The chief executive of Saskatchewan-based Cameco Corp. wants to make clear that the U.S. government is not getting involved in its main uranium mining business under a massive nuclear reactor deal announced last week.
The agreement would see the U.S. government arrange financing and facilitate the permitting and approvals for at least $80 billion US worth of new nuclear reactors south of the border.
The reactors would use technology belonging to Westinghouse, which is jointly owned by Cameco and Brookfield Asset Management.
“We need to directly address some of the misinformation we’ve seen published in the last few days. The U.S. government partnership interest does not extend to Cameco’s core business, although our uranium products and fuel services are certainly well positioned to support the build-out and long-term operation of the global fleet as it grows,” CEO Tim Gitzel told analysts on a conference call Wednesday to discuss third-quarter results.
“The partnership strengthens our footprint to create meaningful value for our stakeholders, but the participation interest by the U.S. government is only focused on the Westinghouse business.”
Chief operating officer Grant Isaac said the U.S. government is effectively acting as a “stimulant” to developing power at the scale needed to achieve domestic energy security.
“The U.S. government is stepping in and saying, ‘It is time. It’s time to get going,'” said Isaac.
There are a number of ways the U.S. role could shake out, he added.
The government could finance plants built, owned and operated by other entities, spearhead its own projects entirely or meet somewhere halfway by building a plant and transferring it to a utility to operate.
“All options are on the table because the driver here is to get 24-hour baseload carbon-free electrons onto the market as soon as possible in order to meet the onshore demand and meet the [artificial intelligence data centre] demand,” Isaac said.
Westinghouse calls its AP1000 pressurized water reactor the most advanced nuclear power plant that’s commercially available today. The units are able to supply more than one gigawatt of electricity to centralized power grids, and it’s that model the companies see being built under the deal.
Spinning out Westinghouse into an independent company with the U.S. as a major shareholder is an option that’s on the table, Isaac said.
“There is definitely a unique interest in investing just in Westinghouse and Cameco is a funny proxy for that. Brookfield’s probably an even funnier proxy to invest in just Westinghouse,” he said.
“So we’re always mindful that the last thing we want to have is trapped value within this family of assets that we’ve put together.”
Earlier Wednesday, Cameco raised its annual dividend to 24 cents, up from 16 cents.
It also posted a net loss of $158,000 or zero cents per diluted share for the quarter ended Sept. 30 compared with a profit of $7.4 million or two cents per diluted share a year earlier.
Revenue from products and services totalled $614.6 million, down from $720.6 million in the same quarter last year.
On an adjusted basis, Cameco says it earned seven cents per diluted share in its latest quarter, up from an adjusted profit of six cents per diluted share a year earlier.
