“The economic incentive to a nuclear power plant buyer is not buy low, sell high. It's don't run out of fuel. That keeps your job and keeps our plants running safely. So there's not an economic incentive to call bottoms.”
Catalyst with Shayle Kann · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
Alkin is explaining why uranium buyers behave differently from coal or gas traders. Fuel buyers at utilities are nuclear engineers who prize security of supply over price, and that shapes how contracts get signed.
Transcript
…up 5x on them that they're paying, is still like, there's plenty of uranium out there. And it's really driven by the opaqueness of the market and the recency biases that are in the market and the fact that security of supply covers them for most of their needs. Yeah, I guess most of the time.
…be operating at close to 100% capacity factor. I know what I'm going to need. And as you said, the only thing that really matters to me is security of supply. It's not necessarily pricing. Why is there a spot market at all? Why don't I just entirely contract forward all of my requirement capacity?
It's a fabulous question. So if we look at the composition of the spot market, you're probably looking at 55, 60, 65%, depending on the year, are physical traders. And so those traders will, what they tend to do is they will get, and some of the Japanese trading houses, some of the banks will do it. Some one-off-random traders will come into the market. You're starting to see actually some of the big oil and gas traders come into the market, some of the mammoth ones. You've seen Mercuria enter the market recently, which is enormous. But they will, so what they do is they will tend to, they might help have helped start finance a mine, a small development mine, and they might get some offtake. Or the Uzbeks or the Kazakhs or Olympic Dam, which is owned by BHP down in South Australia, a monster copper mine. One of the byproducts is copper. So they may take some of their, they produce seven, eight, nine, 10 million pounds a year and a market that's two, let's round up 200 million pounds and demand growing…
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