Brandon Munro | Investor Interest Returns to the Uranium Market

This interview is all about uranium investing.  Brandon Munro gives an overview of the current state of the uranium market and the increased investor interest he is seeing.  He also addresses many of the objections held by those with bearish or skeptical sentiment towards uranium.

Brandon Munro is the Chief Executive Officer of Bannerman Resources an ASX-listed Uranium development company.  Brandon is also a quantitative economist and lawyer with 20 years experience as a corporate lawyer and resources executive, including serving as Bannerman’s General Manager between 2009-2011.  Before joining Bannerman as CEO/Managing Director, Brandon was Managing Director of an ASX-listed company, which was focused on base metals exploration in Africa. Brandon also has extensive experience regarding the corporate social responsibility of mining companies and frequently speaks publically concerning that topic.

0:05 Introductions of topic and guest

2:30 Overview of Bannerman Resources

4:58 Overview of current uranium market

16:11 Main driver of uranium bull market: supply destruction or demand creation?

17:29 What caused uranium’s parabolic rise from 2005-2007?

20:59 Could thorium replace uranium as a primary base load source of power?

23:46 Are there any other electricity-generating methods could dramatically reduce or eliminate Uranium demand in the next 10-15 years?

26:16 Answering an analyst’s argument against investing in uranium miners now

29:20 Is not there 5yrs of uranium above-ground supply to keep the spot price suppressed?

33:02 Isn’t uranium socially unacceptable?

34:40 Projected growth of the uranium market

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

Bill: Welcome back and thanks for tuning in ladies and gentlemen. Today we’ll be talking about a hot topic for many resource investors currently, which is the uranium market. I’m Bill Powers and this is Mining Stock Education. Joining me this episode is Brandon Munro, Chief Executive Officer of Bannerman Resources, an ASX listed uranium development company. Brandon is also a quantitative economist and lawyer with 20 years experience as a corporate lawyer and resource executive, including serving as Bannerman’s general manager between 2009 and 2011.

Before joining Bannerman as CEO Managing Director, Brandon was a managing director of another ASX-listed company which was focused on base metal exploration in Africa. Brandon also has extensive experience regarding the corporate social responsibility of mining companies, and that is a topic that he frequently speaks about.

Brandon, I’d like to welcome you on to the program today.

Brandon: Thanks very much, Bill, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Bill: As I mentioned, we’re gonna be discussing uranium and the uranium markets. In light of that, would you please share with listeners a little bit about your background as it relates to the uranium mining industry?

Brandon: Sure. You touched, Bill, on the fact that I was a lawyer, a corporate lawyer, and that was my first exposure to uranium. I had a number of uranium clients and acted for those clients during the last significant boom, the period between 2005, 2006, 2007. So, that was predominantly from a mergers and acquisitions point of view. I entered the sector as an executive in 2009, and lived in Namibia, one of the key uranium producing countries in the world, where I worked for Bannerman, I ran the country’s operations in Namibia, and also had a lot to do with the Namibian Uranium Association and its interactions with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Nuclear Association.

Interesting things happened, as the listeners will know, after the Fukushima events. And I saw that the sector was going to go through a period of slowdown. I didn’t foresee it being a stoppage, but I did see it as being a spacer. And whilst I maintained some of my industry involvement, and stayed on as a governance advisor to the Namibian Uranium Association, that was when I left the sector temporarily and moved into base metals exploration as you mentioned earlier. And then I’ve been back in the sector full time as CEO of Bannerman for about two and a half years.

Bill: And you’re at the helm of Bannerman. Can you give us a thumbnail overview of Bannerman Resources and your key asset?

Brandon: Love to. Bannerman is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange under the code BMN. We have the Etango Uranium Project in Namibia. Enormous project. Two hundred and seventy million pounds of resource, which includes 130 million pounds of reserve. Bannerman has been hard at it since 2006, working exclusively on this project, and we’ve taken it all the way through from initial drill holes, through to a definitive feasibility study way back in 2012. Now, because of the events that I alluded to after Fukushima, it wasn’t the right time to push that through to financing and production.

So, instead, we’ve looked at optimizing. In 2015, we produced a mining optimization study that included technology advances such as radiometric scanning on trucks. In 2017, we released a processing optimization study which made a number of capex and opex changes and improvements. We ran a pilot plant for two years, so we built a demonstration plant on site to de-risk the processing technology and ensure that when our day in the sun came, we didn’t have banks and financiers and so forth questioning any aspect of our processing. And finally, we’ve just recently completed a membrane test work program, and that’s a novel application of a well-understood nanofiltration technology. And that’s got a number of players in the industry talking because it’s the first time it’s been applied in that particular way of uranium.

The project itself, it’s fully permitted, from an environmental point of view. We’ve got a retention license, which is the preferred form of tenure in Namibia, and Namibia is really a fantastic place to do business, generally. I lived there for six years, loved it, and I got a lot done in that time in the two companies that I was working for. But it really is a crucial and premiere uranium development destination. It doesn’t suffer from a lot of the social, political, and environmental roadblocks that many other jurisdictions that happen to host uranium resources do suffer from. And that’s a key advantage for a number of the things that we’ll talk about today.

Bill: Let’s jump over to your commentary on the overall uranium market. Back in May, you wrote an excellent article on your LinkedIn account entitled, “Uranium supply catalysts plus price inertia equals extreme volatility.” Could you give listeners an overview of what you wrote there as well as your general thoughts regarding the current uranium macro environment?

Brandon: As you said at the outset, Bill, we are seeing really interesting increases in the amount of investor interest in uranium. And that’s a very recent phenomenon. I’ve been working the bear market, you could say, for the last couple of years, and I’ve gone from the viewing maybe one or two interesting articles a month, being written out there, to several a day that are coming out. And we talked a bit about that earlier before going online.

So, the reason is uranium, as a commodity, is famed for its bull markets. So, for example, in the 1980s when the oil crisis created a catalyst for uranium prices, the price settled, in real terms, over the longer term, at more than six times the current spot price. And because of the nature of uranium price input into nuclear power, and the fact that U3O8, raw uranium, only comprises about 3% of the cost of power, the industry was able to thrive despite prices being relatively high at that level. And, of course, in 2005, 2006, 2007, the last bull run that we had in this sector, very spectacular investment returns were made.

So, the investors who’ve been around for a cycle or two and remember those dynamics are starting to get the sense that we’re on the front end of a bull market. And then that brings me to the article that you referred to. We are seeing price inertia at the moment, and the uranium spot price at, let’s call it $23, that’s well below the cost of production for more than half of the world’s uranium mines. Now, there’s a reason why they’re still in production and that’s because they have a buffering from long-term contracts.

So, when uranium price was much higher, many of these mines were able to write long-term contracts. They’d give them a blended price that’s much higher than the current spot price. But something has to give because those contracts are rolling off. And we’ve already seen them roll off, and we’ve already seen bankruptcies such as Paladin Energy. And even though they’ve got a tier-one asset, the lowest cost open-pit uranium mine in the world, they still went bankrupt. And that’s because they lost the protection of their long-term pricing. So it’s being described as a trainwreck in slow motion, as we can see what is about to happen, but price is simply not responding.

And we know from other commodities and we know from uranium that when you have the dynamics shifting fundamentally in a sector without a price response, it’s a little bit like pulling the rubber band back and then letting it go. It doesn’t create a normalized price response. We’re not looking anymore at a normalized curve, we’re looking at extreme volatility, that may well be a similar shape to what we saw in 2007.

So the question you’re probably thinking at the moment is, “Well, what’s causing this price inertia other than me just being wrong on the fundamentals changing?” And that’s very interesting to follow, because what happened is, in January, in the U.S., a section 232 petition was lodged by the two largest uranium producers in the United States.

Section 232, as you might know, is a provision that allows the Department of Commerce to conduct an investigation and impose very strong measures if they find that there is unfair trade practices that lead to a national security concern. So it’s been invoked for aluminum and steel in recent times.

And the reason for the petition was that they argued that uranium supply from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and China was state-sponsored, hence the unfair trade, and the low pricing regime had decimated the U.S.’s domestic production of uranium. So it had gone down from say, 40% in 1989, all the way down to 3% today. So, the effective low uranium prices has decimated U.S. production from 40% in 1989, all the way down to 23% today.

Now, what’s happened from an inertia point of view is the utilities have dug in and opposed, because the proposed remedy by the petitioners is regarded as being unworkable. The petitioners wanted to impose a 25% requirement on U.S. utilities to buy American uranium. And there just isn’t enough uranium in America for that. All of the American deposits were largely mined out during the Cold War, you see. So, why the utilities dug in is they didn’t wanna see this requirement, and part of their negotiating strategy was therefore to suspend their procurement.

Now, when this happened back in January, everyone watching it from within the industry figured, “Well, this is probably a three-week skirmish, maybe a little bit longer. And the thing is, Bill, we’re now into our sixth month after, and the Department of Commerce still hasn’t made a decision on whether to proceed with this investigation. And in the meanwhile, the U.S. utilities have to stick to their guns, so they haven’t initiated any procurement in response to market events. And even the non-U.S. utilities, their initial response to this Section 232 petition was to think, “Well, you know, maybe if this goes all the way through there’ll be some cheap Kazakh uranium, so let’s sit on the sidelines and watch it play out.”

So, from an economist point of view, this is a very, very interesting situation, because we’ve got fundamentals shifting in a very visible way, in a market, and I’ll come to those. But at the same time, the key proponents in the market aren’t able to respond to that pricing.

So, if we look at what the fundamentals are, we’re seeing a very significant disruption in supply. And the article that you referred to articulated that I expect to see about 20% of the uranium supply disappear on an annualized basis in the next weeks. And, in fact, from that article, of the six items that I identified for supply disruption, since May the 21st, three of them have already come good. The major one, and this illustrates the point about volatility really well, is that Cameco, world’s second-largest uranium producer, back in November, last year, they announced that they would suspend the world’s largest uranium mine, the McArthur River Mine in Canada.

Now, what they did is they announced that they would suspend it for 10 months. The 10 months was calculated because, under their bargaining agreement with the unions, they can utilize a provision in Canadian labor law which basically means they can send their employees home for up to 12 months and pay them a proportion of their salary.

And in that 10 months, Cameco was going to consume and utilize some of the excess inventory that they’d built up, your commercial inventory that they’d built up. Now, when that announcement was made, before the Section 232 petition, everyone is figuring, “Okay, well, by the time that 10 months is up, we should see uranium having corrected from $23 a pound now, well into the 30’s, and Cameco would be able to turn the mine back on.” And that simply hasn’t happened. So, now Cameco is facing a very, very tough decision. It’s very hard to justify turning the mine back on with uranium at $23, but it’s also not very pleasant to send upwards of 500 employees home permanently.

And my expectation, and most of the commentators in the industry believe that it’s likely that Cameco will put that largest uranium mine in the world into care and maintenance. And that’s a difficult process and it’s not something you do for 6 or 12 months. That mine will stay offline for two, three years, perhaps even longer.

That’s the effect of the price inertia and that’s what’s going to create extreme volatility in this sector.

Bill: When Rick Rule has commented on the uranium market post-Fukushima, he’s talked about how because of Fukushima, there was demand that was taken off the market, and at the same time, that caused uranium from Japan to be sold into the market, so it was like a double whammy. What you’re describing here, Cameco does not give supply to the market, but then there’s actually demand, because now they’re gonna have to go back, correct me if I’m wrong, into the market, buy uranium, which is gonna create demand in the market, which then they have to sell to fulfill their contracts. Is that right?

Brandon: Yeah, absolutely. So, we are seeing, in the same way that with Fukushima, the post-Fukushima era, we saw the negative price pressure from both perspectives, both demand and supply, in this case we’re seeing the positive price pressure from both as well. And add to that, so in addition to the buying in market that Cameco is going to need to do to fill its contract book, we’ve also got a number of funds that are popping up that are taking investors’ money to buy physical uranium.

And the Yellow Cake Plc that you might have read about in the press, that was launched a couple of weeks ago. As an example, they are raising $200 million on the Alternative Investment Market in London, and they’ve got an agreement to buy 25% of Kazatomprom’s 2018 production, which is 8.1 million pounds. From what I understand, that road show is going exceptionally well, so I’m expecting to see a number of funds of that nature start to pop up. And it’s at this point in the cycle when they have to position themself, because there’s no point these guys taking money from investors, waiting until the uranium price goes back through $40, and then starting to buy. They need to tighten up now while the material is available at sub-$30 uranium prices. So that’s creating additional demand pressure.

Bill: When you look at the main driver of a rising uranium price, if you had to choose between the two, would you say it was supply destruction or demand creation?

Brandon: Supply destruction. And the reason that I don’t hesitate there is there’s still a bit of flexibility in demand that the utilities have, because the demand that is going to rock this market is the demand that these utilities need three years from now. So, they’ve got that flexibility to decide, “Do we jump in now or do we wait for another three months?” Now, of course, if they wait for another three months or another six months, they’re getting closer and closer and closer to this point where they absolutely need the product. And traditionally, the market buys on five years in advance, so they’re already in a sense on borrowed time. And the closer that they go to that key demand point, the more volatility we expect.

Bill: And where is most of that demand coming from?

Brandon: Oh, it’s across the board but predominantly, the uncovered position which refers to the uranium that nuclear power plants are going to require that they don’t already have a contract for. So, uncovered positions in uranium are predominantly U.S. utilities, but there’s also very significant uncovered positions in the EU.

Bill: If we could touch back on the uranium run-up which was parabolic in 2005 through 2007, could you discuss, for listeners that aren’t familiar with that, could you discuss the dynamics of why uranium went from I believe like $7 to $140 a pound? What were the dynamics that were occurring there, and could we possibly see something like that again?

Brandon: Good question, because what actually started that run-up was McArthur River going offline. The uranium mine that Cameco has got. Now, when it happened then, it was a little bit less expected, because it was a flood. So production was suspended. But bear in mind, back then, we had a very significant supply buffer in the market, which was the down-blending of Russian nuclear warheads, which is sometimes called the Megatons to Megawatts Program, or the HEU Downblending Program. And that was supplying about 20% of the market at that stage. So there was a big cushion. Because of that cushion, the utilities had allowed themselves to become fairly exposed, and they had moderate uncovered positions into the future. And so, when McArthur River production went offline, that’s when things started to tighten up.

We also had the nuclear renaissance starting to bubble away back then, but there wasn’t that much construction. There was a lot of talk about Chinese demand improving and growing, but there are only one or two reactors on stream during that period in China, whereas there’s 39 today. And there were only a handful that were in construction, the rest were in planning.

The difference on the downside for where we are at the moment is utilities’ inventory positions are higher than they were back then. But I think when you weigh those different factors up, the fact that we’ve got real demand growth now, rather than proposed demand growth, we’ve got a real story unfolding in China rather than an expectation of a story unfolding in China. There is similar supply disruption to what we’re seeing, it’s maybe a bit more controlled now, but if we see this price inertia continue for much longer, we’ll see more uncontrolled supply disruption. And the fact that we don’t have this enormous buffer from the Russian material, I would say that we’ve got a very, very good proxy in that experience for where we stand today.

And talking to guys who’ve been in the industry for a long time, it very much has a 2005 feel about it today. And I think that’s what’s generating so much excitement amongst the smart money in the institutions right now.

Bill: As you’ve said, many people are excited because they remember the last run-up and how they’ve made…I’ve listened to stories and I assume you have as well, of Rick Rule talking about doing a private placement in the uranium junior at a penny and a half, and then that position went to over $10 a share. So the people that experience something like that, it’s an indelible mark in their head, how can you forget something like that? But not everybody has the same sentiment towards uranium, so if I could, I’d like you to address those and some of the objections that come up from people that are a little more skeptical towards uranium or maybe have a little more bearish sentiment towards uranium.

The first thing is thorium. This isn’t a super common objection that I’ve seen, but I have seen it out there. What are your thoughts about thorium? Is that something that could potentially replace uranium as a big base load producer of electricity?

Brandon: The answer is clearly “no,” but let me unpack the argument there, because I don’t wanna sound like I’m just flat batting something for no good reason.

So the argument in favor of thorium comes down to two things. First of all, it’s a very common and well, unvalued material out there. And as a mineral, it is more common than uranium and it’s produced as a byproduct, an unhelpful byproduct a lot. So, there’s a belief that it would be helpful to use up that thorium and it would be cheaper than uranium. And with that, I agree.

The second reason for proponents of thorium being enthused about it is the perception that it’s safer and that it produces a shorter half-life in terms of the waste materials. Now, that is technically true, but the argument that I’d make against that is that if you look at nuclear power on the facts, and not the public perception, not the hysteria that’s drummed up by some of the anti-nuclear campaigners, but if you look at nuclear power on the facts, modern nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. I’d almost go as far as to say infallibly safe. And the number of deaths from nuclear power throughout its entire life cycle has the lowest number of deaths of any electricity source whatsoever. Very surprising statistic to many people, but within the industry, we understand that.

So, let’s call it the competitive advantage of thorium’s safety is not as real as people would imagine. But here is the real thing, the thing is Bill, while thorium technology has largely proven itself in a technical sense, it hasn’t been established commercially, and there’s no real reason to establish thorium commercially. We’ve got a 50-year history of building and operating nuclear power plants, and on the facts, a very successful history. There just isn’t the incentive to start the process of research and development to get thorium from where it is today, which is a established but commercially unproven technology, into the mainstream. Maybe in 50 years’ time, it’ll have a bit more momentum, but from within the industry, it’s just not really seen as a likely thing any time soon.

Bill: Are there any other electricity-generating methods that could dramatically reduce or eliminate uranium demand in the next, let’s say, 10 to 15 years?

Brandon: There’s no question that uranium and nuclear power is becoming complementary to renewables. And what I’m seeing, and I’m involved in renewables as well, and have been for quite some time, but what I see is that renewables plays a very important role, but it’s always going to be complementary to base load. And there are circumstances where renewables will dominate, and we see some of that in Portugal, for example. But they’re unusual circumstances, and most of the world’s population centers and urban centers are not particularly disposed to renewables as a dominant power source.

Now, the thing that could ultimately change that is grid storage. And the proponents of renewables as this, kind of, 100% energy solution, they’re relying on an argument that goes a little bit like, “Grid storage and renewable power will continue to decrease in cost in the same way that the chip in your computer has.”

And the difference is the chip in your computer, or the SD card that you put in your camera is purely a technology-driven device. And as technology improves, it can, you know, achieve 10 times the storage, from 5 years ago, at a quarter of the cost. But renewable energy and grid storage solutions simply don’t work like that because it relies on natural resources. You need to mine the lithium that goes into a lithium-ion battery, you need to mine the vanadium that goes into the vanadium redox flow battery. And the same with the rare earths and other componentry that goes into a wind turbine or solar panels, etc., etc.

So, to think that they are gonna decrease in cost on that trajectory is simply unrealistic. It’s idealistic, it’s dreaming.

So, the key complementary technology to nuclear in the long term is grid storage attached to renewables in the right place, but that’s a long, long way off. And from a climate point of view, the world can’t wait for that technology to achieve dominance and pump out another 50 years worth of coal. The policy just won’t support that.

Bill: I’d like to read you a quote from an article written by an analyst who is not bullish on the uranium equities right now. He writes, “Let’s consider investors in a commodity where layers and layers of faulty assumptions and ‘investment strategies,’ shown above, have been made. Let’s take uranium. Today it costs more to produce uranium than what it sells for. The spot price is U.S. $23 per pound. The price is telling investors to significantly reduce investments in uranium mining. If one thinks that uranium will do well, one should invest in it as a commodity, using vehicles like Uranium Participation Corporation. Investing in a mining company with expectations of higher commodity prices producing outsized profits is a mirage. Investing in mining should be done for only one reason, for upside inherent in the company, based on the lower of the spot and future prices.”

Could you address what this analyst writes here and talk about the forward price curve of uranium?

Brandon: Yeah. I think the heart of what that analyst is saying is that you can pay for or look up a forward price curve on uranium, and if you follow that forward price curve and assume that it’s operating like a forward price curve in other commodities, it doesn’t look particularly rosy. So, you might look out two or three years and see a forward price of uranium of $27, $28.

And, on a cursory glance, you’d be absolutely right. And I’ve had that from people commenting on my article, saying, “Well, you know, who are you to say that uranium is gonna go up when the market’s telling you on the forward price curve that it isn’t?”

Now, here’s the thing, Bill. And this is where there just isn’t enough understanding about this sector. That forward price curve is simply the carry trade. In other words, it’s what you would pay for uranium if you got an investment bank to buy it in the spot market today, add the interest costs, add the cost of storing it, and add their margin. And then you put it in a spreadsheet, and you come out with a forward price in three or four years’ time. It’s not a real forward market in the sense that we get used to in other commodities.

Now the reason that’s so important is that forward price curve is based on very, very low volumes. So, if I had a large order for 20 million pounds of uranium in three years’ time, and that investment bank needed to go and try and secure that product in today’s prices, they simply wouldn’t be able to get it. So, that’s why the forward curve is illusory.

It’s perfectly accurate for smaller parcels of uranium, 100,000 pounds, 200,000 pounds, maybe 500,000 pounds. But for any volume of uranium, in particular the volume of uranium that’s going to be required by the utilities to cover their uncovered positions from 2020 onwards, to try and buy that in spot and carry on the financial markets for another three years would lead to an enormous appreciation in the spot price.

Bill: What would you say to skeptical uranium investors that would say, “Well, isn’t there five years of stockpile of uranium, so there’s an excess of supply already above ground?” What would be your response to them?

Brandon: I’m really pleased you raised that, Bill. Uranium inventories are an interesting and relevant topic. And the idea that there is five years of excess supply and the correlation of what that would mean for a copper market or a zinc market, for example, that inference is incorrect. However, let me address the effect, first of all, of excess inventory on the current market.

So the way that I look at inventories, and we’ve done a lot of work on it, is there is about one year too much inventory, amongst all of the utilities, as an average.

Now, there’s a couple of things to understand. First of all, inventory includes the material that’s working through the fuel cycle. So if I compare with coal, the fuel cycle for coal can be anything between three days and three months, typically. You know, there’s coal mines that just simply have the coal on a conveyor belt straight into the furnace mouth, and they’re the three-day versions. And then there’s the coal mines that need to ship it across the ocean and they try and keep that down to about three months.

Now, in uranium, the fuel cycle is 12 to 24 months, because first of all, you’ve got to mine the uranium and ship it to the converter, then it needs to be converted into a gas, UF6. Then it needs to be enriched, which is a difficult and expensive process, then it needs to be converted into an oxide, then it needs to be fabricated into the fuel rods that go into the reactors. And there’s a whole lot of transport in between all of that.

So, included in that inventory, is all of the material that’s working its way through that fuel cycle. So by definition, the world needs about two years minimum inventory just to know that the fuel is coming into the reactors in two years’ time.

On top of that, utilities like to keep strategic reserves. So, I said before that the cost of U3O8 as a proportion of electricity in a nuclear power plant is about 3%. So, to carry a bit more of that is a very sensible thing for a utility to do because the price and the cost of running out of it and not being able to produce power is catastrophic.

So the utilities typically wanna carry between two and three years of strategic supply in any case. And they’re running at about three throughout the world. So that’s that extra one year of inventory. So, it is having an impact on the market. It’s allowed the utilities to continue their current hold on procurement. So it’s contributed to the price inertia that we talked about before. It’s also created an environment where the utilities remain feeling quite comfortable, some would even say complacent.

But it can’t carry on for too much longer. And there’s a number of other things I could say about inventory, including the calculations of it and and dispute some of the numbers and so on based on our work, but I think I can leave it there.

So, yes, we are a little bit heavy on inventory, but it’s more like one year rather than five years. And that one year will get used up very, very quickly, because there just aren’t long-term contracts being written, and there’s this wall of contracting that is required from 2020.

Bill: For the person that associates uranium with Fukushima or Nagasaki, Hiroshima, or they would say uranium is just socially unacceptable, what would be your response to that person?

Brandon: Look, and that’s a common thing that we get, particularly in Australia. So, we don’t have nuclear power in Australia, there’s a lot of people at the barbecues who don’t like the idea of uranium mining. And I think for investors, rather than getting drawn into the debates of nuclear power, which we can always leave for another day, but I think what I’d say to investors is this, Bill. Don’t base your view on uranium consumption on what your social environment is in Australia or the United States or Canada. The action is in China, and India, and Russia, and the developing world. That is where the core growth in this sector is.

And in China, very few people are concerned about perceived safety issues to do with nuclear power. What they’re concerned about is their incredible smog issues. The fact that air quality is killing at least a million people a year in China, and they don’t have a solution yet. So, that is the absolute priority for both the government in China and the people to continue the progression that they have towards a better way of life, and, as we know ad infinitum, that, with growth in income comes growth in electricity requirements. They wanna continue that progression, but they don’t wanna get choked by smog in the meantime. And nuclear power is the answer there.

Bill: What is the projected growth of uranium worldwide, year-over-year projected growth, like, say, over the next 10 years?

Brandon: So, then, it depends on who you believe. Because there’s an up case, a down case, and then base cases. And I’ve seen a wide, wide variety of different demand projections. I think the most reliable is about 2% year-on-year. But there is an up case that’s a lot more bullish on that. So if you were to work on that sort of level, and then you’ve got upside to that.

Bill: Brandon, I really appreciate the insights that you’ve shared with us today. As we conclude, is there anything in light of what we’ve spoken about that you’d like to share with listeners?

Brandon: Yeah. Look, I think the thing that I’d like to encourage people to do is have an open mind to what’s happening in uranium, but be very careful of the bearish commentary that’s out there. Some of the issues we were able to touch on today. Because it’s been a bear market, and to put it quite simply, it just isn’t cool to be bullish when everyone around you is a bear. And we’re starting to see that change, we’re really starting to see that change. And it’s now becoming less fashionable to be a bear about uranium, and the information that we’ve just shared with listeners is starting to come out there.

So, I think it’s a real inflection point. I would call it contrarian still, astonishingly, when you look at the economics driving the sector, but there’s a very special opportunity for investors who are willing to be a little bit patient and get positioned at the moment.

Bill: Brandon, if listeners would like to follow you and your company, how would they do that?

Brandon: Our website is bannermanresources.com.au. And listeners can follow me on LinkedIn, Brandon Munro, M-U-N-R-O. Or they can follow me on Twitter, which is @brandon_munro.

Bill: Brandon, thank you for the conversation and sharing your insights today, I appreciate it.

Brandon. It’s a pleasure, thank you very much for having me on, Bill.