Cameco: How a Saskatchewan Uranium Miner Rode the Nuclear Revival

Cameco survived the longest bear market in uranium’s history by refusing to sell into it, and the discipline that looked like stubbornness in 2018 is the reason the company dominates the nuclear revival of the 2020s. The Saskatchewan miner controls the two highest-grade uranium deposits on earth, sells almost all of its output under multi-year contracts and, since 2023, has owned nearly half of the company whose reactor design the United States, Poland, Ukraine and Bulgaria have chosen for their next fleets. This article explains how Cameco’s mines and contracts work, what the Westinghouse acquisition and the 2025 American partnership mean, how it compares with Kazakhstan’s state producer, and what founders and investors can learn from a company that waited a decade for its market to return. It is part of the Canada Company Stories hub.

How did Cameco come to control the Athabasca Basin?

Cameco was formed in 1988 by merging two state-owned companies, the federal government’s Eldorado Nuclear and the Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation, and privatising the result. Eldorado had mined radium and uranium at Port Radium and Uranium City since the 1930s and supplied the Manhattan Project; the provincial corporation held stakes in the newer discoveries of the Athabasca Basin, a sandstone basin in northern Saskatchewan where uranium concentrates at the boundary between the sandstone and the basement rock in grades that have no parallel elsewhere. The merged company listed in Toronto in 1991 and has been headquartered in Saskatoon ever since.

Two deposits define the business. McArthur River, discovered in 1988 and in production since 1999, is the largest high-grade uranium mine in the world; its ore is mined remotely by raise-boring and ground-freezing and trucked to the Key Lake mill, and Cameco owns about 70 per cent with Orano of France holding the rest. Cigar Lake, in production since 2014 after a flood delayed it by eight years, is the highest-grade mine in the world and uses jet-boring from tunnels in frozen ground; its ore is milled at Orano’s McClean Lake. Cameco held 54.5 per cent of Cigar Lake until June 2026, when it and Orano agreed to buy TEPCO Resources’ 5 per cent interest, a deal Cameco closed on 2 July 2026.

The grade is the economic point. Average uranium ore worldwide contains a fraction of a per cent of U3O8; McArthur River and Cigar Lake run at around 15 to 18 per cent, so each tonne of rock carries a hundred times the metal. That lets Cameco produce from two mines what Kazakhstan produces from dozens of in-situ wells, and it means that when the company chooses to curtail output, as it did in 2018, a large share of global supply disappears at once. Cameco also owns 40 per cent of the Inkai joint venture in Kazakhstan with Kazatomprom and the Rabbit Lake and American in-situ operations, all currently idle, and a fuel-services business that refines and converts uranium at Blind River and Port Hope in Ontario.

Why did Cameco shut the world’s largest uranium mine?

Cameco suspended McArthur River and Key Lake in 2018 because the uranium spot price had fallen to about US$20 a pound after the 2011 Fukushima accident, below what the company considered the cost of producing it, and because it had enough inventory and purchase options to meet its contracts without mining. The suspension, initially announced as temporary in late 2017 and made indefinite in 2018, put about 700 people out of work in northern Saskatchewan and removed roughly 18 million pounds of annual capacity from a market of around 140 million. Management’s argument was that producing uranium at a loss to sell into an oversupplied spot market would destroy value and delay the recovery, so the company would instead buy pounds in the market to deliver into its higher-priced contracts.

It was a lonely strategy. Kazatomprom, the Kazakh state producer that accounts for about 40 per cent of global supply, kept expanding until 2017 and only then began modest cuts. Most Western producers either closed permanently or were absorbed. Cameco’s own share price fell by three-quarters from its 2007 peak, and the company spent years litigating a C$2.2 billion tax reassessment by the Canada Revenue Agency, which it eventually won. Its chief executive, Tim Gitzel, who took the job in 2011 three months after Fukushima, has said that the company’s job was to be the last supplier standing when utilities came back to the market.

They came back from 2021. Underinvestment in new mines, the depletion of secondary supplies from decommissioned weapons and inventories, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made Western utilities reluctant to depend on Russian enrichment and conversion, and the revaluation of nuclear power as a low-carbon baseload source pushed the long-term contract price steadily higher. Cameco restarted McArthur River in late 2022 and reached full production in 2024. The spot price, which peaked above US$100 a pound in early 2024, was near US$87 when Cameco priced its Indian contract in March 2026, and the company’s own purchases in the second quarter of 2026 averaged US$66.60 a pound.

How does long-term contracting shape Cameco’s earnings?

Cameco sells almost nothing on the spot market; it sells into a book of long-term contracts with utilities that averages more than 28 million pounds a year over the next five years and totalled about 230 million pounds of committed volume at the end of 2025. Those contracts are typically a mix of fixed-price agreements, escalated with inflation, and market-related agreements that reference the spot or long-term price at delivery with floors and ceilings. The mix means the company’s realised price lags the spot price in both directions: it kept earning when spot collapsed in the 2010s and it has risen more slowly than spot since 2021.

The 2026 numbers show the mechanism at work. In the first quarter Cameco reported net earnings of C$131 million and adjusted EBITDA of C$509 million, with the uranium segment’s adjusted EBITDA up to C$423 million from C$286 million a year earlier. The second quarter was weaker on a reported basis, with net earnings of C$25 million and adjusted EBITDA of C$391 million, because deliveries were concentrated elsewhere in the year and Westinghouse recorded a loss, but uranium deliveries of 7.1 million pounds were made at improving realised prices and management described the variability as normal. For the half-year, adjusted net earnings were C$281 million and adjusted EBITDA C$899 million, and the full-year production target of 19.5 to 21.5 million pounds was unchanged despite spring flooding that cut road access to the northern mines in May.

The contracting strategy is also a source of growth. The nine-year agreement signed with India’s Department of Atomic Energy on 2 March 2026, covering about 22 million pounds of U3O8 for delivery from 2027 to 2035 at market-related prices, had an estimated value of about C$2.6 billion at the time and was celebrated in Delhi by the Indian and Canadian prime ministers and Saskatchewan’s premier; India plans 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047. Gitzel has repeatedly said that Cameco will not bring uncommitted production forward to chase the spot price, because that is how the previous oversupply was created, and the company’s inventory of 8.7 million pounds at 30 June 2026, held at an average cost of C$58 a pound, gives it room to be patient.

How does Cameco compare with Kazatomprom?

Kazatomprom is larger, cheaper and more exposed to political risk, and Cameco is the Western alternative to it. The Kazakh national company produces around a fifth of the world’s uranium from in-situ recovery operations in southern Kazakhstan, in which acid is pumped through sandstone deposits and the uranium dissolved out without mining; its cash costs are among the lowest in the industry and its output in 2024 was roughly double Cameco’s. It listed in London and Astana in 2018 and sells to China, Russia, Europe and the United States, but its concentrate is exported largely through Russia or across the Caspian Sea, and its sulphuric acid supply, joint-venture structure and tax regime are all subject to decisions in Astana.

Cameco’s advantages are the mirror image. Its mines are in a G7 country with a stable royalty regime, its conversion and refining plants in Ontario give it a position in the fuel cycle that Kazatomprom lacks, and its Westinghouse stake connects it to reactor sales and fuel fabrication. Since 2022 Western utilities have been willing to pay a premium for that security of supply, and the growth in Cameco’s contract book reflects buyers choosing a Canadian pound over a cheaper Kazakh one. Cameco participates in Kazakhstan too, through its 40 per cent of JV Inkai, which produced 2.8 million pounds on a 100 per cent basis in the second quarter of 2026 and paid Cameco a US$124 million dividend in the quarter, but it treats that as a financial holding rather than a strategic one.

The comparison matters for the uranium price. Kazatomprom’s periodic decisions to run below its subsoil-use contract levels, citing acid shortages or market discipline, are the largest single swing factor in supply, and Cameco’s own curtailment history is the second largest. Between them the two companies can decide whether the market is tight, which is one reason utilities have accepted long-term contracts with price floors that would have seemed generous a decade ago. Readers interested in the Japanese utility customers that anchor both companies’ books will find context in the Japan Company Stories hub.

Why did Cameco buy into Westinghouse?

Cameco bought 49 per cent of Westinghouse Electric Company because it wanted exposure to the whole nuclear fuel cycle and to reactor demand rather than just the mine gate. The acquisition, announced in October 2022 with Brookfield Renewable Partners and its institutional partners taking 51 per cent, closed in November 2023 at an enterprise value of US$7.9 billion including debt. Westinghouse, based in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, designs the AP1000 pressurised-water reactor, services about half the world’s operating reactors, fabricates fuel and, since the war in Ukraine, has become the only Western supplier able to make fuel for Russian-designed VVER reactors in Eastern Europe.

The investment was questioned at the time because Westinghouse had been through bankruptcy in 2017 after cost overruns on the Vogtle and V.C. Summer reactors in the United States, and because Cameco was taking on debt to buy a services business outside its expertise. The results have vindicated it. Westinghouse’s adjusted EBITDA rose 30 per cent in 2025, helped by a share of revenue from the Dukovany project in the Czech Republic, and the company paid US$350 million of distributions during the year, of which Cameco received US$171.5 million, plus US$49 million in February 2025 and another US$49 million in early 2026. Cameco’s share of Westinghouse adjusted EBITDA in the first half of 2026 was C$284 million, with quarterly swings driven by project timing.

The AP1000 pipeline is the strategic prize. Six units are operating, in China and at Vogtle in Georgia; fourteen are under construction; five more are under contract; and the design has been selected for programmes in Poland, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Westinghouse told investors in mid-2026 that it was tracking up to 91 AP1000 opportunities. Each reactor sold is a long-term fuel customer for Cameco’s uranium, conversion and fabrication businesses, which is the vertical logic that Brookfield, examined in the article on Brookfield’s global alternatives business, found equally attractive from the infrastructure side.

What did the US government agree in October 2025?

On 28 October 2025 Westinghouse, Cameco and Brookfield announced a strategic partnership with the United States government, formalised in a binding term sheet with the Department of Commerce, under which Washington would arrange financing and facilitate permitting for at least US$80 billion of new Westinghouse reactors on American soil, including near-term money for long-lead items. The announcement, made in Tokyo during a presidential visit, tied the programme to the executive orders of May 2025 that set a goal of quadrupling US nuclear capacity, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed it as a matter of national security and of winning the race to power artificial intelligence.

The commercial terms are unusual. The US government receives a participation interest entitling it to 20 per cent of any cash distributions Westinghouse makes above a cumulative US$17.5 billion, but the interest vests only after the government has made a final investment decision and signed definitive agreements for new Westinghouse reactors worth at least US$80 billion. If the interest has vested by January 2029 and Westinghouse’s expected IPO valuation is US$30 billion or more, the government can require an initial public offering, with its interest converting into a five-year warrant over 20 per cent of the listed company’s value after deducting US$17.5 billion. Brookfield’s president Connor Teskey described the deal as a way to meet rising electricity demand from data centres; Gitzel said the government’s share of the upside created the incentive for Washington to see reactors actually built.

Events since have followed that script. In June 2026 the Department of Energy announced a conditional commitment under its new American Nuclear Supply Chain Loans to accelerate AP1000 deployment, which Cameco welcomed. On 31 July 2026 Cameco disclosed that Westinghouse had confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO, with the size, price and timing undetermined. And on 30 September 2026 Cameco acknowledged a United States-Korea framework anticipating US$120 billion of Korean investment in Westinghouse reactor technology in the United States, drawing on the Korean industry’s recent construction experience. The value of Cameco’s 49 per cent, carried at a fraction of what a US$30 billion listing would imply, has become the largest single question in its share price.

What are the operating risks in northern Saskatchewan?

Cameco’s concentration in two mines and two mills is its greatest operational weakness as well as its strength, and 2026 demonstrated both. In May, flooding in northern Saskatchewan cut the roads that supply McArthur River and Key Lake, forcing a pause that ended on 27 May when the operation returned to full production. On 1 July the company suspended Cigar Lake because of problems at Orano’s McClean Lake mill, which processes all of Cigar Lake’s ore, and production resumed on 14 July. Neither event changed annual guidance, but each showed how a single mill or road can idle a sixth of the world’s uranium supply.

The mines also depend on technology that few others use. McArthur River’s ore is so radioactive that it is mined by remote raise-boring through frozen ground and transported as a slurry; Cigar Lake’s jet-boring system was developed specifically for the deposit after the 2006 and 2008 floods. Ground freezing, water management and radiation control are continuous engineering tasks, and the Key Lake mill has had its own reliability issues since the 2022 restart. Cameco’s response has been to increase ownership where it can, as with the TEPCO purchase, to hold inventory, and to maintain purchase arrangements so that a disruption at one site does not become a contract default.

The regulatory and community environment is comparatively supportive. Northern Saskatchewan’s Indigenous communities supply a large share of the workforce and contractors under long-standing collaboration agreements, the provincial government is an enthusiastic promoter of the industry, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s licensing regime is predictable. The contrast with the permitting difficulties that affect Canadian critical-minerals projects elsewhere, described in the article on Canada’s critical minerals strategy, is striking, and it reflects half a century of uranium mining in the region.

How does Cameco fit Canada’s broader nuclear and energy story?

Cameco is the upstream end of a Canadian nuclear industry that is expanding for the first time in a generation. Ontario Power Generation is building the first small modular reactor in the G7 at Darlington, Bruce Power is planning new large units, and the federal government has included nuclear in its clean-electricity investment tax credits; the province of Saskatchewan itself is evaluating SMRs for the 2030s. The provincial dimension of that story, including Hydro-Québec’s and Ontario’s plans, is covered in the article on Canada’s clean electricity and nuclear plans.

The company’s fuel-services division, which produced 3.0 million kilograms of uranium in the second quarter of 2026 and guides to 13 to 14 million for the year, gives Canada one of the few Western conversion capabilities outside France and the United States, and Cameco has expanded the Port Hope plant to meet demand from utilities avoiding Russian supply. The investment case for Canadian conversion and enrichment capacity has strengthened as the United States has moved to ban Russian enriched uranium imports and as Europe has sought alternatives for its VVER fleet.

Financially the company is conservative. It ended June 2026 with C$1.1 billion of cash and short-term investments, C$1.0 billion of debt and an undrawn C$1.0 billion revolving facility, after repaying the last US$200 million of the term loan taken on for Westinghouse. The annual dividend was raised to C$0.24 a share for 2025 under a policy that links it to the growth in Westinghouse distributions and contract earnings. For a company whose Westinghouse stake alone may be worth a multiple of its net debt once the IPO prices, the balance sheet is a store of optionality rather than a constraint.

What can founders and investors learn from Cameco?

The first lesson is that supply discipline is a strategy, not a slogan. Cameco’s refusal to produce into a weak market for four years cost it revenue and reputation in the short term but preserved its reserves, its contract relationships and its ability to set terms when the cycle turned. Any founder whose product has a price set by the marginal seller should ask whether volume growth at today’s price is actually creating value or simply bringing forward a lower price for everyone.

The second is that owning the customer’s customer can be more valuable than owning more supply. The Westinghouse investment gave Cameco a seat at every reactor sale in the Western world, a stream of service revenue that does not depend on the uranium price and, through the 2025 partnership, a position in American industrial policy that no amount of additional mining capacity would have bought. The structure echoes the way insurers and asset managers profiled in the article on Manulife and Sun Life have moved along their own value chains.

The third concerns government partnership. The US deal gives Washington a share of profits above a high threshold and an IPO trigger in exchange for financing and permitting support, which aligns incentives without transferring control. Founders negotiating with sovereign or public investors should study how the vesting conditions tie the government’s upside to its own performance in delivering the reactors.

The fourth is about patience in capital markets. Cameco’s shares spent a decade below their 2007 high, and investors who bought on the fundamentals in 2016 waited five years for confirmation. The lesson is not that patience is always rewarded, but that in industries with ten-year investment cycles the right analysis is the supply-demand balance of the next decade, not the next quarter’s spot price.

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