Cameco: A Nuclear Gamble

Cameco. The name sounds like a forgotten corner of a board game. For a decade after Fukushima, it wasn’t much better. From 2011 to 2021, revenues went down. From $2.4 billion to $1.5 billion. Countries got skittish about atoms, which, honestly, is understandable. Uranium’s price? It fell. Plummeted, really. From $136 a pound to $18. So it goes.

Then the cloud happened. And AI. Everything needs power. And people started thinking about not, you know, boiling the planet. Safer reactors helped. So, countries started looking at nuclear again. It’s a funny thing, how quickly we forget the lessons of glowing mushrooms.

Uranium bounced back. To around $94 a pound as of late. Cameco’s revenues doubled from 2021 to 2024. From $1.5 billion to $3.1 billion. They dug up about 17% of the world’s uranium in 2024. Second only to Kazatomprom, which sounds like a Bond villain’s company. After years of losing money, they actually made some. A small miracle, really.

The stock went up. A lot. Over 620% in five years. People got excited. But will it keep going? That’s the question, isn’t it? A nuclear “super cycle.” Sounds like something out of a science fiction novel.

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What Might Happen

Cameco won’t just dig stuff out of the ground forever. They’re trying to become more than a uranium mine. A whole nuclear energy company. It’s a sensible plan, if you ignore the inherent risks of splitting atoms.

They increased their stake in Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) back in 2021. From 24% to 49%. Laser enrichment. Sounds expensive. The idea is to be a one-stop shop for enriched uranium. Convenient, if you’re building bombs, or, you know, powering cities.

In 2023, they partnered with Brookfield Asset Management to buy Westinghouse Electric. A nuclear power plant designer and builder. 49% stake. More exposure to the atomic infrastructure market. It’s like building a really complicated Lego set, only with potentially catastrophic consequences.

They’ll likely buy more companies. Accelerate the transformation. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) expects nuclear capacity to increase 2.6 times by 2050. That should drive uranium prices higher, even as the miners ramp up production. Supply and demand. It’s almost… comforting.

I suspect Cameco’s stock will rise over the next ten years. There will be bumps in the road. Production bottlenecks. Always bottlenecks. But it’s one of the better bets in the nuclear energy sector. It’s a gamble, of course. Everything is. So it goes.

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2026-02-10 22:54