Hey there, bargain hunter. Everyone bought the uranium miners. Everyone loaded up on the reactor developers. And now the crowd is wondering why their nuclear basket has gone sideways for six months while electricity demand forecasts keep moving higher.
The answer is not the reactors. The answer is what goes inside them.
The Scoreboard
Spot uranium (U3O8) is sitting near $87 per pound as of early April 2026, well off its 2024 highs above $106 but still roughly double where it traded in 2020. The miners got the first wave of attention. What has not fully repriced is the conversion and enrichment tier — the industrial steps that turn raw yellowcake into reactor-ready fuel.
Centrus Energy (LEU) is up approximately 34% over the trailing twelve months, but still trades at a fraction of the valuation multiples applied to companies farther down the nuclear hype stack. ConverDyn, the only commercial UF6 conversion facility in the United States, remains privately held — which means the public market exposure to this bottleneck is extremely thin.
Why This Matters Right Now
The U.S. currently has zero domestic HALEU enrichment capacity at commercial scale. High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium is the fuel specification required by virtually every advanced reactor design being developed — from NuScale to Kairos to the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower Natrium project. The Department of Energy has been funding demonstration programs, but the gap between demonstration and commercial-scale production is measured in years and billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, Russia’s TENEX historically supplied roughly 27% of U.S. enrichment needs. The Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act, signed into law in 2024, puts hard timelines on that dependency. Waivers exist through 2027, but the clock is running.
The Cheap Investor Framing
- Centrus (LEU): only publicly traded U.S. enrichment play; HALEU production contract with DOE; watch revenue ramp from enrichment services segment
- Cameco (CCJ): vertically integrating into conversion through its Springfields acquisition stake; not just a miner anymore
- BWX Technologies (BWXT): nuclear fuel components and naval reactor work; trades at roughly 22x forward earnings with a defense contract floor under the business
Bottom Line
The reactor headlines are priced in. The fuel supply chain is not. If you believe advanced reactors come online in the 2028 to 2032 window — and the signed power purchase agreements from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon suggest the market does — then the enrichment and conversion layer is where the next leg of the nuclear trade lives. Size positions accordingly and watch the DOE waiver calendar closely.
