Texas-based Uranium Energy was already North America’s largest uranium-focused company with several Wyoming assets in play, but it’s about to get an even bigger Wyoming footprint with the $175 million acquisition of the Cowboy State’s only conventional uranium processing mill and its assets.
The mill, which is about 40 miles northwest of Rawlins, belonged to British-Australian company Rio Tinto, a global mining and metallurgy giant. The mill operated from 1981 to 1983, and has a licensed capacity of 4.1 million pounds of yellowcake refined uranium per year, or 3,000 tons per day.
The purchase includes around 175 million pounds of existing uranium resources, ready and waiting to be captured.
Taken in concert with Uranium Energy’s 20 or so other sites in Wyoming, this is a move that further solidifies the state’s groundbreaking position as ground zero for an innovative nuclear energy renaissance.
Not only are resources set to be mined here, but used here as well. Bill Gates-backed TerraPower has already started constructing its proposed Natrium nuclear plant in Kemmerer, while Wyoming awarded a two-year contract to nuclear submarine power plant maker BWXT to examine the feasibility of deploying 50 MW micro-reactors.
“These are exciting times for the Wyoming uranium industry, and we’re on the edge of another boom,” Wyoming Mining Association Executive Director Travis Deti told Cowboy State Daily. “What we’re seeing today is a growing interest in reliability. Fossil fuels and nuclear power fueled by Wyoming uranium are going to be critical to meet the projected increased electricity demand to power the growth in artificial intelligence and data centers in the very near future.
“And when you’re talking about emissions, nuclear is really your best option to provide emission free power with necessary reliability. This is something wind and solar simply cannot do.”
When It Comes To Uranium, Wyoming Is King
Wyoming has the largest uranium reserves in the United States but, initially at least, TerraPower had told Cowboy State Daily it would likely have to source its uranium from Ohio or New Mexico.
Not long after that, however, Uranium Energy announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the TerraPower nuclear plant that Bill Gates is building in Kemmerer to supply the 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with uranium from Wyoming after all.
Some further processing of that yellowcake will be required, and that is still likely to take place outside of Wyoming — at least for now.
“There’s a converter in Illinois which is in the U.S., and there’s one in Canada and another one in France,” UEC’s Senior Vice President of U.S. Operations Brent Berg said. “So there, the product will go through the next stage of processing, and then it goes to an enrichment plant, where they enrich the Uranium 235 content.”
After that, it will be formed into pellets that could then return to Wyoming for use by the TerraPower nuclear plant.
Whether all of those additional processing steps could eventually happen in Wyoming wasn’t something Berg could comment about Tuesday.
“It would be great to have all of those things right in the state,” he acknowledged.
For now, the company is focused on a rapid restart of uranium production in Wyoming.
“This acquisition really provides some synergies with shared infrastructure as well as project personnel expertise that made a lot of sense for the company,” Berg said. “We recently restarted production at Christensen Ranch and Irigaray operations. This is just another tool in the toolbox that will be not only beneficial for UEC, but for Wyoming.”
Bolt-On Acquisitions Not Rocket Science
Given that these new acres from Rio Tinto are adjacent to areas UEC is already exploring, it wasn’t rocket science to pick up the property.
In addition to the bolt-on resources and the licensed uranium mill, the acquisition includes a database of more than 6 million feet of drilling for new projects.
“This allows us to really look at those properties in greater detail than we could have in the past,” Berg said.
While UEC has started some preliminary uranium production, the company is not yet ready to report production volumes yet. That’s something Berg said it anticipates doing closer to the end of the year.
But he does expect the company will have the greatest amount of uranium resource in the U.S., as well as the most licensed production capacity, positioning it to become the “leading uranium developer, not only in Wyoming, but in the United States.”
Given what Berg has seen lately — with even the mothballed 3 Mile Island coming back to life — he’s optimistic about what the future holds for both UEC and Wyoming, which has one of the world’s richest uranium deposits.
“I think more and more people are seeing nuclear power as clean base-load energy,” he said. “And I think it just makes a lot of sense for the United States.”
On Tuesday, uranium was trading for just over $79 per pound, down from a peak of more than $105 earlier this year.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
