Why NPV undervalues nuclear builds

While at CIBC’s Annual Institutional Investor Conference in Whistler, we had the exciting opportunity to host Grant Isaac of Cameco for this Special Edition COBT. Grant serves as President and Chief Operating Officer of Cameco and has held several roles over his 16-plus years with the company, including EVP & CFO and SVP of Corporate Services. In his current role, he is responsible for all Cameco operations, exploration, and corporate development, as well as the company’s commercial and financial strategy. Grant earned a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and previously served as a business professor at the University of Saskatchewan. We were delighted to sit down with Grant to explore the latest developments in nuclear energy.
 
In our discussion, Grant outlines Cameco’s integrated nuclear platform and strategy, with vertical integration as a way to help “build their own demand,” as each reactor build creates 80-100 years of downstream recurring fuel and services demand. We explore how nuclear has shifted from “maybe/what if” to “must do it now,” what drives ordering momentum, and the industry’s push to turn nuclear from a project into a product through standardization, sequencing, and simplification. Grant discusses how investors are increasingly underwriting Cameco as a “nuclear super-major” with scarce, strategic assets, and how the Westinghouse acquisition and partnership with Brookfield broadened the shareholder base and improved visibility into future demand. We touch on supply-chain pinch points across mining, conversion, enrichment, and fabrication, the post-Russia fuel-cycle reset, and why uranium is uniquely constrained by geology and can’t be “fixed” with industrial policy. Grant explains the Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) project, the role of public-private partnerships in capital-intensive nuclear projects, and Ontario as a positive case study for government involvement. Grant also shares why traditional NPV frameworks tend to undervalue nuclear assets, noting that governments and sponsors instead focus on payback math over 80–100-year asset lives, the significant economic multipliers from large-scale nuclear builds, and the “cluster effects” that attract long-term industry, jobs, and investment, making the case for nuclear as a generational, nation-building infrastructure investment. We also cover evolving investor frameworks and valuation metrics, expectations for consolidation in the nuclear sector, his outlook for 2026, the future of uranium supply, and more. It was an insightful conversation.
 
In other nuclear news, the World Nuclear Association published a World Nuclear Outlook Report on Tuesday, January 20 (linked here), which provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of global nuclear energy development, assessing national targets for nuclear capacity against the global goal to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
 
We hope you enjoy the discussion with Grant as much as we did. Our best to you all!