Ur-Energy Inc. (URE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I second the motion.

Thank you. The resolution has been moved. And are there any questions from the floor? Seeing or hearing none, I now put the motion to the meeting. Voting on the resolution will be conducted by ballot. Please complete the ballot marked amended and restated restricted share unit and equity incentive plan resolution by indicating a vote for or against resolution and signing your ballot. The scrutineer will now collect all of the ballots, and would ask everyone to hand all of your ballots to the scrutineer. [Voting]

Okay. I am told that we have no ballots that are being physically voted at today's meeting. So that being the case, we will move on. We'll take a few minutes to finalize counting of the ballot, so -- reading script for you folks. We now have results of the voting by ballot. And so I will turn it back over to Penne for these results.

With respect to the advisory vote on executive compensation or say-on-pay, the proposal has been approved by approximately 80.44% of the votes cast for the resolution. The advisory vote on executive compensation is, therefore, approved. With respect to the amended and restated restricted share unit and equity incentive plan resolution, the proposal has been approved by a vote of approximately 78% of the votes cast for the resolution. The amended and restated restricted share unit and equity incentive plan resolution has also been approved.

Great. Thank you. is there any other business? None that I see it here. If not, then I will entertain a motion to conclude the meeting.

I move that the meeting be concluded.

Thanks. May I have a seconder?

I second the motion.

Great. All those in favor of motion, please signify by raising you hand, aye. Any contrary? Thank you. I now declare the formal part of the meeting to be concluded. And at this point, ladies and gentlemen, I'll just take a couple of minutes to go through. We have something of an abbreviated slide presentation for this year, given that we're operating still virtually -- well, not entirely, but pretty much virtually this year. And hopefully, next year, we'll be back in person fully once again. But we thank those who took the time to join us today. We appreciate that. But there are a lot of exciting things going on with the company and with the industry in general. And I think even in the abbreviated PowerPoint that we prepared for you, I think that you'll find that there's a lot of exciting things going on. So I'll start. You should, at this point, see on your screens, yes, the PowerPoint presentation. And what you're looking at is, on the cover page, in the upper left-hand corner is, of course, an interior photograph of our state-of-the-art in-situ recovery facility in the Great Divide Basin in the state of Wyoming. And for those that may not be familiar entirely with what we do as institute producers, we are solution miners. And what we do is we pump a lixiviant underground. It's a highly oxygenated alkaline solution that dissolves the uranium in place or in-situ. We then pump out that impregnated solution. And it comes into those very large on ion-exchange columns, you can see in the right side of the picture there, where it is loaded on to millions of tiny little polymer beads called the resin. And when that resin bonds itself with the uranium that is then called a loaded resin, it is pumped over to the elution circuit, which is on the left side of that picture, where you see those other very large tanks. At that point, the uranium is stripped off, the resin and the resin beads are then returned back to the ion-exchange columns for reuse. After that goes through a series of circuits where it is precipitated and ultimately filter pressed, dried and packaged as yellowcake, and what you see on the right side is our finished product. We typically will be sending drums out the door at approximately 875 pounds. And when we're selling at $50 a pound, those go out the door at about $43,000, $44,000 a barrel. That's the business model. Moving on here. I hope you see in this advance, that this is the standard disclaimer page. And I would simply say here that I will be making some forward-looking statements during the presentation. I think there's a lot of good things going on. And so I'm going to make a few forward-looking statements. But what I'll try and do is designate them as forward-looking statements as I do that. So you'll know when I'm lying to you. Anyhow. What we're going to do first is we're just going to take a brief look at the company at a glance. And most of you know that we started this company more than 17 years ago. We just marked 17 years. And during that time, we spent the first 7 or 8 years as a permitting and licensing story and the last 8 years, come August, as a production company. We produced approximately 2.7 million pounds at the plant and that's through to the first quarter of this year. We are now on care and maintenance. So we have controlled our production now at market appropriate levels since we are still in the $30 range. But we -- one of the things that has occurred that we are very proud of is that we believe that we have emerged as the lowest cost producer outside of the country of Kazakhstan. And they are the lowest cost producers of the world. That's for a number of reasons. They've got excellent deposits. But mostly, it's -- they have that designation because they have devalued their currency by more than 90% over the last 5, 6 years. And so that gives anybody that's competing in world markets a great advantage. But we believe that we have emerged as the lowest cost producer outside of Kazakhstan, and we know that we're the lowest cost producer in North America. One of the things that I want to emphasize, and we'll be talking about this throughout the presentation is the fact that we have taken the time, and we've gone to great lengths and expense to make sure that we have maintained our very critical operational staff out at Lost Creek. It's hard to overstate the importance of this. These guys are very highly specialized, highly technical and the fact is there aren't a lot of them out there. And so these are people that we can build on, and we will use them as the foundation on which we will build our company when we go to ramp up or when we're called upon to ramp up. So it's very important for us to keep these critical people at the plant. And more recently, we've also received additional permitting and licensing, both at Lost Creek and the Shirley Basin, and I'll talk about both of these. But at Lost Creek, essentially, it took us a number of years, but we got it done. And so now we've increased our footprint there. We've added 6 more mine units. And we also added our production capacity that can be done right there at the plant from 1 million to 1.2 million pounds per year. So this is something where we -- now that we've gotten to know our aquifer, we feel that we can produce at nearly 1.25 million pound level. So this is good news for us, and now we've expanded to additional mine units as well. One of the things that has differentiated us from all of our peers -- virtually all of our peers over the course of the last 10 years since Fukushima, and of course, that was a massive event for our entire industry, wherein our industry has been characterized by an excess of surplus of product and a paucity of demand. Right now, one of the things that we did back in 2010, '11, '12 and '13, and I think this is a tribute to the Board of Directors and the management team, is that we put in place long-term contracts that have extended out to the end of the decade. Now we delivered into the last of those contracts in the second quarter of last year, so we're officially out of contracts, but it served a great purpose. It put us in a position where we had consistent cash flows where others did not. We were not forced into a position where we were living equity raise to equity raise. And we saw an improvement in pricing over the course of the last year, but it also enabled us to build an inventory, which, right now, I'll go into some things that are going on out there in the marketplace, and that inventory is actually quite critical to us. As mentioned earlier, Shirley Basin is our next producer. And just recently, we have received our final licensing permits there, and we are now construction ready. And it's important to note this was a former producer. So we have a good deal of the infrastructure in. There's still things that we want to work on this summer. But Shirley Basin gives us the ability, at least under the license, to increase our production by an additional 2 million pounds per year, that is the estimated license capacity. So effectively, when we finish that permit, we actually doubled our permitted license capacity for production. So we're very, very pleased to have that on, and that's a great tribute to John Cash, our Vice President of Regulatory Affairs, who works so hard on that. But one of the things that's, I think, particularly exciting as we come into 2020, and I will be candid, quite unexpected, is that the new administration has proven to be quite friendly toward nuclear. And I think that there is very much a feeling in Washington, D.C. that point of change will not be addressed effectively without nuclear. It's simply not going to happen. And look, folks, we all saw what happened in Texas, just a month or 2 ago with the deep freeze for 3 or 4 days. We -- wind and solar just failed and not only failed, but they failed 100%, and if not for the nuclear plants that were up and running at that time, hundreds of more lives would have been lost. So one of the things we're very pleased with is that there's a lot of legislation that's coming to the House and the Senate and to Congress. And one of the things that happened before the end of last year in December is that we made it into the omnibus act, the creation of a uranium reserve, which called for an appropriation of $75 million this year in 2021, and that can be extended into 2022. But clearly, what we are seeing is that this administration has made nuclear energy part of its clean energy agenda. So we're very, very happy about that. Let's take just a moment, let's talk about some of the supply/demand fundamentals. If you're going to invest in anything, you want to know what the industry looks like and what some of the fundamentals are. We -- one of the things that I'd like to emphasize, when I'm out there, and I'm speaking to hedge funds and individual investors is that we are not alternative energy. We're 20% of the baseload in the United States, and we constitute 55% of carbon-free electricity. There are 443 reactors up and running around the world right now. The number varies a little bit, it's either 54 or 55 reactors that are under construction. But because of COVID, we only saw 3 or 4 of those come online last year. So what we're expecting this year is 12 to 15 new reactors coming online. So that's a big deal. And those -- each one of those will require an initial core load. So we would hope that, that's going to boost demand a little bit and that -- so we'll see some higher demand figures for this year. But I would point your attention to those bullet points at the bottom because the next one I'm going to talk about is really significant. And that is that we are now in our third year of a structural deficit that exceeds 50 million pounds a year. And let me give you an example to illustrate that. In 2019, globally, we consumed approximately 187 million pounds of uranium. That year, we had primary production of 139 million pounds. So we had a structural deficit of 58 million (sic) [ 48 million ] pounds. The following year in 2020, we had a structural deficit of 56 million pounds. Now we don't know what that structural deficit will be this year. But with the 12 to 15 new reactors coming online, I think we could expect that it's going to be upwards of 60 million pounds structural deficit and that has to be made up for by aboveground inventory or what is generally referred to as secondary supply. So this is something where -- what we are seeing is aboveground inventories and secondary supplies are being consumed very, very rapidly. And for us, and as long as we've been waiting, this is a good thing. Right now, we -- our demand is still low, but the good thing is because of the structural deficits, we're consuming the available material. The next thing I wanted to talk about is that there has been something that occurred, and this announcement came out just under a month ago. And that was that Sprott. For any of you that are natural resource investors, you know the name Sprott, they are engaged in all things, natural resources and very much so in uranium as well, that they took over the Uranium Participation Corp. And what they are going to do is that they're going to turn that into the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust. And so what this is going to do is that they're going to put it on the New York Stock Exchange. They're going to put an at-the-money financing mechanism in place, which means that as new shareholders come into this SPUT, the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, then it means that they will be consuming more and more product on the spot market. The significance of this is that the U.S. utilities that have been out there and, of course, run 94 reactors, the largest fleet in the world, they haven't had to compete for material. Now all of a sudden, they'll be in a position where you're going to have what could be a very, very large fund that exceeds $1 billion maybe in the first year. So that's a forward-looking statement. We don't know what that number is going to be. But if you look at their other physical trusts in precious metals, the platinum-group metals, gold and so on, they're all in excess of $1 billion. So to think that they'll be able to grow that to over $1 billion is not a stretch. And I think that, that's going to mean that there's a lot of competition in the spot market, and that alone can move swap prices higher and do it very quickly. In addition to that, we've seen a lot of newcomers come into the market. You may have seen in the news that a number of companies have come in and have bought physical uranium to hold as inventory, hoping that it would go up and give them flexibility in future financing for ramp-up or perhaps even average down costs when delivering to the utilities. So there's a variety of reasons that they have bought physical uranium. We have not. And that's not to say that we would not do that. It's only to say that we have not done that. And we're in a bit of a different position than everybody else. And I'll get to that in a minute, but I think that it's important to understand that the utilities are now competing for material, both from industry itself, pretty soon from the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust and from other sources as well, and that may very well be government when they start the uranium reserve. So these are all very, very good things that are going on with respect to the growth of demand here in the United States. And here in this country, what you should be seeing is a very colorful slide here, a bar chart that shows our production here in the United States over the course of the last 20 years. One of the things that is most significant is the headline of that slide, and that is that we are 100% now dependent on foreign sources for our nuclear fuel. I've said this so many times, this is not only insane energy policy, it's downright dangerous national security policy. We consume consistently upwards of 50 million pounds per year. In fact, that number was right at 49 million pounds last year, but it's projected by UFC that, that number will exceed 50 million pounds again this year. But we -- our -- amount of material that is mined out in the United States has become so insignificant, it's negligible and is no longer being reported by the EIA. So what you see there is that there -- we had only something like 8,000 pounds that were produced in the first quarter of last year in 2020, the last time they gave us a number of pounds. Since then, the number has been inconsequential. This cannot continue. This is something where, if for any reason, the countries that have been providing us with material were to halt the delivery of that material, we would be in crisis literally overnight. And sadly, we're getting about 50% of our nuclear fuel from Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan right now. And so that means that we are getting it from Vladimir Putin. And I don't know about you, but that does not give anybody a warm and fuzzy feeling of that. We have seen all the cyber-attacks. I know that there is going to be a summit coming up in Geneva. But I can imagine that the cyber-attacks are going to be front and center in what's going on in those discussions. And my feeling is that we could see a disruption in flow of that material at any time. And we've seen it in natural gas and oil. Vladimir Putin has demonstrated that he's ready to use natural resources as a political weapon anytime he thinks that it's appropriate. But as I mentioned, there's a progression of market forces taking place out there. Many new things are happening. And what I'd like to do is go back a couple of years and talk to you briefly about this. Most of you know that we initiated and spearheaded an effort for 1.5 years under Section 232, a trade action that was part of the Trade Act of 1962. And what we asked for was that, look, we give 20% of our consumption each year to the Russians, isn't it appropriate that we require that a quota come from the United States to keep the domestic industry alive? And we know that the Department of Commerce did an investigation for 9 months. We have not seen the results of that investigation, even though it's been asked for. And in fact, there are lawsuits under FOIA that are demanding it, but we have not seen it. We suspect that it spoke about the dangers and the very real dangers of relying on Vladimir Putin for our nuclear fuel. But we've not -- that has not been made public yet. But -- so when it came to finally be decided on by President Trump, he acknowledged -- frankly, had not read the report from DOC. He acknowledged it and said that he saw that it was a very real danger and a national security issue, but he punted on it and said he was not willing to take action at that time. So technically, our efforts to see a quota put in place candidly we failed. But what did happen then is that President Trump put in place the Nuclear Fuel Working Group, and this included 7 agencies of the federal government, 2 scientific commissions, the Head of FERC, the Head of NRC and 2 of his staff who was in the White House, so 13 in total. And what they did is that they spent the next 9 months putting together a report for the President, that came out with 18 measures, that's what they called them, or recommendations, if you will. And it's interesting because the uranium reserve was one of those, and that did come to fruition in December of last year. But I went back through that over the last week, and it was interesting to note that of those 18 measures that came out of the Nuclear Fuel Working Group, 11 of them have now been adopted by the Biden Administration in their clean energy agenda. So when you take a look at Section 232, it led to the Nuclear Fuel Working Group, which has now led to the clean energy, and it is an integral part of the clean energy agenda. So I suppose if you look at the success or failure of Section 232, that's only going to be known in hindsight and in the fullness of time because it may very well lead to a healing of our industry here in the United States, a little later than we would have liked, but it may very well lead to very good things for us. Also during last year, we saw an extension and amendment of the Russian suspension agreement. They've been providing 20% of our consumption each year for the last 28 years. That was extended for another 20 years. And -- but we got some small concessions there. We weren't happy with everything we got, but it will average 17% now for the next 20 years. And that, of course, is for as long as Vladimir Putin is willing to continue to make those deliveries. But we do recognize that this administration is making nuclear a central pillar of its clean energy mandates, and it has solid bipartisan support because it is a Democrat administration. We are seeing a lot of support from the Left for nuclear for the first time in decades. So this is something that is very welcomed. We're very happy to see this. One of the things I wanted -- and this is what I wanted to get to, I think this is probably the most important slide in the deck. And that is that we have worked very hard over the course of last several years to put ourselves in the most advantageous position possible when it comes to our ability to ramp up. As I mentioned, we have kept our operational staff on, but what we've done is that we wanted to provide the numbers, give everybody an idea of what it would take us to ramp up. If you take a look at Lost Creek because we simply have shut down a good portion of the wellfield there and have limited our operations, we actually have the ability to ramp that back up in a very short period of time. And so for as little as $15 million and 6 months' time, we can ramp back up to about 1 million pounds per year run rate. I can assure you that there is no one else in our industry that can come anywhere close to that. In fact, I would say that the second guys on the list would probably take a full year to 1.5 years to get to 1 million pounds per year and at considerably greater money. If you look at Shirley Basin, that would take approximately 15 to 18 months and another $25 million, $26 million. But aggregately, if we wanted to wrap the 2 million pounds per year, we could get there for about $40 million and in less than 2 years' time. None of our peers I think can come close to that. So I think that's something that's very, very important. And that would not be possible if we had not kept our operational staff on. So I think that we are best positioned to take advantage of what we hope is going to be a resurgence in our industry. And I'm going to make another forward-looking statement here, but I do believe my personal feeling is that we will see the utilities coming back into this marketplace in the second half of this year. We'll wait to see whether or not I'm correct on that. But we know that we're in the best position to ramp up production. And this is a good time to also comment on something else. Many of our peers have been buying uranium. When you really look at it, think about this for a moment. If you -- at $30 uranium, if you have $15 million, you're not doing anything, well, you could buy approximately 0.5 million pounds of uranium. But for that same $15 million, I can ramp to 1 million pounds per year run rate, and I have an inventory already. So I think that we are in a unique position. And while I'm not opposed to buying an increase in our inventory, right now, for us, at least, it wouldn't make sense like it does for some of the others in the industry who have no ability to ramp production. But one of the things that we have, that we feel very good about and this is on your screen right now is that we wanted to insert this dilution slide. You will note that this is a historic dilution by company, and these are considered to be our 3 closest peers in the industry and note that it's since first quarter of 2011. That's meant to be the time of Fukushima. And you will notice that over the course of the last 10 years, our -- the dilution has been quite a bit less than any of our peers. Two of them are so great, it's off the charts. One of them has done a better job, but still substantially higher than our own dilution. Look, we're -- I'm the largest shareholder of this company. For me, this is something that is very, very important to me. And we have not come this far over 17 years to flow up the dilution in market cap or the capital structure at this point in time. Here is a good summary of our current share capital and cash position. You will note there that we have a little over 189 million shares issued and outstanding, also have options and RSUs to the Board and staff members. And then we have warrants that have been issued along with -- as units when financings have been done in the past. Second, on that box on the left there, you will see that we have approximately 285,000 pounds of uranium that's in inventory at ConverDyn and ready to be delivered at any time. And it's important to emphasize here that this is domestically produced uranium. And when it comes to the uranium reserve that's now been put in place or is being put in place more accurately, that it has to be material that is produced in the United States. In other words, you can't go out there, buy material from Kazakhstan and deliver it into the United States' strategic uranium reserve. It has to be produced here in the United States. And they are technically only 2 of us that are still producing in the U.S. So we're -- this is a great advantage to us to have inventory in domestically produced material. And you can see in the lower box on the left, we're trading very well. We've been -- today, for example, we're trading in a range of $1.45 to $1.54, but yesterday and today, we broke our 52-week high and hit $1.57. So overall, things have been going quite well for the last 6, 7 months, and we think that's going to continue. And I think this is probably a good time to mention that we saw the Russell re-rank date come and go, and this was 3 weeks ago tomorrow. And we have been told by our primary investment banker that we made it on to the Russell. If we did and they are confident that we have, then it would be the fourth time we've made down the Russell. And so we've been on 3 times, we've been off 3 times. When you go on the Russell, it's a whole lot of fun, when you come off the Russell, well, not so much fun. But if we make it back on again, what you -- I think what you're seeing is that, over that last 3 weeks, you've seen our stock consistently climb. And what happens is you end up having 135, 140 index funds that then need to own your stock. So this is something we very much look forward to. We have the additions/deletions date, the first list will come out after business close tomorrow afternoon. So we want to make sure that we're on that list. But then beyond that, the reconstitution date is the last Friday in the month of June. And typically, on that date, if you've made it on to the Russell then what you see is a tremendous amount of volume and typically a spike in price as well. So we certainly hope that we made it on to the Russell. We think that we have. And so we're very much looking forward to that and excited to see what it does to the stocks on behalf of our shareholders. The question was who is our primary banker, and we have used Cantor Fitzgerald consistently over the last 6, 7 years. I think that it's important when you're taking a look at any stock or the industry within which it resides, to take a look at what we see as the catalyst in that industry. And I think that, for us, you have to start with supply and demand as we are a natural resource. But let's just be candid here. There is nothing that is more political than uranium. It is the most politicized commodity in the world more so than gold, more so than rare earths. But as we already talked about in some detail, we are now in our third year of structural deficit of in excess of 50 million pounds per year. The WNA and other organizations like TradeTech, UxC and Nuclear Energy Institute are all calling for rising demand through this decade. So we not only are seeing structural deficits, which are consuming aboveground inventories or secondary resources, but in addition to that, we are seeing a growth in demand that will persist through the remainder of the decade. And of course, middle of the decade, we're going to have a lot of new starts in the form of small module reactors. This will be a fact while we get into second part of this decade. And I'll talk more about this in a moment, but we had a very good news on that yesterday in the State of Wyoming. But moving on to market forces. I think it's very important to understand that COVID has caused a lot of changes. At one point in the middle of last year, we saw a 35% decline in primary production of uranium globally. Now ostensively, it was due to COVID, but I think what it was is that prices were very low and under the cover of COVID, a number of producers simply shut down their facilities while awaiting higher prices. So -- but either way, whatever the cause was, it had a dramatic impact. And the other thing that's notable is both Cameco, one of the largest producer of uranium in North America, and Kazatomprom, the largest producer in the world were both been in the market, both last year and in the first 4 or 5 months of this year as buyers. So we have seen them in the market buying to satisfy their contracts. We're very excited about what may happen and the potential of the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, the appropriations into the uranium reserve and Biden Administration's new emphasis on nuclear. One of the other things is that, I mean, in line with that comment that we are the most politicized commodity in the world, it should be important to take into consideration, and you've got to realize that this is a world that's constantly in conflict and the largest geopolitical players are always going to be central to those complex, whether it's Syria, Iran -- I mean we're bombing targets in Syria. Iran is now enriching uranium to over 60%, approaching weapons grade. We've got Russian-sponsored cyber-attacks. South China Sea has been a constant source of conflict, and there are armies massing on the Russian-Ukraine border. Any one of these things could be a catalyst for which Vladimir Putin may decide, you know what, we're going to halt the transfer of nuclear fuel to the United States. And I can assure you, if that were to occur, we would go into crisis. Those utilities will go into crisis literally overnight. So just to reiterate, as far as our takeaways. We're in solid position. We have good cash, solid cash as a company right now that give us good solid runway for the next few years. We have $285,000 (sic) [ 285,000 pounds ] of homemade product that is very important to the newly structured uranium reserve. We have restructured our state bond loan. We still have a little over $12 million there, but we're making interest-only payments at the time. This is really a significant advantage to us because we do not have to pay -- make another principal payment now until fourth quarter of next year. So this has really enabled us to really significantly curtail our spending. And I think that, that's something that everyone appreciates. We just recently got the news this week that both of our loans now have been forgiven under the SBA's PPP loan program, that was part of the stimulus package. So great job to Roger and his group on doing that. Roger, good job. So -- but now we've gotten full forgiveness on both of those loans, and that is great news. But I'd like to reiterate that we're in a position where we have -- because we have kept that core operational staff, we are in best position to ramp up at lower cost in a shorter time frame, and ideally, with far less dilution than any of our peers, and that is something that every one of you should be concerned about. And we have multiple sources of financing should we need to do that. But I think that I would close by just making a couple of other comments because there are a couple of other things going on in the industry that are worth discussing it. As I had mentioned, we have made great progress in our own permitting and licensing, which has expanded our footprint now and given us greater flexibility moving forward into the future. But the NEI recently provided a piece to us, which is not available to the public, but it is to us internally as members, where they were detailing the pieces of legislation that may very well come into the marketplace. They detailed 6 of them. Of those, 4 would have a direct impact on us as uranium producers. So there's one piece of legislation that's out there right now, another that's going to be reintroduced as the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act, but then others that are going to be coming to the floor. When Congress moves on beyond the infrastructure act, or when they come together on this infrastructure bill, I don't know. But we know that there is legislation that's pending, and some of that is very, very good for us. One thing that I'll mention that many of you may be aware of in that is that the President's budget was released Friday of last week. And it did not have a specific reference in there or allocation for 2022's uranium reserve. And what I'd like to emphasize is that this is not the end of that process. Both the Senate and the House have to do their versions of the budget. And in fact, it's important to emphasize that the President does not set the budget, Congress does. So this is just the beginning of that process where we will continue to fight that battle. We will be meeting with the appropriators. We will meet ideally with members of the President's staff and anybody else that -- and those at the Department of Energy as well. But we will fight very, very hard to make sure that we may get into the 2022 budget. And we were a last-minute inclusion in the omnibus bill last December. So this is nothing new to us. We're used to fighting these types of battles, and we don't necessarily like spending that much time in Washington, D.C. or that kind of money. But, unfortunately, it comes with the territory. But we will do our very best to make sure that the uranium reserve is not only perpetuated from 2022 and beyond, but is doubled to $150 million a year that the Nuclear Fuel Working Group had recommended in its report. But in addition to that, I think that it's important to understand the structural deficits are consuming the inventories added at just an unprecedented rate. So this is happening very, very quickly. We've all been waiting for it. It's finally here. This is something that's going to have a great impact. I love the idea that for the first time, the utilities are going to actually have competition for buying both from the federal government and from other players in the marketplace -- market players. So it's not going to be -- no longer going to be a situation where they simply go out for bid, and they're the only -- and everyone beats a path to their door cutting each other's throat to be the low provider to the U.S. utilities. Now we're going to actually have to compete. This is something we haven't seen in decades. So it's very, very exciting development. And yesterday, it was announced at the governor -- with Governor Gordon, up in Wyoming announced in front of the room full of luminaries that Bill Gates TerraPower, along with the Department of Energy and Pacific Corp., is going to be building a small modular reactor. They have 3, 4 different sites in Wyoming that they are evaluating, but this is the second one to be announced, but it will be built in Wyoming. It will be Natrium technology. It's going to be 345 megawatts. And this will be what will be referred to as a molten salt reactor. So this was exciting news that came out of Wyoming yesterday. We were very happy to be present for that, and this is exciting because we're going to have a front row seat to watching one of the first small module reactors being constructed and the jobs that it provides and the good things that it does for not only our country, but our industry. So that was great. It's interesting because there's a publication out there called Bear Traps Report by a guy by the name of Larry McDonald. It's one of the largest in the industry and very broadly read amongst the institutional investors. And he, in an interview on national television referred to uranium as a single best investment in the world right now. Now whether or not he's right on that, I don't know. That was his quote from Larry McDonald, not mine. But I think that we have entered a period of time that's the most exciting that we've seen since 2007 since the last uranium renaissance. So we're very, very pleased with everything that's going on. And now, as long as we're in that list tomorrow, the additions/deletions list for the Russell that will come out after close of market tomorrow, it should do very, very good things for our stock. The 3 times in the past that we made it on to the Russell, we were 1 of the -- in each one of those years, we were either the top performer in the uranium space or one of the top 2 or 3. So this is again, a forward-looking statement. But it just -- look, when 140 funds have to own you, it does good things for your stock. So we're very pleased, and we'd be very happy to get back on the Russell, and that's a big development for us. And so I have every confidence that we will make it onto that list for tomorrow afternoon. So with that, I would conclude my comments, and I don't know if we won't be taking any questions. So I guess that, that would be it. I don't think we have any comments that we're expecting from any of our other personnel, Penne?

No.

Okay. Well, with that, then I will say, once again, ladies and gentlemen, thank you -- yes, sir?

What price would be enthusiastic about reopening production at Lost Creek?

I'm glad you put in that qualifier enthusiastic. The question on the table is that what price would be enthusiastic about restarting production at Lost Creek? Look, we get the question all the time. So it's a great question, and it's one that I hate answering because the fact is that we know that, and what we lived with for the last 4, 5 years has been about $50 contracts. And we pretty much broke even at those contracts when you consider everything that has to go into your cost of production and cost of running the company and so on. Even though we were cash flow positive in 3 out of those last 4 years, would have been 4 out of the last 5 years if not for accounting requirements. But aside from that, we would like to see upwards of $60. And it's important to understand that globally, it's anticipated that they are generally acknowledged that $50 to $55 a pound is the minimum that needs to be out there in order for most companies or any -- even the lowest cost producers to make money in this industry. And for me, I got to tell you that I want that $60 and above and for a simple reason. I want to take into consideration -- we have to take into consideration capital cost recovery. Not only that, but ongoing exploration and development to replace the pounds that you're producing. But in -- I think it's only appropriate that after all these years of our shareholders having to suffer through very, very challenging times in the post Fukushima environment that we build in an adequate rate of return for our shareholders as well. So I'm going to say the -- give you the same answer that Tim Gitzel of Cameco gives his shareholders, and he says, we'd like to see $60-plus before we'd be willing to restart production in the United States.

[indiscernible]

Well current burn rate for the entire company. Roger, do you want to weigh in on that, just ballpark?

[indiscernible]

About $2 million a quarter? Yes. I was going to say somewhere between $6 million and $8 million. And it just depends on, I think with the -- and I would focus on this. We, of course, just maintenance, and we have obligations under our permits and licenses that we simply have to adhere to. So those costs in some cases are fixed. We don't have a lot of leeway on that. But I can tell you this, that we're somewhat around, I would say, $700,000 a month, if you want to call it, the total burn rate for the company. About that?

Yes.

Yes. So I think it's a good number to work with. And -- but we are at the lowest burn rate that we've been in some 12, 13 years, probably. So we're running very lean and clean right now as a company, and I would say, actually much leaner than our peers. So any other questions that I might be able to deal? Okay.

I appreciate it. Thank you for [indiscernible].

You bet. That's fine. Thanks, Roy. I appreciate having the questions. But with that, ladies and gentlemen, we'll close the meeting. Thank you very much for your time and attention today. And keep your eyes peeled, we're -- I think we're going to have a great year this year, and I hope we have wonderful things to report to you next year. Thank you very much. Bye.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a nice day.