Published on Sep 25, 2026 • Updated on Sep 30, 2026
This article was written by Adem Tumerkan
Content Editor, Dunham | 2025 ThinkAdvisor Luminaries Award Winner | 2026 Wealthies Finalist, Thought Leader of the Year | Macroeconomics, markets, geopolitics & global trends
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Uranium's long-term price just hit an 18-year high as the two producers controlling over half of global supply hold output flat instead of expanding. Mines take 15 to 20 years to build, and utilities have under-contracted supply for 14 straight years running. Together, that's setting up what's shaping up to be a uranium super deficit lasting well into the 2030s and beyond.
While the rest of the world is watching oil, there's another energy fuel that's making me look twice.
I'm talking about uranium.
Uranium has been going through its own renaissance as of late, with demand booming from AI and clean energy needs while supply growth looks nonexistent.
Taken together, booming demand plus weak supply equals higher prices.
Highlighting this, uranium's long-term contract price just broke an 18-year record, hitting $96/lb, above the old 2007 peak, as utility companies start needing to lock in long-term contracts.
Meanwhile, the two companies that control over half of global uranium supply, Kazakhstan's Kazatomprom and Canada's Cameco, are both cautious, limiting new investment and output even as prices rise (Kazatomprom actually slashed output 5% in 2026¹).
The first one makes sense as energy needs soar.
But that second one is really unusual.
Why? Because normally when a commodity price keeps rising, producers respond by ramping output to take advantage of higher margins. That's not happening here. Many of these producers are still scarred from the crash that followed Fukushima, and they aren't spending billions to ramp up again until they believe high prices are here to stay.
So - is a real shortage forming? Probably, yes. Mines cost billions to start up and can take over a decade to build, and producers are holding back on purpose at a time when demand is climbing on three separate fronts at once.
To understand why this is happening, it helps to know the capital cycle - a concept economist Edward Chancellor has spent decades studying the supply side of markets.
I’ve written about this in depth before² - but for now - picture a fast-growing town where rents keep climbing as more people move in.
A developer sees the high rents and breaks ground on a new building. But so does everyone else at the same time.
And since buildings take years to finish, by the time they open dozens hit the market at once, chasing renters who show up one at a time. Thus, rents fall even though the town keeps growing.
Economic Darwinism kicks in. Developers stop building as margins plunge, some go under, and it takes years for the growing population to fill up all that empty space.
Eventually things will turn as rents climb again and those left standing are stronger -but someone will get ambitious again and break ground on a new building, restarting the loop.
That's the capital cycle. Boom, overproduce, bust, culling, recovery, repeat.
Uranium ran through its own version of this, with one thing that made it worse - a shock to demand hitting at the exact moment the industry was already overinvesting.
To give you some history, uranium peaked near $140/lb in 2007 – and it had already cooled to around $70 by the time the Tsunami hit Japan in 2011, causing the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster³.
Japan idled its reactor fleet as fears spread - and Germany (because of nuclear fears) even announced it was exiting nuclear entirely.
Demand soon fell off a cliff while inventories piled up.
Then - by November 2016 - spot uranium hit a 12-year low near $18/lb (more than 70% below pre-Fukushima levels).
The irony is that even as prices plunged, producers pumped out record amounts, overproducing straight into the glut. It sounds irrational, but it made sense at the time.
Why? Because if your product drops 50%, you need to double output just to keep revenue flat - even though that only reinforces the oversupply crushing your margins in the first place.
And when an entire industry thinks this way – prices can sink and stay down for years until the big producers finally throw in the towel and say, “Output be damned – It’s time to cut back and preserve our finite resources.”
Thus, after years of collapse – the remaining firms finally began cutting supplies. Marginal supplies soon left the market. And the survivors consolidated around their best assets and waited.
Then by 2019, recovery began.
Spot uranium has since climbed more than fivefold off that 2016 low, sitting near $90/lb as of September 2026, one of the sharpest recoveries off the deepest bear phase on record.
Simply put, the brutal bear market from 2011 to 2018-19 was the seed for uranium's current renaissance.
“So uranium prices are up, won’t producers just add more and prices fall?”
If markets were efficient, yes. But markets aren't efficient, and that's where the current cycle gets interesting.
Global primary uranium production ran around 173 million pounds in 2025. That covers roughly 90% of reactor requirements, with the rest patched by shrinking inventories and secondary supply. Forecasts put 2026 primary supply near 175 million pounds against demand already above 200 million.
It's manageable for now - but less so heading into the 2030s.
That’s because major producers who account for most of the world's uranium output haven't ramped up to meet it.
Some have held guidance flat despite operational setbacks. Others have cut targets outright, citing input constraints and a preference for holding onto reserves rather than mining them at a discount.
That's the opposite of how a normal commodity behaves when the price runs. They're scared to invest more unless they're convinced prices stay higher for longer. And who can blame them?
Because of this, Goldman Sachs⁴ sees this playing out for another two decades. Its research shows the uranium market moving from a supply surplus that lasted from the 1990s through the mid-2020s into a widening structural deficit that persists through 2045, even after accounting for new mines still to come online.
Even more conservative measures still indicate a widening, multiyear deficit brought on by rising demand and limited new supplies at current construction and investment plans.
The point is, when the companies that could help close that gap can’t - or choose not to – then the deficit will only get worse.
This is the part that separates commodities from most Wall Street analysis.
The lag effects.
See, a mothballed mine can restart fast. But building a new one can't.
Taking one from discovery, permitting, financing, and construction to output takes roughly 15 to 20 years.
Thus, whatever the market needs by the mid-2030s should already be somewhere in that pipeline today.
But it isn’t.
See, the world (so far discovered) holds roughly 8.1 million tonnes recoverable at under $260/kg - enough to cover demand through 2050 and beyond - according to the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA)⁵.
The issue now is turning that rock into an operating mine before the existing supply runs down.
And for producers to invest in that whole two-decade process, they need a price they can plan around that’s usually backed by a signed utility contract before they commit big money.
And while uranium exploration and mine-development spending have picked up, it's still not where it needs to be.
For instance, Domestic spending rose from $377 million in 2020 to $965 million in 2024. The NEA expects the 2025 total to land near $1.0 to $1.1 billion once missing country data gets filled in, and drilling rose 20% over that same period. But that's still only half of what the sector spent at the last cycle's peak, back in 2011 to 2013, when domestic spending topped $2 billion.
Even that recovery doesn't move fast enough.
Under the NEA's low-demand scenario, the mines already running or approved can only cover reactor needs until around 2032. And under its high-demand scenario, even if every mine ran fully, the world would already be short today.
So, yes. The money is coming back. But it’s just flowing into a hole that takes 15 to 20 years to dig out of.
"But what about the other half of the equation, demand?"
Good point. I deliberately avoided leading with demand, because demand forecasts move around a lot more than mine depletion schedules do (aka they’re fickle).
Still, the World Nuclear Association⁶ expects uranium demand to rise about 30% by 2030 and more than double by 2040. Roughly 80 reactors⁷ are under construction across 15 countries, with China alone running 38 of them.
Meanwhile, meeting the global target of tripling nuclear capacity by 2050 would require construction starts to climb to around 6x current levels by the mid-2030s.
Part of that push is that nuclear produces power with zero operating emissions, and it can scale in a way solar and wind can't. That makes it one of the few tools governments have for hitting net-zero climate targets without giving up reliable, around-the-clock electricity.
Then there's the AI boom.
Morgan Stanley⁸ expects global electricity demand to climb more than a trillion kilowatt-hours a year through 2030 - with data centers driving nearly a fifth of that growth (an increase close to the size of Canada's entire power grid).
Uranium also offers something no other fuel source does well - it can be stockpiled for years so it doesn't need continuous shipping lanes or pipelines to keep a reactor running.
Thus, as governments get more nervous about energy security (as we’ve seen with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz), that matters almost as much as the electricity itself.
Uranium barely trades on the spot market, since no utility wants to buy its fuel week to week at fluctuating prices. So, about 85% of it moves through long-term contracts⁹ signed years ahead of delivery.
But that has pros and cons. Producers get a fixed rate they can plan and invest around. But if prices surge past that rate, they're stuck selling something worth $85 for $50 for years.
Right now, utilities are on their 14th straight year of signing fewer of these contracts than they'll actually need. They're not buying less because they need less. They're buying less because they're hoping for lower prices.
But that doesn't work forever. As of August 2026, utilities had only locked in about 37 million pounds globally for the year, a small fraction of what reactors will actually burn.
This is called "coverage" - and it's starting to show stress for utility firms gambling on lower prices.
For perspective, U.S. utility contract coverage falls from about 98% of requirements in 2026 to roughly 60% by 2030 and just 9% by 2033. European coverage drops from full in 2030 to 36% by 2034.
Simply put, most utilities won't have enough uranium locked in to run their reactors within the decade unless they start signing contracts soon. Uranium has to pass through conversion, enrichment, and fabrication before it ever reaches a reactor, so utilities need to lock in supply now for pounds they won't burn until the early 2030s.
Making it harder, Russian material still supplied about 16% of the EU's uranium in 2025. Western buyers now compete with China, Russia, and India for a shrinking pool of uncommitted Kazakh supply. And U.S. utilities still lean on foreign sources for 93% of their deliveries last year - something that has troubled politicians.
So, utilities can put off buying for now. They can't put off the years it takes a mine to get built. That mismatch, deferred demand meeting a slow supply cycle, is where I believe the real shortage shows up.
Of course, none of this is set in stone.
A demand shock, another Fukushima-scale accident, a China slowdown, or a recession that cools AI spending could soften the picture fast. Higher prices could also pull more supply out of the ground than models assume, and stockpile drawdowns could bridge gaps longer than expected.
The supply deficit is widening as of now, but that doesn't make the outcome certain.
What we do know is mines take over a decade to build. The two companies that dominate global supply keep saying they aren't expanding. And demand is climbing on reactor builds, a re-contracting cycle, and AI power needs right as utilities have deferred more buying than at any point in over a decade.
That's the position we're in. Whether it plays out that way is a different question, and nobody gets to skip that part.
But as always, time will tell.
Is there a uranium shortage right now? Not yet. Current mine production covers roughly 90% of global reactor requirements, with inventories and other sources filling the gap. Most projections suggest that supply can meet demand through 2030. The risk grows after that, as existing mines deplete and utilities have less of their future uranium needs covered by contracts.
Why aren’t uranium miners producing more? Many producers remain cautious after the 2011–2016 price collapse hurt industry margins. Kazatomprom and Cameco, which together account for more than half of global supply, have held output flat or cut it rather than expand. They say current prices don’t yet support the long-term investment needed to develop a new mine.
How long does it take to build a new uranium mine? A new uranium mine typically takes 15 to 20 years from discovery to first production. That includes permitting, financing, and construction. The long lead time matters because mines needed to meet demand in the mid-2030s would need to be in development already. Higher prices alone can’t bring new supply online right away.
What is causing the uranium supply deficit? The expected deficit comes from demand growing faster than new supply can come online. Reactor construction, nuclear power’s role in net-zero goals, and AI-driven electricity demand are adding to uranium needs. At the same time, mine development takes many years, and utility contracting has lagged. That makes it harder to close a future gap quickly.
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