Uranium Term Prices Hit 18-Year High as Utilities Secure Supply

Nuclear power plants do not buy their fuel the way drivers buy gas. That difference explains most of what is happening in uranium this year, and it is why the fuel market and the mining equities are telling different stories.

Utilities are buying years early

Term contracting through early November stands at more than 83M pounds across 44 utility deals, against about 48M pounds at the end of October last year. The fourth quarter is when most of the business gets done, and about 40M pounds has come into the books since October opened.

Even at that pace, the total sits below the roughly 150M pounds a year needed to replace what reactors burn. Utilities are buying security of supply rather than the cheapest pound available today, and the contract price now sits above spot.

Demand keeps stacking up. The International Atomic Energy Agency's latest outlook puts global nuclear capacity at between 641GW and 1,045GW by 2050, against 377GW at the end of 2025, with 78 reactors under construction in 17 countries. The nuclear fuel race has a longer history.

The term price cleared the old peak

CamecoCCJ publishes a long-term price indicator, and it rose to $98.00 a pound at the end of October from $96.50 in August and September. It is the price utilities pay over years, not in a single trade.

The demand math points one way. TradeTech's long-term indicator has held at its highest level in more than 18 years, and Fitch Solutions' BMI expects spot to average $95 a pound next year, up from $88 this year, with reactor uranium requirements growing 4.1% a year through 2035 against mine production growth of 3.3%. It expects the market to tip into deficit next year.

Kazakhstan's acid bottleneck

Kazakhstan accounts for about a fifth of the world's mined uranium, and its in-situ mines dissolve ore underground with sulphuric acid. Russia has capped acid shipments through December, and China, the largest producer, stopped exporting in May. Kazatomprom's new acid plant has slipped to somewhere between late 2027 and early 2028.

Kazatomprom still produced 18.76M pounds in the third quarter, up 12%, and left 2026 guidance unchanged at about 71M to 75M pounds. Strong output does not remove the constraint. A producer can hit its numbers and still be hostage to a chemical it imports.

Where the listed names sit

Cameco realized $65.80 a pound on third-quarter deliveries and narrowed 2026 production guidance to 19.5M to 20.5M pounds after the Key Lake mill outage.

Chief executive Tim Gitzel is explicit about the discipline.

Uranium EnergyUEC took the opposite route. It signed two agreements with US utilities covering 1.1M pounds from 2027 through 2032, priced at prevailing spot levels with no floors or ceilings, and reported an average realized price of $93.13 a pound in fiscal 2026.

Energy FuelsUUUU kept its uranium segment profitable for a third straight quarter, with its realized price up 10% from the second quarter and a gross margin near 63%. The group still posted a $52.2M net loss on mark-to-market losses.

The gap investors are trading

Mining equities have not kept pace with the fuel market. Nuclear stocks have been crushed even as fuel prices held, and Sprott market strategist Paul Wong argues the pressure is financial rather than fundamental, with tighter liquidity raising the cost of capital.

The Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, which holds 81.7M pounds worth about $7.6B, trades at a 16% discount to net asset value and can only raise fresh money at or above that value. With the biggest financial buyer sidelined, the physical market leans on utilities and producers.

Last year's final quarter totaled about 70M pounds, and this year's pace into November has been faster. If utilities keep signing at that rate, the term market will have done the work the spot price cannot.