By Mark Travis, CPG

There are moments in history when humanity stumbles into a discovery so profound that the old world simply cannot continue. We split the atom less than a century ago, and for a long stretch, our species barely knew what to make of it. We feared it, mythologized it, and stuffed it into a box labeled too powerful, too political, too much.

But now—finally—something is shifting. The timing, the physics, the policy winds, and the relentless hunger of the digital age are converging into an unmistakable truth:
we are stepping out of the era of chemical fire and into the era of nuclear fire.

This is not a cycle story. It’s a civilizational pivot.

And uranium—quiet, dense, misunderstood uranium—is at the heart of it.

I. The New Fire: Humanity’s Leap Beyond Combustion

For fifty thousand years, every spark that powered our lives came from the same narrow miracle: electrons jumping between bonds. Campfires, coal plants, gas turbines—they’re all variations on the same ancient theme.

Then came nuclear fission. A new fire. A different fire. A fire born not from electrons, but from the nucleus itself—where the strong force holds court as the most powerful force nature has ever revealed to us.

One pound of uranium equals the energy of three million pounds of coal.
Energy density so extreme it defies intuition.
So compact it reshapes civilization the moment we accept its implications.

We’ve spent decades treating this fuel as though it were just another commodity. But uranium is not the next step in the combustion story—it is the first step beyond it.

II. Three Industrial Revolutions at Once

In October, JPMorgan dropped a quiet thunderbolt: a $1.5 trillion Security & Resiliency Initiative, aimed at reinforcing the strategic backbone of the U.S. economy. The pillars were unmistakable:

• AI and frontier technologies
• Energy independence and grid resiliency
• Critical minerals and advanced manufacturing

And there, placed unapologetically among the must-have infrastructure of the 21st century, was nuclear energy.

When institutions of this scale shift their worldview, they aren’t betting on a fad. They’re acknowledging an inevitability.

Artificial intelligence, automation, domestic supply chains, data… these things are not trends. They are the architecture of a new industrial order. And that order requires a stable, abundant, high-density energy substrate.

It requires the new fire.

III. The Market Awakens

For years, uranium wandered in the desert—underpriced, misunderstood, dismissed as yesterday’s fuel. Yet even in the lean decade, the physics remained unchanged. And eventually, reality comes calling.

Today, every part of the fuel cycle is tightening:

• Spot and term prices rising
• Enrichment swinging from underfeeding to overfeeding
• Inventories thinning
• Utilities returning to long-term contracts after a decade asleep

And what was once a niche corner of commodity finance now has a shadow giant: the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, pulling pounds off the market with the force of pure price signal.

This is not speculative froth.
This is structural tightening.

We burned through our cushion.
We failed to invest in new supply.
We forgot that no reactor, no matter how modern, can run on sentiment.

And now the market is rediscovering what the physics always told us: uranium has been undervalued for an entire generation.

IV. Policy Tailwinds: Fast-41 and Federal Momentum

For decades, permitting has been the slow-turning wheel that discouraged developers and exhausted investors. But the federal landscape is changing—quietly, steadily, and now unmistakably.

Fast-41, once a framework reserved for highways and pipelines, now explicitly includes: ISR uranium, Mills, Conversion, Enrichment, & HALEU production

In parallel, the 2025 Budget Bill and executive directives have recognized nuclear as essential to national security, supply-chain strength, and decarbonization. Washington isn’t simply approving nuclear. It is prioritizing it.

The bureaucracy is beginning to match the physics.
And that alone is enough to shift the trajectory of an industry.

V. The World Starts Building Again

While the West spent years debating nuclear’s identity crisis, the rest of the world kept building: China. India. South Korea. The UAE. Eastern Europe.

Dozens of reactors under construction. More in planning. And the U.S., once stagnant, is quietly transforming its own fleet with 80-year life extensions—the kind of decision that locks in long-term uranium demand for generations.

Meanwhile, SMRs and microreactors are not science projects anymore. Their first deployments aim where the grid falters: Remote towns, Industrial loads, Military installations, Microgrids, & Data centers

The next generation of reactors will not look like the last.
Their scale will be smaller, their roles more varied, and their potential enormous.

VI. AI and the Electrification Surge

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a computational discipline—it is an energy consumer of mythic proportions. Model training. Inference. Hyperscale data centers. 24/7 loads with zero tolerance for downtime.

We are building digital cathedrals that run day and night, learning, predicting, dreaming, building. They demand electricity not in peaking cycles, but in ceaseless baseload.

Intermittency cannot carry this burden.
Batteries cannot shoulder it.
Gas cannot scale cleanly enough for it.

Only nuclear operates with the quiet consistency that AI requires:
90%+ capacity factors. Multi-year refueling cycles. Carbon-free baseload.

AI is the new industrial furnace. And the only fuel that can support it at scale is uranium.

VII. The Price Is Wrong — and Physics Says So

The greatest misunderstanding in the entire uranium market is a simple one:
we price uranium like a commodity, but it behaves like a physical miracle.

Whether uranium is $70/lb or $300/lb barely moves the cost of nuclear power. Fuel is a single-digit portion of reactor economics. Meanwhile, the energy density of U-235—nuclear strong-force energy—puts it in a cost-equivalence range orders of magnitude above today’s pricing.

A physics-based valuation framework places uranium somewhere between:

• $300/lb (conservative cost parity)
• $1000–3000/lb (pure energy-density equivalence)

This is not a price forecast.
It is a statement of mismatch—between what uranium is and what the market pretends it is.

This gap is the opportunity of a generation.

VIII. When Prices Move, Entire Districts Wake Up

A true price breakout doesn’t just lift a few producers. It resurrects forgotten districts, reopens dormant mines, and redraws the map of viable exploration.

At higher uranium prices:

• ISR isn’t the only game in town
• Open pits and underground operations return
• Marginal belts transform into real contenders
• Drilling accelerates
• Staking wars reopen
• The exploration pipeline finally breathes again

Meanwhile, modern tools—AI, machine learning, 3D geologic modeling—unlock layers of subsurface intelligence never before accessible. Roll-front discovery becomes a data-driven pursuit rather than a needle-in-a-basin exercise.

The work becomes smarter. Faster. More predictive. More efficient.

We’re not just inheriting new fire.
We’re learning how to aim it.

IX. Waste: The Myth, the Reality, and the Future Fuel

Nuclear waste is one of the great optical illusions of modern society. The entire spent-fuel footprint of the United States fits on a single football field stacked 30 feet high. It is solid. Contained. Tracked. Managed with a flawless safety record spanning seven decades.

And—this is the part almost no one realizes—95% of its energy remains unused.

Tomorrow’s reactors and recycling technologies will turn much of what we now store into multi-century fuel. Even the isotopes considered “waste” today are becoming strategic assets—powering nuclear batteries, satellites, sensors, and remote systems for centuries.

In a world obsessed with circularity, nuclear is quietly revealing the most circular energy cycle of all.

X. What This Means for Us

The horizon in front of us is not abstract. It is real, rising, and demanding talent, courage, stewardship, and scientific clarity.

As uranium prices rise and the world’s appetite for electrons becomes insatiable, opportunity expands across every corner of the sector:

• Geologists
• Engineers
• Hydrologists
• Nuclear fuel specialists
• Data scientists
• Permitting professionals
• AI-driven subsurface modelers

This is not a renaissance to watch.
It is a renaissance to shape.

We have inherited a fire more powerful than any our species has ever wielded—and with it, a responsibility to use it wisely, transparently, ethically, and with a long memory for the land and communities that support our work.

We are building the energy architecture of 2050, 2080, 2100 and beyond.
The choices we make now echo into a century that will run on electrons drawn from the nucleus.

The new fire is here.
And it is ours to kindle.