Goldman Sees a 2.3 Billion-Pound Uranium Deficit by 2045 — and SMRs Just Made It Worse

Goldman Sees a 2.3 Billion-Pound Uranium Deficit by 2045 — and SMRs Just Made It Worse A doubling of nuclear demand by 2040 is colliding with a supply base dominated by a handful of producers, and small modular reactors have added a fresh 62 million pounds of demand to the model. The structural case for uranium just got a number attached to it. Goldman Sachs, having added small modular reactors to its nuclear supply-and-demand model, now warns of a cumulative uranium supply deficit of 2.3 billion pounds between 2025 and 2045.³ A deficit measured in billions of pounds over two decades is the kind of gap that defines a commodity's price trajectory, and it is the consequence of a demand wave meeting a supply base that cannot easily expand.³ It matters because the demand growth is steep and broad-based. The World Nuclear Association expects uranium demand to climb about 28% by 2030 and more than 100% by 2040.¹ Underpinning that, the United States government wants to quadruple nuclear capacity from roughly 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050, and Bank of America frames nuclear as a $10 trillion market opportunity.¹ A doubling of fuel demand inside fifteen years is not a gentle ramp; it is a step-change that the mining industry has to supply after a decade of underinvestment.¹ Small modular reactors are the piece that tipped the model into deeper deficit. Goldman's analysis forecasts cumulative SMR deployments of nearly 46 GW by 2045, which lifts its 2045 nuclear generation forecast by about 6% and creates an additional 62 million pounds of uranium demand, a 17% upside to its prior long-term estimate.³ SMRs, with capacities around 300 megawatts per unit against 550 to 1,500 MW for conventional reactors, are being ordered for exactly the AI-driven power demand reshaping the grid, and every one of them needs fuel.² The supply side is where the deficit becomes dangerous, because production is concentrated. In 2024 Cameco produced about 17% of the world's uranium, second only to Kazakhstan's Kazatomprom at 21%, with Orano the next closest at 11%.¹ A market where three companies account for roughly half of global output has little room to ramp quickly against a demand curve that doubles by 2040.¹ When demand outruns a concentrated supply base, price is the variable that clears the gap.³ The reactor buildout that drives the fuel demand is already funded and moving. Westinghouse, 49% owned by Cameco, is part of an $80 billion agreement with the US government to build new reactors for AI deployment, which ties the fuel-supply story directly to the data-center power crunch.¹ A producer like Cameco that owns both uranium and a reactor-design business is positioned to capture both ends of the deficit, which is part of why the equity market is treating the nuclear resurgence as a structural rather than cyclical theme.¹ There is a potential pressure valve, but it is years from scale. A US startup has joined the country's first national laboratory to recycle spent nuclear fuel into energy for fast reactors, aiming to extract up to 100 times more energy from uranium, drawing on the roughly 95,000 tonnes of spent fuel the US has accumulated.⁴ If recycling works at scale, it would ease the raw-uranium deficit by reusing material already mined, but it is a long-dated technology and does not change the 2025-to-2045 supply gap Goldman has modelled.^4,3 Put together, the picture is a demand curve doubling by 2040, an extra 62 million pounds layered on by SMRs, a supply base concentrated in three producers, and a 2.3 billion-pound cumulative deficit.^1,3 That is a setup for a tight, rising uranium market over the long run, with the risk skewed toward higher prices as the deficit compounds.³ The signal to watch is whether new mine output and recycling can scale fast enough to dent that 2.3 billion-pound gap.³ If miners expand and fuel recycling proves out, the deficit narrows. If supply stays concentrated and SMR orders keep adding demand, the gap widens and uranium becomes one of the structurally tightest commodities of the next two decades. The reactors are being ordered; the fuel to run them is the constraint.^3,1