three mile island being reactivated to support with cross oft, imagine the junior strategist that wins to microsoft is board and says, you know what? A I power demand is huge. We need a cheap radial dispatch ble flat baseline to power to supply IT. We should invest in nuclear power. And I imagine somebody hire above that person said, we are in idio.

Have you ever heard of three mile islands? And this junior strategy said, yeah, that's the one we should turn out on back on and the fact that IT veit through and it's not just microsoft now every big tech company is associated with nuclear investment, and they have all gone through this process of what do they need basic electricity of an unknowable demand growth and where can they get IT. And so whether it's funding new S M R, small modular reactors or reactivating the existing ones, it's been a remarkable inflection point.

And then when all these headlines come and suddenly everyone wakes up that all these tech companies are going to want some nuclear play, what's happening on the producer side? Because I imagine they can just turn the switch right away more, what's happening on the supply side when .

these headlines. And so on the producer side, the good news is, again, it's a small list market and move relatively slowly. So the real inflection would be around small modular reactors because reactivating closed reactors, we know we've got one of huzzy. You could react .

theory on the inside.

So on the mining side, I think the miners need a Price signal, which they have. They need regulatory approval. And then we'll start to go out and reactivate some of these minds. They'll start in the U S.

In canada, right? The canada already, certainly the athabasca gon. There's plentiful uranium resource there.

And there is a range of places in the U. S. You can find uranium along the gulf, texas. Uh, you can go find that out and kind of four corners out in in the the west.

So the resources there, you don't need huge amounts of capital, and we're starting to get a signal for your response. And then you go further remote on the cost. Further remote, I should say, not on the cost of of the mib has got a fantastic endowment.

Russia caused an heaven down's. And that's where this supplies ultimately going to come from, from a security of supply. Clearly, the U. S. And the canadian stuff is closer home.

What's the time frame for this? Like on average, how quickly can supply ramp up .

forever in two years? So roughly, we are measuring copper mine life cycles in a decade now, right from amazon resource to to first production. So even the easy stuff is really measured in half a decade to a decade.

And so yeah, uranium, if it's quick, i'd be stunned if there's a big supply response in less than five years, that seems hard to see. Five to ten, you start to get a response. And again, because the volumes are small, we could start to baLance the market them.

What do you see .

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So the Price of uranium is obviously tied to the prospects of nuclear energy, but nuclear doesn't exist in a vacuum when IT comes to energy transition. And there are other options out there, like solar or wind. How do you kind of evaluate the cost for nuclear verses, wind and solar?

And there's two end members, in reality, that always sits in between. So the primary end member that everyone talks about in in the energy space is the level ized cost of energy. And lizards, for examples, has been studying this for decades and putting out great work.

And the idea of level ized cost of energy is I need an electron. I need to charge my phone. I don't need to charge IT all year.

I just need to charge IT now. And that would be levelized cost of energy. And wind and solar are remarkably good from that standpoint. Then there's the other end member, which is, hey, I need to power a remote antarctic field station, right, something way off the grid. And I need a baseline twenty four, seven for a year.

And if I don't have baseline, if I have intermition cy, if the sunshine es and doesn't shine, then I need batteries to support the rest of the time. And so if my sunshine one percent, I need the other ninety nine on batteries. I gotto buy a lot of batteries.

so alco wouldn't take that into account.

And so alcohol link would elect ze full cycle or full system cost of energy heading letters to the acronis does and that nuclear starts to shine. But because IT is just it's built to be baseload.

We've done episodes。 We have done a lot of episodes on renewables and uh some on batteries and the intermet cy issues that arises with renewables, episodes on nuclear. And you know there are people who think it's going to be an old like I was at a conference last week and we did that conference is like i'm convinced the future is all solar and then i'll talk to someone else like the future is all nuclear and my god would be that the future is not gonna all of one energy source.

But how would you go about thinking what will determine what that ultimately x looks like? Imagine fully electrified economy, what is a policy decisions is a technological breakthrough. What ultimately, in your view, will determine to share that will be nuclear versus verse, maybe some wind.

So I sort of dismissed these all in the hypotheses because the world we live in can barely. We don't have a single type of telephone. We don't have a single type of carbonated beverage.

We don't have a single beer in the market excited. So you kind of go down. And there's no obvious reason why modern economy needs one form of electricity.

So it's going to be a big baLance. And the way to solve intermittently is kind of three ways to do IT. You know, one is nuclear, create energy that based load on all the time.

The other is batteries, where I can sort of offset the interminable cy. And the third is sophisticated grids. If my grid is big enough, right? If i've got a cross european and grid and its windy and norway, but I need my ac in spain, the grid can solve IT. And so there's this sort of competition between investing in the grid, which we're not doing enough of globally investing.

is to be clear, what do you think about what share of the electrified economy will be powered on nuclear? What things would go into that determination?

Uh, so we expect if IT grows, it's gonna less than ten percent, right? It's going it's not gonna a dominant form of energy simply because we would have to build so many reactors so quickly. And so generally, the way we get in our long term view of what electricity demand from uranium is, a you can take an I E A net zero pathway or you can take the sustainable pathway.

And IT gets you something like GDP h growth from A A base of tens h percent. And it's always gonna there. So it's always gonna be part of the mix, what you're seeing as a customer base that really, really wants IT and has deep pockets. And so if you've got big tech throwing research and development funds, then you can start to say maybe IT inflected higher and maybe small modular reactors come quicker.

And what's the higher at fifteen?

yes. Be that sort of tune, right? It's never going to be. There's no obvious reason that has to be the majority.

So since we mentioned batteries and we're talking about uranium, I wanted to bring up a sort of another mini type thing yeah, which is like a so if you look at a chart of the lithium prize, H, I mean, that looks like a bubble, a bubble that burst, uh, what's been going on there?

So on the cells on wall street, the permeability and there's perm bears and then i'm something of a perma cycle. And so my general response is this too, shell pass. And so lithium Prices were high two years ago, and I would have said, and we did say this two shell pass, they are low today, measured in ten box a kilogram sorts of levels in this two shell pass.

And we would say not returning to that eighty dollars a kilogram from the ipsam effects of the post covered. And but really think about building back from ten to maybe fifteen dollars a kilogram in the near term towards twenty. It's not a terribly hard commodity to extract. It's not terribly scarce, and we've terribly over capitalized at four the next couple years.

I imagine that within lithium. And I just and like I said, i'm just imagining that there is a lot booming demand from the electrification in the batteries and literally everything, and that is a bullish force and that batteries are getting Better and Better and Better and more efficient and that that is a barrier force for lithium. Tell me if that's ripe. More importantly, how do you think about these two headwinds? Tel.

yeah. So for a period of time, I always want to be a comparable, and I want to be an oil able. The two things that undermine the combined thesis are hybrid electric vehicles, because hybrid's, with their fuel efficient, right, and they Carry very small for fifteen, killed our batteries.

Where is a big battery electric? Could have a fifty or one hundred one kilo White battery. And litham into those batteries is linearly proportional to the kill. What hours.

And so what we see now globally is for the last two each years, battery electric vehicle sales year on your growth is plumage and is kind of get tored flat year on year. Hybrid vehicle sales have been growing fifty percent year after year after year. So we're seeing A A world where hybrid er are winning the growth.

They're still the the minority of the vehicles. And that's bad for live um it's bad for copper because coper scales as well as kind of bad for oil. And and we were told for years that hybrids are complicated.

They Carry two independent modes of a travel, uh, we need batteries. Electric is are so simple. And what kind of come into a world where and people are moving back issue towards the hybrid.

So at a time where a lot of capital went into lliana, a mining and lithium bring, we woke up and saw E V adoption break fifty percent in china. So the majority of vehicle sold in china now are electric vehicles. But the chAllenge is the sizes and the styles are not athlete m hungry, we would thought.

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Joe, should I just keep throwing out commodities and bob can talk to them? Okay, let's do gold.

Uh, speaking of there.

go. But I mean, the Price action in gold has been just kind of crazy recently, record highs. So I feel like i'm asking the same question over and over, but what's going on there so .

that this is one of the ones most of the time this too shell pass. If it's high, IT goes down. If it's low, IT goes up.

If it's in the middle, little stay in the middle. I'm still of the view we we burning, still of the view that gold works from here. And a couple ways to think about IT, which is always kind of supplying demand.

We've gone back and looked at every rate cut cycle, and we've looked at every individual rate cut in a world where rates are being cut check and where the fed exceeds and bringing long term interest rates down, gold has always gone up. And so our view is, if you think the fed succeeds, then gold goes up. Where we struggle is to what level, right? The one the speed at which gold has moved this year surprised even us and to the level is a bit tRicky on the supply side.

Mining companies, gold mining companies will brag about our grades that are a grand per tn, one grand per tn, that's one part per million. And so to make money in gold mining, you have to take a ton of rock blasted out of the earth ground to flower, find the one part out of that million and that gramm is worth ninety box today. Write a gram of gold nine i've to make a business uh of finding a needle in a haystack and I got to do IT for forty or fifty box atton and i've got ta safely dispose of that deposit and move on and find the next one. So it's a tough business.

has the cost of blessing out that time and finding that gram come down with technology long term.

absolutely. And is stunning. The ability, I mean, the fact that you can make money pulling one parts per million out of any is remarkable. So the scale at which the mining industry is efficient boggles the mind. Again, come to iron ore.

I almost iron, but I can move A A ton of iron or from the the amazon rainforest safely to china for forty box a ton, right? I can't get someone to deliver most dinners in midtown for forty dollars. And so the efficiencies of the mining industry boggled the minds.

Now having said that, IT appears as if geology is fighting back, right? IT is getting harder and harder. The average coper mine gets deeper and deeper every year.

We're moving to higher elevations. We're moving just more difficile region. So geology is always in this fight against technology and innovation. The fact that most every commodity you buy from the earth, mind metals, are like ten box a kilogram, is a testament to how well the industry is done. But IT should grind costs of metals should grow faster than inflation.

You know what else has been going up? And this is very exciting for me personally. Here's my disclaimer.

A for south of no silver. For some reason, my dad, every year for my birthday, sends me once silver dollar from his collection. And because i'm getting old, I have quite a few of them now.

So silver has been going up. It's not quite at a record, but you know it's sort of been following the path of gold. Is that just a an echo of the gold player? Is there something more fundamental going on .

through most of this year? There have been this funny split between precious metals. Platinum, gold and silver were the more useful the metal, the less IT went up.

And gold is the least useful of the medals. There's very little real utility for industry and silver is actually quite useful. 嗯， uh, especially if we think about the future of solar energy and and so on the silver front, we d like silver. And finally, silver beating gold this year. So silver kind of broken how to bit.

So I didn't realize .

yeah IT just in in the last few weeks. And what's interesting is it's, if you went through the list of the forty largest minds that produce silver, one or two of them are silver mines, the rest are LED zinc mines or gold mines or coper mines.

So I was gna say, and I brought this up of the podcast before, but this reminded me a couple years ago, I was taking uber into work.

You know, when I used to put to the uber drivers would see that I would go to blumberg like, blimber like, what do you think about bit kind or doge coin? And then there was this guy who said, oh, you for bloomberg, i'm really bullish on silver because there's less copper mining going on in the world and silver is a by product of copper and there's a lot of solar demand. And so there's going to be supplied demand to something might .

have been me driving. Yeah.

that's pretty well alive. He was reading the braket novel.

yes. Uh, and so the answer is yes. If silver were to double overnight, there is no mind.

That would say, well, now we should go chase silver. So the largest silvine in the world was think still could be K G, H M. In poland. And it's the giant a copyright with a lot of silver by product and a lot of the big gold mines in mexico, silver of bike product, which means they love to see that revenue stream go up from silver. But IT isn't the primary driver of capital decisions, investment decisions or or supply response.

And so IT would take a big Price signal from silver to convince much of the world supply to do much more than they're doing already. But we will mop IT up with solar panels over time, pass the the other industrial uses. Joe.

whenever we going to interview your uber driver.

our producer cal is supposedly working on that. So yeah, yeah, we're in touch with them. I think is going to come at some point. We're going to make that that happen.

那 他 要 被 烦。 So I hesitate to ask this question because, you know, politics are everywhere and unescapable at the moment, but we do have a presidential election coming up, and we have two candidates who seem to be in different positions when IT comes to the energy transition. What are you watching out for there?

There's three events that have kept a lot of institutional energy and oil investors on the sidelines over the last several months. And the idea is barely speaking. If I go to last vegas and go to any game at the casino, on average, going to lose, right? So I shouldn't go.

If I throw money at the stock market blindly, over time, it's gonna compound, high single digit, so I can kind of throw money in. And so therefore, to make money is like what I think markets go up and let me find some ideas. And in in oil markets right now, you have to get three independent variables or decisions or outcomes, right, in order to figure that out. And if you're as good at figuring out geopolitics that you get one out of two and then one out of two and one, there's a one in eight chance you going to get, all right.

So what the three.

the one has been, this constant, this the escalating escalation between iran and israel, right? What is the geopolitical premium in the oil Price? And we woke up monday with oil down five percent because the latest israeli response was extremely measured and disciplined and not the attacking of nuclear or the attacking of oil infrastructure that the people worried about.

And and we've been seeing that all for with this sort of measured escalation. And so you had to get that right. And then you have to get the election right in terms of oil Price, and then you have to get the OPEC thanksgiving meeting right in terms of oil Price.

And then you wake up in january and you have to decide what is china oil demand going to do next year. This year has been staringly poor for chinese oil demand growth. So you got get like fourth geopolitical things were right.

That's tough. Flip and coins on them would be tough. And so most investors are simply waiting. The way i've frame IT, at least in terms of the election, is if IT is a trump presidency, you concerted believe he will do things like he did last time.

And then you have to separate into micro o things i'll do around oil and the micro things i'll do like teraphim, right? Somebody will have a view on what is terrible policy is. But if I just look at the oil sector, we know under the trumpet administration, sanctions on iran were much more severe than they are today.

And so you could take a million or two barrels off the market from iran. And he's no huge fan of iran. So you can imagine that decision wouldn't be that difficult for him that would strengthen the oil Price under Harry administration.

You sort of assume you, for lack of clarity, more businesses usual continue with biden. And so no radical reaction to iranian sanctions. And so i've been arguing for most of this year, I think, starting in january, that trump would be good for oil Price in that regard.

And I have I had a majority of investors push back and worry about drill, baby drill where he would be bad for oil Price well. But IT will time will tell them and ultimately, it's much easier to put sanctions in place on venezuela or iran. Then IT is to convince an oil and gas industry that's pretty mature, pretty grown up, pretty disciplined to drill, baby drill.

I think I just have one last question. But since I like you and you talk geology and science as much, I like the Price stuff. But most you know, there are other people, the world you can talk Price. Can you talk about let's bring, and what that means and how that works?

So broadly speaking, two places define lithium mines and brines. And up until now, the brines have been, let me go to the most remote places on the planet. I'm going to go to high altitudes and to these ancient lake beds.

These soars the salty, dried up lake beds. And the ottomar has this lithesome triangle that spreads between bOlivia, argentina and Shelly, the world's hugest enough ment. You go up into the highlands of tibet and you can find similar.

So in tibet, for example, chinese companies are drilling wells right again, which is kind of funny, where we've come full circle from my oil and gas roots. You drill for uranium, you drill for oil, you drill for gas, you drill for blithers brands. You pumped this very salty brand to the surface and history ally, you letter evaporate.

You did the same thing the french we've done on their coast for years, and you create cell are beautiful sea salt. But you don't want the sodium chlorate, you don't want the table salt, you want the lithium. And so we've been doing that for a very long time, economic, even doing IT in these remote areas.

And then slowly and now quickly, over time, there is a technology disruption. And so one of the reasons I have to cover all of these various commodity, yeah, is the shale industry destroyed the oil patch. And the reason that shale was such a disruptive technology was three fold.

First, at small little units of capex, ten million dollars a well, not a billion dollar platform. Second, you get a quick response. I get oil two quarters later, not five years later.

And third, we draw one hundred thousand shell wells, and we got smarter and smarter and smarter. So rights law, that natural learning curve mattered, is so why my talking about this in dla? Well, lithesome is now being commercialized with a new technology around D. L. Direct litham extraction, where instead of laying that briny liquid out in the sun and letting mother nature evaporated, i'll do IT in a tank.

And so if you're about a year ago is when x on mobile announced their plans to go to old oil field areas, they're going up into arkansas and they are drilling wells to pump out brands from the smacked over formation, and they're going to put IT in a facility that doesn't look any different than an amazon fulfillment center, and they're going to extract that live me. And by twenty thirty, they want to have a million cars worth of lithium and equal next door. And arko l wants to do the same thing.

The technology works. We saw rio tino in my coverage spent paying almost one hundred percent premium on a company that is leading the industry in terms of direct lathy of extraction. So there is a there's a disruptive technology that comes into the bottom, the cost of on liyang yum so that the future of lithium um is will the industry get more liyang yum from old oil fields or will they get IT from the stars of the high altitude?

And is joe and I learned the hard way that commodities can in fact evaporate when they're in containers because I had a small glass jar of crude oil and I left IT in the office when I moved to a adobe because I figured I couldn't take a jar of oil on a plane and um it's slowly evaporated in the office for which I apologized to .

that's OK as far as I didn't get, I have one tiny, tiny question. And I just want to ended back on uranium. What is the role of nuclear weapons commissioning in the uranium .

supply as an excEllent question. And so as a geologist, I can go by mine, by mine, and out of all of the uranium supply, there are three other places that you can get uranium from. I can go to old uranium tAilings and enrich those.

That's never gonna the bottom, the cost curve. They wouldn't be sitting there. The other is government stockpiles can release uranium.

And the third is I can accelerate the conversion literally, almost literally sorts to power shares and start moving decommission ing warheads and using that as a supply. What I would say is the government is not in the business making money. So I don't really worry that there's some government bureaucrat that says all uranium in one hundred twenty box.

Let's put some of our volumes into the market IT. IT will almost be like gold, right? As gold Price goes up, governments actually buy more.

It's almost the reverse of what you'd expect. And so if uranium Price goes up, it's highly unlikely that governments are like, let's make a quick buck. Instead, they will see that as a strategic stockpile.

Bob reg, I can't think of any other guest where we go from you know the highlands and tibet to a random place and architects. Nuclear weapons decommission ing. And the effect on the iranian Price. But there was no double we could do with you.

Thank you so much for coming back on absolutely.

I love talking above those, so fun.

Yeah, he's one of those rare guests where you can just sort .

of throw out anything and literally heb that if you throw something out, he's going to have some extremely granular knowledge .

of what he is talking. Yeah, brad sr, yeah. Is one that sticks in my mind. No, that was fascinating.

I do wonder, first of all, I feel like there's this weird like overarching theme when IT comes to these commodities where people get really like emotionally attach to a lot of them. You know, I don't think anyone treats like U. S. Treasuries in the same way .

they treat .

like uranium or gold or something like that. So that kind of interesting why that happens. And then secondly, I was thinking about the prospects for nuclear energy and IT. Does I I take bops point about how you're actually measuring the cost and that things like oko aren't gonna take into account the stability of nuclear power. But I do wonder as the cost curve comes down for a stuff like solar, if you know maybe some of the appetite for nuclear kind of ABS.

yeah, we'll have to say I to my mind, there is still just so much incredible uncertainty about what the energy makes looks like in five years, ten years, twenty years and beyond. You know, bob said something that was like this major light ball moment for me in that conversation.

I ve always thought commodity people are a little bit so many of them, not bob, but you know, like especially the people get really cult about commodities and stuff like that. And then he said, all commodity people are aware that their business is disappearing. And it's like, you know what if I were in a business like where every day I woke up, I forgive you you a business day like there's lesson less of IT in the world and people are trying to sub to away from IT. I get IT alright.

Shall we leave at there? Live there? This has been another episode of the all podcast. I am Tracy. Other way you can follow me at Tracy .

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