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Cameco mines uranium and turns it into the fuel that nuclear power plants around the world use to generate electricity.
Cameco is one of the world's biggest uranium companies. It does two main things: it digs uranium out of the ground, and it processes that uranium into the exact form nuclear power plants need to make electricity. Most people never think about this business, but it quietly sits near the start of a long chain that keeps the lights on in countries that run on nuclear power.
The mining side is where the big money and the big risk live. Cameco owns mines in Canada, including the famous Cigar Lake and McArthur River deposits in northern Saskatchewan — some of the richest uranium ore on the planet. High-grade ore matters enormously here: if a ton of rock holds far more uranium than average, you spend less to get each pound out, which is the difference between a profitable mine and a money pit. Cameco also gets uranium from other sources, such as its stakes in mines elsewhere and buying on the open market, so it can keep supply steady even when one mine stumbles. The second piece is the fuel services business. Raw uranium isn't something a reactor can use. It has to be converted and processed into fuel assemblies, and Cameco does part of that work through its fuel services operations in Ontario, plus its stake in a conversion business. Then there's the big wild card: Cameco is a major owner of Westinghouse, the nuclear reactor company, alongside Brookfield — a deal that pushed it beyond simply selling fuel into the broader business of building and servicing reactors. Customers here are utilities and national nuclear programs, mostly in North America, Europe, and Asia, and they choose Cameco because they need long-term, reliable supply from a company with real reserves and a track record.
Cameco was born from a merger of two government-owned companies: Eldorado Nuclear, owned by the federal government, and the Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation, owned by the province. After the deal, the province owned most of the new company and the federal government owned the rest. The point was to combine them into one of the world's largest uranium mining and processing businesses. It was a big, state-built company from day one.
A few years later, the company sold shares to the public for the first time, raising money on Canadian stock exchanges. That was a real change: a company built by governments now had outside shareholders. By then it was already a major player, supplying a big slice of the world's nuclear fuel needs.
Cameco crossed the border and bought Power Resources, the largest uranium producer in the United States. The deal grew its reserves by about a tenth and gave it a real foothold in the American market. It also started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, putting the company in front of U.S. investors.
Two years later, Cameco paid a large sum for Uranerz, a company with stakes in several mines. The prize inside the deal was a share of the McArthur River project, the world's largest known high-grade uranium deposit. That deposit would come to define Cameco's fortunes, for better and for worse.
By now the governments had been selling down their stakes for over a decade, and the last of it went in one final step. Cameco was fully private, owned entirely by ordinary shareholders. The company the state had built was now on its own.
Then disaster struck in Japan. The Fukushima nuclear accident led countries around the world to shut down reactors, and demand for uranium fell hard. Prices collapsed, and Cameco slid into a long downturn that would last years.
With uranium prices stuck too low, the company did something painful: it shut down the McArthur River mine and the Key Lake mill, the very assets it had fought to own years earlier. About 700 workers lost their jobs. It was a huge cut to global uranium supply, and a sign of just how bad the market had gotten.
The mood shifted. The world started running short of uranium, and countries began taking nuclear power seriously again as a clean way to make electricity. Prices shot up. Cameco restarted McArthur River and Key Lake and pushed its Cigar Lake mine to produce more. The long downturn was finally over.
Cameco made its boldest move yet, teaming up with Brookfield Renewable to buy Westinghouse, the famous nuclear company, for billions of dollars. Westinghouse builds reactors, makes fuel and sells nuclear services, so the deal pushed Cameco far beyond just digging up uranium. It now had a hand in much more of the nuclear fuel cycle, and less of its fate rode on the uranium price alone.
Cameco, Brookfield, Westinghouse and the U.S. government joined forces to speed up building Westinghouse reactors in America, backed by a huge financing commitment and help with permits. Cameco also posted strong results, paid off its term loan and kept growing its dividend. The miner that once shut its best mine was now at the center of a nuclear building boom.
Uranium is a strange commodity. Prices spent years in the dumps after the 2011 Fukushima accident, which scared countries off nuclear power and left a glut of supply. Cameco responded by shutting mines and waiting, and the pendulum has since swung back: nuclear is being reconsidered as a clean, steady power source, and uranium prices have recovered. That makes Cameco a leveraged bet on nuclear's revival — great when prices rise, painful when they fall, since it's still fundamentally a price-taker on a commodity it doesn't control. The company pays a modest dividend and has spent heavily on Westinghouse and its mines, so its free cash flow gets split between growing the business and returning some to shareholders.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026