In his ongoing Jack-in-the-Stox series, Jack Lifton comments on public companies, technologies, capital markets, supply chains and geopolitics. He is not a licensed investment adviser, and his views are provided for informational purposes only. Nothing in this column constitutes investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.
The uranium market provides another example of a mistake that investors repeatedly make in the critical minerals business: confusing ownership of a mineral deposit with the production of a usable industrial product. Uranium in the ground is not nuclear fuel. Uranium ore brought to the surface is not nuclear fuel. Even uranium concentrate (U₃O₈), commonly called yellowcake—is only the first commercially useful product in a long and highly regulated manufacturing chain.
Yellowcake must next be converted, generally into uranium hexafluoride; enriched in uranium-235; converted into uranium dioxide powder; manufactured into fuel pellets; and assembled into the precisely engineered fuel rods and assemblies qualified for use in nuclear reactors.
Thus, when examining uranium companies, I begin with the same question I ask throughout the critical minerals economy: Where is value actually being added, and who is producing something that a customer can buy today?
The CMI Uranium Companies
Among the current members of the Critical Minerals Institute (CMI), I identify four companies with material exposure to uranium: Energy Fuels Inc. (NYSE American: UUUU | TSX: EFR | ASX: EF2), Western Uranium & Vanadium Corp. (CSE: WUC | OTCQX: WSTRF), Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. (CSE: API | OTCQB: APAAF), and Critical Minerals Americas Inc. (CMAI). They should not be placed in the same investment category.
Energy Fuels is an operating producer of uranium ore and finished uranium concentrate. Western Uranium & Vanadium is mining uranium-bearing material and has begun selling ore, but it does not yet own an operating uranium mill. Appia is an explorer. Critical Minerals Americas is attempting to develop an immense polymetallic black shale resource in which uranium is one of many potentially recoverable elements. The distinction is not semantic. It is the distinction between production, development, and geological possibility.
Energy Fuels: The Integrated American Producer
Energy Fuels Inc. occupies a unique position in the American uranium industry. The company owns and operates the Pinyon Plain mine in Arizona and the La Sal and Pandora mines in Utah. It transports uranium-bearing ore from these mines to its White Mesa Mill near Blanding, Utah, where the ore is chemically processed into finished U₃O₈. White Mesa is the only licensed and operating conventional uranium mill in the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, it was also the only American conventional mill operating at the end of the first quarter of 2026. The other American uranium-concentrate facilities then in production were in-situ recovery operations.
That difference matters. An in-situ recovery operation circulates a leaching solution through a permeable underground uranium deposit and recovers uranium from the resulting solution. It can be highly efficient where the geology permits it, but it cannot process conventionally mined ore from other deposits. White Mesa can.
That makes White Mesa not merely an Energy Fuels asset but an essential piece of American uranium infrastructure. It can process Energy Fuels’ own ores, purchase ore from independent miners, and recover uranium from approved alternative feed materials. It also has the regulatory and chemical processing infrastructure necessary to handle uranium- and thorium-bearing monazite and to produce separated rare earth products.
This last point is often misstated. I would not describe Energy Fuels as the only American corporation licensed merely to “store uranium and thorium.” Other companies and facilities hold radioactive-material licenses of various kinds. The precise and commercially meaningful fact is that White Mesa is the only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States and has an exceptional license, operating history, and waste management infrastructure for processing uranium and thorium bearing feeds. The yellowcake produced at White Mesa is a finished natural-uranium concentrate that can enter the next stage of the nuclear-fuel cycle.
Energy Fuels reported that during the first half of 2026 it mined ore and mineralized material containing approximately 740,000 pounds of U₃O₈ at Pinyon Plain, La Sal and Pandora. It also reported producing approximately 1.7 million pounds of finished U₃O₈ at White Mesa during the same six-month period, much of it from previously accumulated ore inventories. Its conventional-ore processing campaign, extending from the fourth quarter of 2025 through the second quarter of 2026, produced approximately 2.3 million pounds. This is not projected production. It is not a preliminary economic assessment. It is not an inferred resource. It is uranium being mined, processed, and placed into finished inventory.
Western Uranium & Vanadium: Mining Ore, but Not Yet Milling It
Western Uranium & Vanadium Corp., requires a more carefully qualified description.
Western owns the Sunday Mine Complex in Colorado and is ramping up conventional uranium and vanadium mining. In June and July 2025, it delivered approximately 792 tons of uranium-bearing material from Sunday to the White Mesa Mill under an ore-purchase agreement with Energy Fuels. The delivered material included historically stockpiled ore supplemented by new mine production.
Western can therefore reasonably be described as a producer and seller of uranium-bearing ore. It cannot yet be described as a producer of finished uranium concentrate under its own control.
The company is developing its proposed Mustang mineral-processing facilities, including kinetic separation intended to upgrade ore before final chemical processing. Until those facilities are built, commissioned and licensed—or until Western establishes a continuing third-party milling arrangement—White Mesa remains the essential downstream link between Western’s mines and saleable yellowcake.
Western illustrates an important industrial truth: a working mine is valuable, but a mine without access to processing is an incomplete business.
Appia: Uranium Exploration, Not Uranium Production
Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. has significant uranium exploration exposure in Canada. Appia owns the Otherside, Loranger, North Wollaston and Eastside properties in Saskatchewan and also holds uranium bearing ground in the historic Elliot Lake district of Ontario. Its Otherside project lies in the Athabasca Basin and hosts geological and geophysical targets analogous to those of major Athabasca uranium deposits. But analogy is not discovery, discovery is not a resource, and a resource is not production.
Appia is presently an explorer. Its uranium properties give investors exposure to discovery potential, particularly in one of the world’s most prospective uranium districts, but they should not be valued as operating assets. The relevant measures are drilling results, continuity, grade, geometry, metallurgy, resource definition and ultimately the cost and time required to reach development.
Critical Minerals Americas: Uranium as Part of a Polymetallic Proposition
Critical Minerals Americas Inc. is advancing the SBH polymetallic black-shale project in northern Alberta. The shale reportedly contains uranium along with molybdenum, nickel, vanadium, zinc, cobalt, lithium, scandium, thorium and rare-earth elements. This is not, in my view, presently a uranium company in the conventional sense. It is a multi-element resource development and process technology proposition. The project’s economic future will depend not simply on the presence of uranium but on whether the proposed bioleaching and downstream separation system can consistently recover several products at scale and at a cost acceptable to customers and regulators. Uranium may eventually contribute to its product basket, but it is not producing uranium today.
The Other American Producers
Energy Fuels is not the only company producing uranium concentrate in the United States. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that six facilities produced approximately 1.04 million pounds of U₃O₈ during the first quarter of 2026:
- Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill in Utah;
- enCore Energy Corp.‘s (NASDAQ: EU | TSXV: EU) Alta Mesa operation in Texas;
- Ur-Energy Inc.‘s (NYSE American:URG | TSX:URE) Lost Creek operation in Wyoming;
- Uranium Energy Corp.‘s (NYSE American: UEC) Willow Creek operation in Wyoming;
- Peninsula Energy Limited’s (ASX: PEN | OTCQB: PENMF) Ross central processing plant in Wyoming; and
- Cameco Corp.’s (TSX: CCO | NYSE: CCJ) Smith Ranch-Highland operation in Wyoming.
White Mesa alone accounted for approximately 788,000 pounds, or about 76 percent, of that first-quarter total. Some of the reported production from the other facilities was quite small, reflecting ramp-up, limited operations or recovery from existing circuits. Nevertheless, enCore Energy, Ur-Energy, Uranium Energy Corp., Peninsula Energy, and Cameco must be acknowledged as companies that produce uranium concentrate in the United States. The American uranium revival is therefore broader than one company. But it is still extremely small relative to American reactor requirements. The United States produced only about 2.1 million pounds of U₃O₈ in all of 2025, while its reactor fleet consumes uranium on a scale measured in tens of millions of pounds annually. Domestic uranium production is recovering from a very low base. It is nowhere near national self-sufficiency.
My Conclusion
If I were comparing the CMI uranium companies, I would not ask which one controls the largest acreage or publishes the most impressive geological comparisons. I would divide them by what they can sell today. Energy Fuels produces uranium ore and converts conventional ore into finished yellowcake at the only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States.
Western Uranium & Vanadium mines uranium-bearing ore and has sold it to Energy Fuels, but it remains dependent upon outside processing while developing its own proposed facilities. Appia offers exposure to uranium exploration in established Canadian districts. Critical Minerals Americas offers a much earlier-stage polymetallic extraction proposition in which uranium is one possible component. All four may have a place in the uranium discussion, but they represent four very different levels of industrial maturity and risk.
In uranium, as in every critical minerals supply chain, the investor must follow where value is added. Today, among America’s and the Critical Minerals Institute (CMI) member companies, that trail leads most clearly from Energy Fuels’ American mines to the yellowcake produced at White Mesa.
That is the difference between possessing uranium and being in the uranium business.
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