Energy Fuels Aktie

Hello, and welcome to the Energy Fuels Inc. 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. [Operator Instructions].

Good morning, everyone, and welcome again to the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Energy Fuels Inc. My name is Bruce Hansen. I'm speaking to you from our corporate headquarters in Lakewood, Colorado.

I serve as the Chair of the Energy Fuels Board of Directors, and I will act as Chair of this meeting. Corporate Counsel and Corporate Secretary of the company, Julia Hoffmeier, will act as Secretary of the meeting.

Also with us today are Ross Bhappu, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Curtis Moore, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development; Nathan Bennett, Chief Financial Officer; Nathan Longenecker, Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President of Global Government Relations; Kim Casey, Director of Investor Relations; and [ Brian Sheed ], KPMG Audit Partner. I would also like to acknowledge our Board of Directors, many of whom are in attendance with us today.

Finally, I'd like to pay special recognition to 2 directors that have chosen not to stand for reelection this year. That includes Birks Bovaird, who joined the Board in 2006 and served as its Chair from March 2007 to June of 2025, a period of more than 18 years in his notable 20-year tenure with Energy Fuels. Birks strong leadership, sound judgment and balanced perspective have helped support the company through numerous challenges, opportunities and successes.

Our longest-standing director and a member of various Board committees. Birks has a wealth of institutional knowledge and has brought to the Board a vast range of relevant experiences and have been invaluable in bringing us to this point of growth and transformation.

His expertise clearly cannot be easily replaced. The other director is Alex Morrison and has been a valuable member of the Board since 2019 and has acted as Chair of the Audit Committee since mid-2021.

And he has been a member of various other Board committees as well. A financial expert and an experienced member of numerous public company boards, Alex has contributed significantly to the company's risk assessment framework and cybersecurity program and has also provided critical oversight of Energy Fuel's internal and external audit procedures, including its internal controls over financial reporting.

Alex, as a Board member has also significantly contributed to the Board's strategic and general business guidance. I want to personally thank both Birks and Alex for their years of service and dedication to the Board and to the company. We at Energy Fuels wish them all the best. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Ross Bhappu, our President and CEO.

Thank you, Bruce. Hi. This is Ross Bhappu. I'm President and CEO of Energy Fuels. I'd like to first welcome you all to this year's meeting which we're very pleased to be holding virtually so that you, our shareholders and guests can meaningfully engage with us from the convenience of your own homes and offices.

We welcome your participation throughout the meeting, and we may pause intermittently to accommodate questions on matters before you today. After the official business is concluded, I invite you to stay on for my presentation, which I'm pleased to share with you on our year-end review, and that will include notable accomplishments, strategic priorities and significant pending transactions designed to position Energy Fuels as a globally relevant critical minerals platform. With that, I'll turn it to Julia.

Thank you, Ross. This is Julia Hoffmeier, Corporate Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Energy Fuels. This meeting is held in accordance with the Ontario Business Corporations Act, which permits shareholder meetings by electronic means.

Under the act, this meeting is deemed to be held in Toronto, Ontario as that is where our registered office is located. [Operator Instructions]. Please note that in the interest of all shareholders, we will only address those questions that are pertinent to the business of the meeting.

If you are eligible to vote at this meeting and have already voted your shares and do not wish to change your vote, no action is required at this time. If you are eligible to vote at the meeting and have not yet voted or would like to change your vote, you may do so by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen.

Only shareholders and proxy holders who have been provided an 11-digit control number located on the form of proxy you have received or obtained from your broker are entitled to vote at this meeting.

If there are any registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders who have inadvertently logged into the meeting as a guest, but intend to vote by online ballot during the meeting, please log back into the meeting as a registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder as per the instructions provided to you.

Thank you, Julia. The 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Energy Fuels will now come to order.

To make best use of our time, certain shareholders have been asked to move and second the resolutions to be considered here today, which are set out in the notice of the meeting. This will allow more time for voting as well as any questions and comments later in the meeting. We welcome shareholders who have logged in by using their control number to submit questions as they arise though we may address them at a later point in the meeting or on a private basis, depending on the subject matter.

We will pause periodically throughout the meeting to review questions directly related to any of the motions of the meeting during which you may experience brief periods of silence. Subject to time constraints, general questions related to the company's business and operations will be addressed after the CEO's presentation, which follows this meeting.

Duplicate or similar questions may be consolidated and paraphrased when read aloud to minimize repeat answers. Any guests in attendance today who have questions may also submit them through our Investor Relations team via e-mail at [email protected]. We will conduct the votes on the matters before us by a poll.

In this format, every shareholder or proxy holder who has been provided an 11-digit control number is therefore entitled to vote on the matter and has 1 vote in respect to each share entitled to be voted on the matter and held by that shareholder. If you previously voted by proxy, please note that voting in the poll will void your previously cast votes, and any votes submitted here will govern.

We note that the proxies received to date indicate that the company has sufficient votes to pass all matters in accordance with the recommendation of management. The poll will be open for all resolutions at the same time. This will allow you to vote either on each resolution immediately or to wait until the conclusion of the discussions on all resolutions prior to casting your vote on any of the resolutions.

Your votes may be changed until voting is closed just prior to the termination of this meeting. Now Equity Trust Company, LLC will act as a virtual scrutineer of this meeting to report on the shareholders present virtually and the number of securities represented virtually and by the proxy at this meeting and by any adjournment thereof to compute the votes cast by proxy and by the poll conducted at this meeting or any adjournment thereof and to report to me on these matters.

The notice of Internet availability of proxy materials was mailed to all registered shareholders and was also mailed or notice was delivered in accordance with the notice and access requirements to all nonregistered shareholders in accordance with Rule 14A-16 of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Accordingly, the company is also in compliance with Canadian National Instrument 51-102, subpart 9.1.5, which allows compliance with SEC notice and access rules. The affidavit of mailing has been duly filed, and I direct that this affidavit be attached to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule.

If you're entitled to vote at the meeting, you may address the meeting when there is a call to discuss a motion before the meeting. Should a shareholder or proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting would like to address the chair or other speaker on any motion, please type in your question or comment in the questions box at the right-hand side of your screen.

Subject to timing constraints and the applicability of the matters discussed, the secretary or another speaker may read the question aloud and provide a response during this meeting or as previously noted, duplicate or similar questions may be consolidated and paraphrased when read allowed to minimize repeat answers. Now a quorum for the transaction of business at this meeting of shareholders is at least 2 persons present.

In this case, virtually, each being a shareholder entitled to vote at the meeting or a duly appointed proxy holder or representative for an absent shareholder so entitled. I will now ask the Secretary to report on the attendance at the meeting.

We are pleased to report that there are 126 shareholders holding 124,183,126 common shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting. This represents 49.74% of the 249,649,039 issued and outstanding common shares.

Thank you, Julia. I declare that the requisite quorum of shareholders is present and that the meeting is properly constituted for the transaction of business.

I direct that the final scrutineer's report on attendance be annexed to the minutes of the meeting as a schedule. Now our first item of business is the presentation of the financial statements of the company for the year ending December 31, 2025, together with the auditor's report thereon. Copies of the financial statements have been publicly filed and mailed to all shareholders who have requested them. Are there any questions concerning the financial statements?

This is Curtis Moore, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Curtis. As there are no further questions, receipt and presentation of the financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, is hereby acknowledged.

Now our next item of business is the election of directors. It is proposed that 7 directors be elected at this meeting. As described in our proxy statement, the company has adopted a majority voting policy that provides for individual director voting by the shareholders.

Under this policy, if any nominee director receives a greater number of votes withheld than votes for election, such nominee will tender his or her resignation for consideration by the Board of Directors following this meeting.

In addition, the company's bylaws require that shareholders submit a notice of director nominations at least 35 days and not more than 65 days prior to the annual meeting.

No notices of nomination were received by the companies within this specified time period. May I have now a motion to nominate the individuals recommended by the Board of Directors?

This is Ross Bhappu. I nominate for election as directors of the company for the ensuing year, the following 7 persons whose nominations have been authorized by the Board of Directors: Ross R. Bhappu, Benjamin Eshleman III, Barb Filas, Bruce D. Hansen, Jacqueline Herrera, Dennis L. Higgs and Michael Stirzaker.

Great. As no other nominations were received by the company in accordance with the advanced notice provision of the company's bylaws, I now declare the nominations closed.

All of the nominees have signified their consent to act as directors of the company. May I now have a motion in respect to the election of the nominees as directors.

This is Ross Bhappu. I move that the individuals who I nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of the Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Curtis. As there are no further questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting.

All persons are eligible to vote and may enter the votes by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen at this time. You may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting.

Now the next item of business is the appointment of auditors as described in our proxy statement. Management is proposing that KPMG LLP, an independent registered public accounting firm located in Denver, Colorado, be reappointed as the auditors of the company for 2026. I now ask someone to please make a motion to this regard.

Bruce, this is Ross Bhappu. I move that KPMG LLP of Denver, Colorado, an independent registered public accounting firm, be appointed as auditors of the company until the next annual meeting of the company at such remuneration as shall be fixed by the Board of Directors.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

As there are no further questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All persons eligible to vote again may enter their votes by clicking the Vote My Share tab on the right of your screen at this time.

Again, you may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting. The next item of business is a vote on a nonbinding advisory proposal to approve the compensation for the named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. I now ask for someone to make a motion.

This is Ross Bhappu. I move that the following resolution be passed. Resolve that the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to Item 402 of Regulation S-K, including the compensation discussion and analysis compensation tables and narrative discussion is hereby approved.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Curtis. As there are no further questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. Once again, all persons eligible to vote may enter their votes by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen at this time.

And again, you may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting. The next item is a vote on a nonbinding advisory proposal regarding the frequency on which shareholders will vote on say-on-pay proposals in the future known as say when on pay as detailed in the proxy statement.

The Say Win-on-Pay vote consists of 4 voting options denoted by the ability to vote in favor of a 1-year frequency, a 2-year frequency or a 3-year frequency or to simply abstain.

Each voting option is mutually exclusive, meaning that shareholders can only vote for 1 of the 4 options and should vote against or abstain on the other 3 options. Abstentions will effectively count as votes against that specific Say Win-on-Pay proposal.

Failures to vote will not have any impact on the Say Win-on-Pay proposal. It is the recommendation of management that shareholders vote for a 1-year frequency. I will now ask someone to make a motion.

This is Ross Bhappu. I move that the following resolution be passed: Resolved that the shareholders of Energy Fuels Inc. determine on a nonbinding advisory basis that the frequency with which the shareholders shall have an advisory vote on executive compensation set forth in Energy Fuel, Inc.'s proxy statement for its Annual Meeting of Shareholders beginning with the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is every 1, 2 or 3 years.

This is Julia Hoffmeier. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this specific motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

As there are no further questions, I will call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All persons again, eligible to vote may enter their votes by clicking the Vote My Shares tab at the top right of your screen at this time.

If you have not entered your votes for all of the motions put forth at this meeting, please do so now. Now we'll pause for approximately 20 seconds to allow all shareholders to complete their votes before we close the polls.

[Voting]

The polls are now closed. And based on the preliminary scrutineer's report, proxies were received from a significant number of shares relative to the total number of votes cast at the meeting.

Such that I declare the following: With respect to the election of directors, I declare the motion carried and confirm that all nominees have been elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed.

Each of the nominees for director received more votes for than the number of votes withheld. And accordingly, each of the directors has been duly elected, and none of the directors is required to tender their resignation under the majority voting policy.

With respect to the appointment of KPMG LLP of Denver, Colorado, an independent registered public accounting firm, as auditors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders at such remuneration as shall be fixed by the Board of Directors, I declare the motion carried.

With respect to Say-on-Pay, the requisite majority resolved that the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to Item 402 of Regulation S-K, including the compensation discussion and analysis, compensation tables and narrative discussion is approved.

With respect to the Say Win-on-Pay, a 1-year frequency received the most votes in favor. And as a result, the shareholders resolved on a nonbinding advisory basis that the frequency at which shareholders shall have an advisory vote on executive compensation set forth in Energy Fuels, Inc.'s proxy statement for its Annual Meeting of Shareholders beginning with the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders is every 1 year.

I hereby now direct that a copy of the scrutineer's final voting results be annexed to the minutes of the meeting that a report on the voting results be filed on SEDAR in accordance with Section 11.3 of National Instrument 51-102 continuous disclosure obligations and that a Form 8-K in accordance with Item 5.07 be filed on EDGAR pursuant to the filing requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

This concludes the scheduled business of this meeting. Is there any other business that anyone entitled to vote at this meeting would like to bring to the attention of the meeting?

This is Curtis Moore. There is no further business to be brought before the meeting.

Thank you. As there is no further business, I declare this Annual Meeting of Shareholders formally adjourned. However, I most certainly invite you to stay online to hear from our President and Chief Executive Officer, Ross Bhappu, on Energy's last year in review and I think a very exciting strategic outlook for the coming year.

Thank you, Bruce. Please note that this statement -- sorry, that this presentation contains forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations, and they're subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please refer to the slide addressing the forward-looking statements in this presentation as well as to Energy Fuels filings with the SEC and the Canadian regulators for a discussion of these risks. We undertake no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law.

With that, I'd like to do a quick presentation about the state of Energy Fuels, where we are. As I'm sure everybody is aware, we've been very active for the last number of months. And certainly, in the last 5 or 6 days, we've made some very, very important announcements. But I wanted to start with this slide, the title slide that I think talks to a little bit about where we started, where we are and where we're going.

I think it's an important slide and important to talk about the fact that we came from a history of uranium mining. Today, we're the largest producer of uranium in the United States. It sets us apart. I think it really creates a fabulous foundation for us as we advance into other parts of our business.

Importantly, we've expanded from just being a uranium miner and processing company to take that uranium expertise and advance into rare earths with the knowledge and expertise of rare earth separation and our choice of rare feed being monazite that's moved us into heavy mineral sands mining.

And now with our announced acquisition earlier this year of ASM and more recently, the announcement yesterday of our planned acquisition of Vacuumschmelze VAC, it moves us into metals, alloys and magnets.

I want to reiterate though, and I think this is really important that by no means does this mean we're giving up on the uranium side of the business. In fact, uranium will remain very important to us as we go forward with the execution plan.

So this is, I think, just a helpful slide to sort of set the stage. I've already discussed the forward-looking statements, so please be aware of those. On this next slide, I think the important thing that I'd like to share with you is that we are executing on our strategic plan. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the strategic planning process here in just a minute. But what's really defined the year is we've set a clear path to an integrated supply chain model, especially on the rare earths. We've started the execution of that. We've been very disciplined across core initiatives. We've progressed on M&A activity that I think is vitally important.

And I'll talk more about the M&A activity here shortly. But I think the important thing to remember on the M&A activity is these are not easy processes to get involved with organically. There is a lot of expertise, a lot of know-how, a lot of just years of experience that go into metal making, alloy production and then certainly magnet manufacturing. So with the acquisition of both ASM and VAC, we're buying existing companies, existing operations, existing EBITDA and cash flow that I think is vitally important.

And again, tremendously separates us from others that are operating in this space. So where are we headed? We're headed to be a global leader in the rare earth supply chain. We want to be a strategic partner to those OEMs, to those electronics companies, to missile -- or sorry, to defense contractors, other industries that are finding these rare earth minerals critical.

So we want to be a valuable partner to them. We also want to be a vertically integrated operator. Again, the acquisition of VAC and ASM really allow us to be self-sufficient and operate across the entire value stream and more importantly, allows us to capture margin across that stream. So the bottom line is Energy Fuels has strengthened our foundation, and we've outlined a very clear path to long-term value creation. So how did we get here? And how did we come up with our mission and vision? You can see on the slide there that we have developed a mission statement. Why do we exist? We want to responsibly produce the critical minerals that make clean energy and advanced technologies possible. That's why we exist.

And so how do we achieve that? We want to be or we will be the leading global producer of critical materials, enabling resilient supply chains and creating sustainable value for our customers, our people, our investors and our communities. We don't take these statements lightly. We spent 3 days. We took the top 16 leaders of the firm to an off-site, a 3-day offsite where we sat down and we really talked about what is our goal as Energy Fuels, what is it we want to try to achieve.

And as a group, we developed these mission and vision statements. We took them to the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors signed off on and agreed with this strategy and this workflow. And so on the back of that, we also created values. And the values, I think, are really important. It is what does it mean to work for Energy Fuels. And the 5 values that we came up with, which I think are vitally important and what we live by every day is certainly safety and environmental stewardship. It's working with integrity. It's respecting your fellow workers, the environment, the communities we work in and the cultures that we're dealing with in the various geographies in which we work.

It involves teamwork or includes teamwork. And I think that's vitally important. I think if you would have seen in the background the work that went into announcing our VAC intent to acquire VAC, you would have seen an incredible team effort that just exemplifies the teamwork that we have put together.

And then finally, operational excellence. We intend to deliver to the highest standard with financial discipline. And I would just reiterate that with financial discipline is an important part of that statement. So these are the values, the mission, the vision. And I'd say together, these really define the direction that we're going. So as part of that off-site strategic work that we did, strategic planning work, we really identified 4 key priorities. One is developing an operating model that will define how we're going to execute on this strategy.

The second is defining and advancing the projects and permits to allow us to achieve what we're doing. That means advancing the White Mesa Mill, the Donald project, the Vara Mada project, advancing on ASM's acquisition and the AMP development, AMP being the American Metals plant, development of our radioisotope program, advancing on the Bahia Project and advancing on the development of Roca Honda.

The third priority was financing and offtake, and that's securing agreements to support the development and profitability of the business going forward. We've certainly achieved some incredible milestones over the last year, starting probably with our convertible note offering in October, raising $700 million there. And then, of course, announcing last week the $725 million agreement with the U.S. government with the Office of Strategic Capital to help finance the activities we have going on with the White Mesa Mill and with the American Metals plant.

The fourth and final key priority is the people strategy. And you can't underestimate the need for and the importance of having the right people. I mentioned that one of the priorities is putting the operating model together. We have identified that operating model, now it's incumbent on us to put together the people that are going to drive that operating model.

And we have some incredible people in Energy Fuels. We're going to continue deepening our bench and making sure we have the right people as we grow and as we continue. So let me just talk about a few of the accomplishments that we've had in 2025 and '26.

First, projects and approvals. We got final regulatory approval for the Donald project. We've got a support letter from the Export Finance Australia EFA to help finance it. We've rebranded our Toliara project to the Vara Mada project, and we published the feasibility study. That was an incredibly important and value-accretive change, just the rebranding alone.

On the White Mesa Mill, we issued our bankable feasibility study for the Phase 2 expansion. We've also released information about our Phase 1B and 1C decision. Those 2 Phase 1b allows us to process the heavy rare earth minerals. Phase 1C will allow us to process MREC or mixed rare earth carbonates. So really important accomplishments from the project and approval side of the business.

On the rare earth supply chain side, we've produced our first dysprosium oxide, a critical milestone and Dy, that dysprosium passed all the initial purity and QA/QC benchmarks.

We also produced our first terbium oxide. These are both done at pilot scale levels, but very excited to have produced significant or substantial quantities of both Dy and Tb. POSCO, the manufacturer of neodymium, praseodymium into commercial scale rare earth permanent magnets and standard electric vehicle motor blocks was advanced, and we actually saw NdPr from our facility converted into magnets and being used in commercial applications, which is a fantastic milestone.

We signed an MOU with Vulcan Elements. And on the uranium side, within the uranium side of the business as well as our capital and portfolio, we have announced the VAC and ASM acquisitions. The Pinyon Plain Mine has continued to operate very successfully. We've exceeded our uranium guidance for fiscal year 2025. We've already met our full year production guidance for uranium by mid-2026.

As I mentioned earlier, we raised $700 million via a convertible note offering in October. Just last week, we announced the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital, the OSC provided a conditional $725 million financing commitment. And of course, yesterday, our big announcement of the VAC acquisition, which was negotiated and announced.

On the leadership and alignment side, I can't tell you how grateful I've been working with Mark Chalmers. As I think you all are aware, Mark retired on April 15. Mark remains a very important consultant to me personally, but to the firm as well, just a tremendous person.

And so that transition has now occurred, and I've taken over as CEO as of April 15. We did issue our sustainability report earlier this year. I think it was a fantastic undertaking. I think by all measures, everyone would agree that, that was a really very well done, not just a report, but a very well-done execution on our sustainability program.

The organization was outlined into 3 major business segments. And I haven't really talked about this before, but as part of the organizational model, we've defined 3 operating units, each with their own P&L. That will be the heavy mineral sands and rare earth mining segment. That includes the Vara Mada project, the Bahia project, Donald. It would include Dubbo as it advances.

Then we have the uranium, both mining and uranium and rare earths processing division that includes the White Mesa Mill, plus our 6 or 7 uranium mining operations, the Pinyon Plain Mine and La Sal in particular, which are operating. That's the second business unit.

And then the third business unit is the metals alloys and now, of course, with the announcement of VAC magnets. So metals, alloys and magnets will fall into that third business unit. So excited about implementing those changes. They've already started, and we're advancing on them quite well.

And then, of course, advancing on our top priorities that I mentioned earlier. So let me just talk a little bit about our announced acquisition of VAC. I think everyone should have or would have heard a lot about that yesterday. There's been a lot of press on it. VAC is an amazing company. It's in advanced magnetic materials, magnetics.

I think the key metrics are there at the bottom, 2025 adjusted revenue of almost $369 million. VAC has about 4,000 employees. They've been in operation for over 100 years, and it's amazing when you go to their factory, their facilities in Hanau, Germany. You can see this juxtaposition of this factory site that's been there for over 100 years, but with this incredible modern state-of-the-art equipment in it.

The company has over 1,000 customers, and they have over 400 patents all tied to this incredible work that they do. When you look at the sites that they have, they're headquartered in Hanau, Germany. For those of you that aren't familiar, Hanau is just outside of Frankfurt. That's their global headquarters and R&D center.

They have facilities in Finland, in Slovakia, in Malaysia, in China. But most importantly, they now have this new facility that they're developing in South Carolina at Sumter. It's a state-of-the-art facility, fully robotic. It's truly an impressive, impressive facility and one we're very excited about. It's got a capacity today of 2,000 tonnes per annum, but we've got line of sight to eventually getting that to 12,000 tonnes per annum.

So it's an incredible facility. When we look at the acquisition, what it does for us, first of all, just a few of the key terms of transaction values about this slide is $1.8 billion. I think we've said $1.9 billion in our materials yesterday. We've provided cash consideration of a little over $700 million to our partners and stock consideration of just under 66 million shares.

Additionally, there is a preferred security consideration of up to $135 million subject to certain conditions. There are conditional -- sorry, customary governance standstill lockup provisions for our partners, but they will have the right to nominate one member to the Board of Directors, and we're very excited for that individual to come on our Board.

The transaction is expected to be completed in approximately 6 months, but early 2027. And really, the key there is getting those regulatory approvals. And look, I think the important aspect of this is the value creation drivers. It provides full vertical integration from the mines to the magnets. It gives us that full vertical integration. It's got very complementary capabilities. It combines Energy Fuels, rare earth processing and extraction capabilities with VAC's magnet manufacturing expertise and their advanced technologies.

It broadens our customer reach. So when we think about customers, the customers knowing that there is a security of supply of raw materials to make their magnets, I think, can be understated or can't be overstated. We believe that it's going to create a re-rating opportunity for the company. We're going to enhance our cash flow and margin profile.

And again, very excited by what that means for our shareholders, for all of you as our shareholders. And then finally, the supply chain resilience. Again, I think that can't be just overstated. It is just so important to have control across the entire supply chain, and I think that's going to lead to much higher profitability and margins as we look forward. I'll talk just very briefly about the ASM acquisition. We've already spoken a great deal in the past about that.

Just a snapshot, we're paying AUD 1.60 per share. That equates to 0.053 Energy Fuels shares plus a $0.13 cash payment as well. The implied equity value is about $447 million. That will provide ASM shareholders with just under 6% shareholding -- pro forma shareholding in Energy Fuels prior to the VAC announcement.

The strategic fit, I think it accelerates our downstream rare earth capabilities. It provides us with an additional arrow in our quiver with the Dubbo project. It enhances our separations capabilities by having an additional feed source. It allows us to move directly into metals and alloys through their Korean metals plant, and it really positions us to being a leader in the Western mine to now magnet production profile.

The Korean metals plant is extremely valuable. Again, it's in operation today. We're expanding it as we speak. It improves margin capture, and it broadens growth pipeline through the Dubbo and the planned American Metals plant going forward. I don't want to, again, understate the importance of uranium to our process.

The picture that you see on the right is from the Pinyon Plain Mine and our valuable workers at the miners that are making that happen. So when we look at where we are from a market position perspective, the market demand remains as strong as we've ever seen it.

The rare earth demand continues to grow. We're excited about being a completely U.S. controlled source of rare earth supply to meet that growing demand. But we're also seeing incredible growth in the uranium sector. And so again, a very favorable backdrop for uranium.

When you hear about and listen to all the activity going on with regard to SMRs, small modular reactors plus the restart of new uranium facilities, nuclear facilities plus new additional nuclear facilities coming online, you can't help but be really excited about the future of uranium.

We are a relevant producer of both uranium and as we look forward, rare earths. So we are a relevant operator. And now we need to execute on a few of our projects. So projects like Donald, like the Phase 2 project like Phase 1B and 1C.

So I am just excited as I could ever be about Energy Fuels, where we are and where we're going. And with that, I'd love to open it up for any questions you might have, and I thank you for participating.

Well, thank you, Ross. This is Curtis Moore. There are no further questions at this time.

Great. Thank you, Curtis. Well, with that, I'd like to conclude our 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I'd like to thank everybody for attending, and we look forward to your participation again next year. Thank you.

Thank you for your participation in today's meeting. This does conclude today's call.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you all for joining us for this Energy Fuels proposed acquisition of VAC. [Operator Instructions] And to get us started with opening remarks and introductions, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to President and CEO, Mr. Ross Bhappu. Welcome, sir.

Thank you, Jim, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We have some really exciting news to talk about, and I'm excited to be here with Erik Eschen. Actually, Erik is in Germany, but he's joining me online and we'll be making a presentation together to tell you about this great news.

So if we flip to Slide 4. Yes. First of all, I just want to, again, thank everybody for joining. Today marks a very important milestone for Energy Fuels and rare earth supply chain security. With the acquisition of Vacuumschmelze, also known as VAC, we're realizing our vision to become the only really true Western mine-to-magnet platform. This culmination of years of effort to build a world-class portfolio of upstream, midstream and downstream mining assets that comprise a uniquely vertical -- sorry, unique vertically integrated rare earth supply chain.

I'm now going to walk you through how all these pieces fit together, starting with the VAC transaction. So just starting on Page 5. VAC is a leading advanced magnetics company headquartered in Hanau, Germany. This transaction coming on the heels of our planned acquisition of ASM puts us on a path to create a fully integrated mine-to-magnet rare earth platform, combining Energy Fuels low-cost upstream rare earth element mining projects and existing separation capabilities with VAC's world-class downstream rare earth magnet manufacturing expertise.

Together, we will be in a better position to serve customers across North America, Europe and high-growth sectors, including the automotive, aerospace, defense, robotics, data centers, electronics and industrial automation sectors. The cash and stock consideration for the company includes $718 million in cash and 65.85 million shares. Based on Energy Fuels closing share price of $16.12 as of Monday, June 22, the transaction implies an equity value for VAC of approximately $1.9 billion.

The transaction has been unanimously approved by the Energy Fuels Board of Directors, and we expect the transaction to close in early 2027, subject, of course, to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of applicable regulatory and government approvals. Accounting for the planned completion of the ASM acquisition, Ara Partners is expected to own roughly 19.9% of Energy Fuels following the closing of the VAC transaction.

The stock element of the transaction keeps Ara invested in the long-term value creation opportunity of the combined company. Ara will have the right to appoint one director to the Energy Fuels Board and will be subject to customary lockup and standstill restrictions. The acquisition of VAC will be immediately accretive to our earnings and cash flow, and VAC's legacy business generated $27 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2025 and has experienced more than 20% year-on-year growth in its order book for 2026.

VAC's Sumter facility is expected to generate approximately between $65 million and $75 million worth of annual run rate EBITDA once its production reaches its current capacity of 2,000 tons per annum. VAC is the only commercial European and U.S. permanent magnet producer that's operating magnetic facilities in North America, Europe and Asia with a commercial spectrum of relevant customer-qualified Neodymium Iron Boron and Samarium Cobalt magnet grades, including energy dense, high cohesivity magnets required for mission-critical defense and aerospace applications.

So if we turn to the next slide, we'll talk a little bit about what VAC is. VAC has more than 100 years of production expertise. It has over 400 patents and more than 1,000 long-term customers globally. Over the last decade, VAC has produced and shipped more than 1 billion -- let me repeat that, 1 billion rare earth permanent magnets. VAC employs approximately 4,000 people across several locations. These facilities include Hanau, Germany, Ulvila, Finland, Horná Streda, Slovakia and Sumter, South Carolina.

VAC state-of-the-art Sumter, South Carolina facility, the largest permanent magnet plant of scale in the United States is constructed and it's able to produce 2,000 tonnes per annum of Neodymium Iron Boron magnet block and has a pathway to scale up to 12,000 tons per annum.

Moving to the next slide. There continues to be a surge in demand for Neodymium Iron Boron magnets in North America and Europe, and we expect it to grow by over 50% over the next decade based on estimates from the International Energy Agency. Bridging the Western supply gap requires significant investments, including more than $60 billion by 2035. That supply gap is concentrated in the most technically challenging and underinvested parts of the value chain, which is exactly where VAC adds critical downstream capability.

Next slide, let me explain why we've opted for the acquisition to create this Western mine to magnet platform and what that market is looking for. We see strong evidence that buying gets us to where we want to faster and with more capability compared to our peers. Energy Fuels has built a strong foundation across rare earth feedstock, processing and separation with planned metals and alloys capabilities being added through the ASM acquisition. Strategically, this transaction is about accelerating the rare earth value chain we've already been building over the past several years.

The VAC transaction paves the way for us to become the only company with geographically diversified commercial capabilities across every critical step of the rare earth value chain. It also expands Energy Fuels participation in higher-value downstream markets, where customer relationships, technical capabilities and supply chain reliability are increasingly important. I'd now like to hand the floor over to Erik Eschen, CEO of VAC, who will discuss VAC's established platform, customer relationships and differentiated capabilities. Erik?

Thanks, Ross. It's very exciting to be here with you and present this outstanding deal. So quickly, my name is Erik Eschen. I'm the CEO of VAC. I'm with the company for 10 years now and happy to provide a little bit of background information what we are doing. VAC is a more than 100-year-old company with a lot of experience in producing soft magnetic materials and permanent magnets. We have about 1,000 customers where most of our products are spec-ed in, which means we develop it with them. It's very sticky to these customers.

At the same time, we are highly innovative. More than 20% of our revenue is usually with products. We just implemented in the [indiscernible] market the last couple of years. Also for that, we have an outstanding relationship with our customers on average more than 30 years, some of them 100. But also saying that we have a lot of start-ups because we have the full mix of whoever is in the innovative world works with us. And most important, we are the only producer, as Ross already mentioned, on permanent magnets in the Western world.

Saying that, we are fully DFARS compliant, and we serve the military in the United States and obviously, with the allies for many, many decades and have a significant differentiated IP portfolio. How do we manage our business? Because with our revenue of nearly $400 million, we are quite diverse. We separate in soft and hard magnetic magnets and hard magnetic magnets, these are our permanent ones. At the moment, this is our smaller business. But as Ross stated, with a lot of demand out there. And if you look at our financials, we make a gross margin of $68 million and EBITDA of $28 million as we speak with whatever we discussed before.

On the R&D side, I think that's very essential for that deal as well, and everyone was looking into that. We have 150-plus FTEs in our R&D. We have 420-plus patents, a lot of process IP, and we serve with the high-end markets, automotive, it's not only EV, but mainly that's where we're coming from. The whole automotive industry, we have a very strong aerospace and defense and drones, the solar industry for our soft magnetic market. And on the permanent magnet market, we have a lot of requests and demand and customers in the robotic sector, aerospace, defense, data centers, obviously, is one of the major industries right now and also the whole automotive industries, as I said before, on both sides, on the electric as on the combustion engine.

If we look -- take a look on the following side, and this is the most exciting or a very exciting part that also I'm pretty sure Ross was attracted right from the beginning. We just completed our facility in Sumter, South Carolina. I'm on Page 10 now. So we got asked a couple of years ago to build a facility on U.S. soil. We just completed that in a very short time frame. It was outstanding what the team could achieve. We are fully commissioned and in production. We are in Sumter, South Carolina. It's close to the shore Airbase, whoever is familiar with that area.

We can, at the moment, produce 2,000 tons per annum on block material. And we designed the factory that we can very quickly expand the capacity to 4,000 tonnes without interruption of the current production. So we already thought ahead when we designed the first phase, and we can easily expand to 12,000 tonnes. We have secured the space around and are ready to go that route over the next couple of years. So in the deal together also with Energy Fuels and also with ASM, we are ready and want to integrate the value chain steps before, especially metal making and strip casting, where ASM has great experience, and we are so excited to work together.

And also, we are waiting, obviously, to get the material from Energy Fuels and we can fill the whole facility with the materials we will get out of Energy Fuels. And you can see the growth potential with the expansion of that sector in Sumter, South Carolina. And yes, we are just excited the whole team. It's just here. And we are looking forward to work with Energy Fuels very, very close and happy to have you, Ross and your team. And I hand it over back to you.

Thank you, Erik. And we're very excited to be working together with you as well. So this combination brings together very highly complementary capabilities across the value chain, and it pairs Energy Fuels upstream and midstream rare earth platform with that downstream magnet manufacturing expertise. VAC's Sumter facility will be the end destination for the feedstock produced across Energy Fuel's integrated supply chain.

In its first phase, the Donald project in Australia will produce monazite that's expected to be processed into separated rare earth oxides at Energy Fuels existing processing circuits existing at the White Mesa Mill in Utah, just outside of Landing, Utah. That's where upgrades are expected to be completed by the end of 2027. The separated oxides are expected to be converted into rare earth metals and alloys at the Korean metals plant part of the ASM acquisition, and these in turn will be used to make permanent magnets at the Sumter facility.

Energy Fuels planned Phase 2 expansion at the White Mesa Mill is expected to increase the mill separation capacity up to 5,200 tonnes per annum of NdPr oxide and approximately 240 tons per annum of dysprosium and 70 tons per annum of terbium oxide by mid-2029. Energy Fuels will feed this expansion with monazite from the Donald project and Energy Fuels for Amada project and our Bahia heavy mineral sands projects, which are currently in their permitting and development stages. We'll also feed the mill through market purchases of monazite and mixed rare earth carbonate as required.

Oxides produced as a result of the Phase 2 separation capacity are expected to be converted into rare earth metals and alloys at the Korean metals plant and the American Metals plant, both of which facilities are expected to be expanded. The mill's Phase 2 expansion is expected to provide more than enough rare earth alloys to support a full 12,000 tonne per annum scale up at Sumter, as well as VAC's current European rare earth permanent magnet facilities, subject, of course, to demand for the permanent magnets. By integrating feedstock, separated oxides, metals and alloys and finished magnets, we see opportunities to improve the value of supply chain security, capture more of the value across the rare earth value chain and strengthen structural margins over time.

Next slide. We see a significant customer opportunity with over $2 billion of annual customer revenue pipeline that can support Sumter's expansion case over time. The value creation opportunity comes from vertical integration, customer access, margin capture, supply chain security and participation in higher-value downstream segments of the rare earth market. VAC's permanent magnet customer pipeline includes EV and non-EV automotive applications, data centers, power tools, robotics, aerospace and defense, semiconductors and other industrial applications.

By combining Energy Fuels upstream and midstream rare earth capabilities with VAC's downstream magnet manufacturing platform, we can capture more of the margin across the value chain. Vertical integration gives us the opportunity to eliminate third-party markups, internalize input costs and create a more structurally advantaged cost position over time. It also gives the combined company greater flexibility to serve customers at variable points -- multiple points in the value chain. That includes oxides, metals and alloys or finished magnets depending on customer needs.

For customers, that means a more complete supply chain solution supported by secure feedstock, Western production capabilities and DFARS compliant production. For Energy Fuels shareholders, the transaction creates a clear path to margin uplift and long-term value creation as Energy Fuels captures more economics across the entire value chain, and that includes both rare earth and magnet supply chain.

On Slide 14, the combined company brings together operating assets, developing projects and long-term expansion opportunities across rare earths, uranium and critical minerals. VAC adds immediate downstream scale and customer access to Energy Fuels existing upstream and midstream platform. Energy Fuels feedstock and processing capabilities help derisk VAC's supply chain, while VAC's magnetic expertise helps accelerate monetization of Energy Fuels rare earth production.

The result is a broader, more balanced growth profile with assets at multiple stages of maturity and multiple paths to long-term value. Now I'd like to walk through the intended pro forma of the company, the growth initiatives, which we expect to be supported by government funding that's existing, conditionally committed and in discussion across the United States and Australia. As we announced last week, Energy Fuels has received a conditional commitment for up to $725 million from the U.S. Office of Strategic Capital in the form of a 20-year loan to accelerate the planned expansion at the White Mesa Mill and construction of the American Metals plant.

Energy Fuels and its joint venture partner, Astron, are also making progress on discussions regarding an AUD 220 million lending package to support the development of Phase 1 of the Donald project from Export Finance Australia. In addition, VAC has received USD 220 million in total funding to support the scale of Sumter. [ VAC ] governance and project level support is expected to help derisk capital deployment and support execution across key growth projects, including White Mesa, Donald's, the American Metals Plant and Sumter.

Now let's talk about the value to shareholders. The benefits of the long-term growth, innovation and value creation catalyzed by the acquisition of VAC will be experienced by all our key stakeholders. For Energy Fuels stakeholders, shareholders, the transaction creates exposure to fully integrated Western mine-to-magnet platform with significant value creation potential through enhanced margin capture and downstream growth.

For our customers, the combined company enhances product capabilities, supports more resilient Western supply chains and provides DFARS compliant production. The combined company will also be better positioned to serve as a secure and trusted supplier of critical rare earth materials and magnets supporting customers whose supply chains are increasingly tied to national security, industrial competitiveness and resilience. VAC will retain its branding and historic identity. Recall, it's been in business for over 100 years with its technology-based engineering expertise and manufacturing footprint remaining critical to the success of the combined company.

Our focus now is on completing the transaction, engaging constructively with regulators and stakeholders and continuing to advance our broader rare earth strategy. I'd like to close by summarizing where this transaction positions us. We're creating a fully integrated mine-to-magnet rare earth platform, combining Energy Fuels low-cost upstream rare earth mining projects and existing separation capabilities with VAC's world-class downstream rare earth magnet manufacturing expertise.

The acquisition results in a significant margin uplift and long-term value creation as Energy Fuels captures more economics across the rare earth and magnet supply chain. We will be better positioned to serve customers across North America and Europe in high-growth sectors. We will win market share by offering a more complete supply chain solution supported by secure feedstock, Western production capabilities and DFARS compliant production.

Combined company growth plan is expected to be supported by government funding that's secured conditionally committed and in discussion across the United States and Australia. We're very excited about the opportunities ahead and confident in the long-term potential of the combined company. And with that, I'd like to open the floor up to questions that you might have. So I'm going to turn it back to Jim for polling questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll hear first from Nick Giles at B. Riley Securities.

Ross, congrats to you and your team on this transformative deal here. So maybe just on the first side, touching on VAC's growth. I was wondering, Erik, if you could just walk us through the CapEx for Phase 2. What kind of savings would you see just given the kind of front-loaded investment? And then how should we think about CapEx ultimately to that 12,000 mark?

Ross, should I take it immediately? Or do you want to start?

No, go ahead, Erik.

So obviously, we built our first Phase 1 in record time with a CapEx of $0.5 billion. We assume there will be some savings for Phase 2 for 2 reasons. First, some of the infrastructure is already there. We don't have to start from scratch. We also -- even we have been close to perfection, we learned a little bit out of first one like you do in every project.

And I'm sure the team will get better out of that. So in that range, minus 10% to 20% for each 2,000 is a ballpark, I would assume. Saying that, if we then further build immediately from not step-wise, but the facility by 4,000, you can have another discount on the overall CapEx. So that's how I would see it and would do my calculation on that.

Thanks, Erik.

Nick, I hope that answered your question, and good to talk to you.

Yes. No. And sorry, if I don't have it in front of me. Just what was the -- what would be the gross dollar amount just on that basis for ultimately reaching Phase 2?

Erik, I don't know if we've published that number. I don't believe we have...

For Phase 1, it's all a little bit forward-looking, so I'm a little bit more careful. But 2,000 tonnes, depending then on the final magnet because not every magnet is the same. You can assume $250 million up to $400 million depending on the complexity of the magnet with a very, very healthy margin as you have seen in the presentation. So you can make the math. The payback period is pretty attractive. And what we usually do, we are looking for firm contracts for a period also to secure the investments.

Understood. Ross, I wanted to really just ask you about capital allocation at the back of this deal. You have a nice bit of cash on the balance sheet, but some of that -- the majority of that will go towards the deal here. So just how do you think about capital allocation to your other growth projects? And what do you think about kind of funding needs from here?

Yes. Look, I think the government support that we announced last week has a huge impact on our cash position on our funding capabilities. Clearly, we are using a fair bit of our cash to get this deal done, but we are exploring how to I guess, explore other alternatives for funding the rest of our activities.

So Nick, we've got -- as you know, the White Mesa Mill feasibility study came in lower than we had anticipated. We've got our Phase 1 expansion going on. And so I think we're in good shape, but we've also put in place a loan from Goldman Sachs that will help support our cash flow, and that's a term loan. So I think we're in good shape to manage our cash and our capital requirements.

We'll move next to Noel Parks at Tuohy Brothers.

I guess with Energy Fuels doing this transaction at this particular time, I wonder if you could just sort of talk about your assessment of sort of the risk reward of this additional step in the integration. I'm thinking about it does represent additional operational complexity for the parent company. And I assume that was somewhat balanced against your faith in rare earths market and sort of the ability to see the critical minerals at the moment. So can you just sort of talk about how you assess that and how that affects the timing?

Sure, Noah. And thanks for the question. Look, I think from a risk-reward perspective, we chose VAC because it's existing, because it has over 1,000 existing customers. It is an operating company. It's been in operation for 100 years. So from a risk perspective, we're not developing new technologies. We're not building a new plant. They've already got existing facilities in place. So we think it's the lowest risk way for us to vertically integrate.

It's a tremendous opportunity for us. The fact that Ara chose to work with Energy Fuels, we chose to work with them and acquire this company, I think, is sort of a testament because there were certainly other suitors, and I don't know specifics about that, but I'm sure there were other suitors for VAC. And so I think this is just a tremendous match between the 2 companies and the lowest risk way for us to get into the magnet business as opposed to trying to develop the path on our own.

Got it. And if you could just sort of talk about where the ASM piece and the Korea processing sort of fits into the puzzle. I'm just curious, I guess, first of all, would this would not have made sense without the ASM piece? And I'm just wondering if you foresee I have a real opportunity of being able to arbitrage cost structures in the marketplace. Now you have these different -- I mean, with your various monazite sources and [indiscernible] sources long term, is that a big piece of it? Or does it really just boil down to the efficiency and the customer opportunities?

Well, look, I think the acquisitions of both companies provide this full vertical integration. I think that had we not acquired or been acquiring -- in the process of acquiring the Australian entity, I think we would want to get into the on alloy making regardless because that's a missing piece of the value creation matrix.

And so having the full vertical integration, I think, is vitally important. Would we have done VAC without them? I don't -- I think, of course, we would have certainly thought about that. But I think not being reliant on a third party to supply metals and alloys gives us a tremendous leg up on anybody else operating in this space. So I do think it's just that whole vertical integration makes incredible sense.

We'll move to Joseph Reagor at ROTH Capital.

I guess first question is just on VAC. What was their production rate last year that resulted in the $29 million of EBITDA?

Yes. I'm not sure that that's been publicly disclosed. Is anyone here know of it -- we disclosed that amount.

And by the way, we don't have a production rate because we have facilities and so many different products. There's not one production rate. So nothing to disclose on that hand and just like Ross said.

Okay. Fair enough. And then, Ross, should we expect Energy Fuels immediately post closing of this transaction to provide investor guidance on what you guys expect revenue run rates and EBITDA margins to look like on the combined basis?

So yes, we will -- we have put out guidance in the past. We will continue to put out guidance. I got to tell you, it's not my favorite thing to do because we're in this massive growth phase. We've got all these exciting things happening. And it's hard to judge us quarter-to-quarter, but we will certainly do that. I think the long-term value creation is where people need to be focused on with Energy Fuels with these acquisitions.

Okay. And then one other one, if I could. Just on the $1.9 billion valuation, is there any way from Energy Fuels side that you can kind of break down how you guys got to that number as a fair value to acquire it given the EBITDA was only $29 million last year?

$29 million last year, but historically, it's been much higher. And the growth profile that we're looking at is -- and the value that it brings to the combined entity, I think the calculations were pretty easy to zero in on that sort of number. And we worked with our advisers. I know Ara worked with their advisers. And jointly, we came up with a number that was appropriate for both parties and accretive certainly to our shareholders.

And we'll take a follow-up from Nick Giles once more at B. Riley Securities.

I was just curious, Erik, if you could maybe walk us through your current feedstock. Obviously, it will be replaced by Energy Fuels at a later date. But if you could just walk us through where you're currently sourcing your metal today?

Yes. That's a fantastic question. That's why we are so excited. So traditionally, our feedstock for permanent magnets, and I'm only talking about that side of the business because that's I assume you are referring to. Most of that feedstock traditionally comes out of China. We have a supply chain outside China for 15, 20 years, mainly for military, but also for customers who were asking for that, where we use material from outside, but that's a small volume, and this is where the Western world is struggling. The capacities there from the mines to the midstreams are not sufficient, and we are the only producer for permanent magnets in the Western world.

And therefore, we are excited to get as quickly and as much material out of the mines from energy fuels. And we will replace that. It's highly cost efficient as well competitive. I think there are great opportunities also from the margin on all -- on each and every step there and we will replace as much as possible. And the first year, it's more like how much can we get. At the moment, just to say that and make that clear, we cannot fulfill all the demand because we need more raw materials. And therefore, it's -- for me, it's a merger made in heaven to have Energy Fuels now on our side.

Great. I really appreciate that. And then maybe just there was a slide, a nice slide on kind of your soft magnetics contribution versus that of permanent magnets. I was wondering if you could just touch on the margin profile between both of those segments? And then how do you ultimately see the margin profile expanding as you go from kind of Phase 1 to Phase 2 and Phase 2 to the 12,000?

Yes. So historically, our margin profile is pretty stable over the 2 businesses. We have a few points lower margins on permanent magnets. Just recall, we are the only competitor to the Chinese dominant. And therefore, the competition there is very, very strong. But with our innovations we are having on that side, we could make an attractive margin. On the soft magnetic side, we have a lot of products where we single source. The competition is a little bit less intense and most of our competitors, by the way, come out of Europe and the U.S.

So it's a complete different competitive profile, and therefore, the margins are a little bit higher. What we see right now is there's a lot of political efforts in North America as well as in Europe to source more out of the Western countries. what might change the overall picture. So I'm just with Ross, and we haven't calculated it through with the whole process yet. So this is what we are going to do in the next couple of months and weeks. It's difficult to make predictions. But I am very positive we can further improve there, if we are working together.

Great. And then just while we have you, I'll sneak in one more, if that's all right. Magnet qualification cycles are not short to my knowledge. So how far along is Sumter in that process? And how do you kind of see that time line shrinking? Or can it shrink as you ramp further and you get more products in the hands of these customers?

That's an outstanding question. So we produce these kinds of permanent magnets for more than 40 years when they got innovated. So we have all the qualifications you need if you work for automotive, for aerospace and defense. This takes usually years to get. As we are doing it, we are just having that. We could bring our experienced team from Europe to Sumter. And actually, most of the workers, really the shop floor workers and obviously, the whole management team, we trained up to 18 months here in Germany in our facility, brought them over to Sumter and they are trained the trainers. So we are fully operational and qualified.

And that's one of the huge advantages, I think no one in the industry -- or wait, not in the industry, actually, industry observers are not aware because you are looking on the mine and process technology, and this is all key where we are leading and -- most of our technology we installed in Sumter, we changed and developed ourselves. That's why we are still here and the others all failed against the Chinese competition. By the way, we never made a loss in permanent magnets over the last 40 years. I just want to say that here as well.

And getting these qualifications, this is completely overseen by everyone. It's pretty harsh because you have to produce, you have to produce for months, if not years, to get qualified, we have it. And just imagine, you cannot send a magnet into a fighter jet or into a commercial plane if you are not fully compliant with all the regulations. And they are audited, they are tested, and they are tough to get, as you can imagine, and it takes ages to get them. And just to repeat once more, we are already there.

[Operator Instructions] And we have no signals from our audience remaining. Mr. Bhappu, I'm happy to turn it back to you, sir, for any additional or closing remarks that you have.

Thanks, Jim. I appreciate that. Look, I want to just reiterate that this is a transformational acquisition and merger with -- for Energy Fuels. It's extremely value accretive just in a long-term strategic position for our shareholders and for our company. This is going to allow us to capture margin across all stages of production, and I can't overstate the value of that. What we're taking on with VAC is a very dedicated workforce, very capable workforce. Energy Fuels has the same. We have a dedicated, very, very successful and extremely valuable workforce, and I can't help but think that combining the 2 is going to be extremely valuable. I can't overstate the value of acquiring the capability that VAC has.

As Erik just mentioned, developing this capability have organically -- is extremely challenging. You can't just start a magnet manufacturing facility and get qualified and get your magnets into production at the OEMs or defense contractors overnight. It's a long, long process. And that's what really drove us to the attraction of this partnership with VAC. So just I want to close by saying we're extremely excited about this acquisition. I think this combination is extremely powerful. It should make us the most valuable rare earth company outside of China, and I'm very confident when I say that. So thank you, everybody, for listening. We're excited about this and look forward to answering more questions in the future.

Thank you, Jim.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's Energy Fuels Inc. conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines. We hope that you enjoy the rest of your day.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you all for joining us for this Energy Fuels Q1 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's session is being recorded.

It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to President and CEO, Mr. Ross Bhappu. Welcome, sir.

Thank you, Jim. I appreciate the intro. And thank you, everybody, for participating today. Look, I want to start by thanking Mark Chalmers. Mark recently retired from Energy Fuels after almost 10 years with the firm. Mark has done just a fabulous job putting together a great group of assets, putting a great team together. And as I look forward to my new tenure here as the CEO of the company, I'm just thrilled to be taking the helm and moving the company into the next generation.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. And as I start kind of my tenure in the company, I'm focused on a few things. One is executing on our business strategy. It's ensuring that we have the right team in place, and it's ensuring that we all operate safely within this organization. So that is a key, key area of responsibility.

Look, the other thing that's a heavy focus of mine is being a good neighbor in the communities we operate, and we want to operate at very high environmental standards and be truly a good partner wherever we go. So my focus, as I look forward is to position the company for long-term growth and build stability and shareholder value.

So with that, I'd like to turn our attention to the next slide, which is our forward-looking notice, forward-looking statements. We will be making -- I will be making forward-looking statements today. These statements reflect our current expectations and assumptions and certainly involve some uncertainties. I'd refer you to our 10-Q filing and the latest 10-K and other SEC and SEDAR filings for the risk factors.

So looking at our next page, the first quarter highlights. Look, we had a fantastic first quarter by every measure. And I'm excited to tell you about some of these accomplishments. First of all, from an operational perspective, we mined 425,000 pounds of uranium, and we produced nearly 800,000 pounds in our mill. We ended the quarter with 2.25 million pounds in our inventory, and we released a very positive Vara Mada feasibility study with a $1.8 billion NPV, and that includes over $500 million per year of expected EBITDA. When you think about that and put that into perspective, that takes Energy Fuels to a whole new level.

We also completed our White Mesa Mill Phase 2 bankable feasibility study, and that came in with a fantastic lower-than-expected capital cost at $410 million. We expect $311 million of annual EBITDA when that facility is up and running on a stand-alone basis.

We also announced the ASM acquisition. ASM, Australian Strategic Materials, which I'm going to talk about later, really moves us into a new league and gives us the ability to produce metals and alloys, and we'll talk about that, like I said, later.

Also during the quarter, we produced our first terbium. Terbium is one of those exotic rare earth heavy minerals that everybody is seeking in their magnets, and it really puts us into a different league. So we've gained as a result of those announcements, substantial interest from offtakers as a result of all this news.

From a financial perspective, we have a robust balance sheet of over $950 million of liquidity. We generated $8 million of EBITDA, and we had sales and revenue from both a combination of contract and spot sales in the uranium business.

In addition, we are continuing to work on expanding our Phase 1 facilities. Recall Phase 1 is our uranium processing line that we recently, a couple of years ago, converted to process rare earth minerals. We're expanding our current capabilities in Phase 1, what we're calling Phase 1B, which will allow us to produce commercial quantities of terbium and dysprosium. And then we're adding Phase 1C, which will allow us to process MREC material. MREC is mixed rare earth carbonates, and that puts us into a different league. And the fantastic aspect of that is we'll be able to process rare earth minerals and uranium simultaneously with Phase 1C.

Finally, in the quarter -- right at the very end of the quarter...

[Technical Difficulty]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the operator, please remain connected.

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is your operator. I thank you for your patience. I believe we have Mr. Bhappu reconnected. Thank you all.

Thank you, Jim. And ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for that mishap. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but I hope you can hear me now. I'd like to go back and start -- I don't know where we cut off. So I'm going to start back on our first quarter highlights.

By any measure, what I would say is Q1 2026 was a very good quarter for Energy Fuels, and I'm excited to tell you about it. From an operational perspective, we mined 425,000 pounds of uranium and produced nearly 800,000 pounds through the mill.

At the end of the quarter, we ended with 2.25 million pounds in inventory, and we released a very positive Vara Mada feasibility study. That study showed an NPV of $1.8 billion, and we're anticipating over $500 million per year of expected annual EBITDA. This takes Energy Fuels to a new level by any measure and is a game changer for us.

We also released the White Mesa Mill Phase 2 feasibility study. We were pleasantly surprised that our CapEx came in lower than anticipated at $410 million. The economics of that project are robust and provide for a $1.9 billion NPV. The IRR on that project is about a 33% rate of return. We expect EBITDA from that project from the Phase 2 to be about $311 million, and that's just on a standalone basis, not including taking into account the Vara Mada feed as well as other feed.

We produced our first terbium this quarter, which again is a game changer. It's being done at a pilot plant scale. We're producing about a kilogram per week, and we've gained incredible interest from all those announcements across the board. The other -- sorry, the other announcement, of course, was the announcement of the ASM acquisition, Australian Strategic Materials. ASM is a metal and alloy producer, rare earth metal and alloy producer, and that's a game changer. It helps block a choke point or open a choke point that exists in our sector for rare earths.

From a financial perspective, we have a robust balance sheet. We have $950 million of liquidity. We generated $8 million of operating cash flows last quarter in Q1. We had sales revenue from a combination of both contract and spot sales, and we like to keep a balance of both contract and spot sales, and that's worked well for us in the past.

In addition, we are working on a number of exciting opportunities in -- at least we started working on them in Q1. The first one is Phase 1B. Recall that Phase 1 of our mill is our uranium facility that we've converted to process rare earths. Today, we can only process either uranium or rare earths. We can't do them simultaneously. But we're trying to fix that.

And we're adding Phase 1B, which will allow us to produce heavies, both dysprosium and terbium. And we will also be able to produce other heavy minerals like samarium, europium, gadolinium and possibly yttrium depending on market conditions. Phase 1C will allow us to process MREC material. MREC is a product coming from ionic clays and that will allow us to process both uranium ores as well as rare earth ores simultaneously, which we can't do today.

Also, I'd like to just highlight that at the end of the quarter, we published our sustainability report. It's a fabulous demonstration of what we're doing in the sustainability area. And I'd encourage you to take the time to have a look at that report. It's on our website.

For those of you that are new to Energy Fuels, new investors, I'd like to take you through a little bit of background on our capabilities. Energy Fuels started its life as a uranium company. We've been in the uranium business for over 45 years in various forms. And we built that uranium capability through mining and processing at our White Mesa Mill.

Given that expertise, we took that on and we carried that over to rare earth minerals. Now recall that all rare earth elements, all rare earth minerals contain some level of either uranium or thorium. They're all radioactive to some extent. Our knowledge and expertise in the uranium business has allowed us to be a leader in the processing of those rare earth minerals.

The mineral of choice for us is monazite. Monazite is a byproduct from heavy mineral sands. And that's allowed us to get into the heavy mineral sands business, and we've put our foot on and own 3 heavy mineral sands operations plus another mining operation called Dubbo with the ASM acquisition. So I'll talk about monazite and why it's our mineral of choice here in a few minutes.

While the 3 areas, those 3 sectors look quite disparate, they're actually quite -- they flow quite well together. And the thing they have in common is that they all contain radioactive components. And that's really what creates Energy Fuels the company today.

So when we look at a global footprint of where we are with Energy Fuels, on the far left side, the dark blue dots and highlights represent our uranium business. In the middle of the left side, the yellow box, that's our White Mesa Mill that really brings everything together and allows us to do everything else that we're doing.

Across the bottom of the page, the red boxes represent our heavy mineral sands opportunities and projects. Those will be not only producing titanium and zirconium products, but they'll also provide us the monazite that we will feed into the facility in White Mesa, our mill here in Utah.

And then with the addition of ASM, we now have an operating metallization facility located in Korea, and we're planning to replicate that facility with an American metals plant here in the United States. So very much a global footprint, very much a growth story and very much of an exciting story for critical minerals here in the U.S.

Carrying this over now to our uranium highlights. Recall that Energy Fuels is the largest producer of uranium. We mined 425,000 pounds from both La Sal and Pinyon Plain last year -- sorry, this last quarter. Last year, we produced 1.7 million pounds from those 2 mines. The White Mesa Mill produced about 800,000 pounds in Q1. And to date, we're about 1.2 million pounds of uranium from the White Mesa Mill. We continue to build a strategic base of uranium, and we sell opportunistically into the spot market. But then, of course, we also have a long-term set of long-term contracts that we're feeding into.

The U.S. is heavily reliant on export -- on imports of uranium, and we're trying to help solve that problem. It still amazes me that we're taking uranium ore from -- or uranium material from Russia. I know that's going to end soon, but we'd like to be a part of solving that. When we look at the market trend for uranium, you can't help but be excited about what's happening in the nuclear energy space and the need for more uranium.

So we'll continue to offer uranium on both the balance of contract and spot sales. The older contracts are set to expire over the next few years. Recall, those are lower-priced contracts, but those allowed us to get into business a few years ago or get -- restart our uranium operations a few years ago. And the new contracts will continue to have price floors and ceilings. So we're excited about the opportunities there.

When we go to the next page, the White Mesa Mill in Blanding, Utah, the White Mesa Mill really makes everything possible for us at Energy Fuels. It's truly a national treasure by any means -- by any measure. It's 45 years old, but it's using state-of-the-art technology and equipment for processing not only uranium but rare earth minerals. We're often asked what it would take to replicate that facility, and it's hard to put a price tag on it because it's not easily replicable, mainly due to challenges with permitting, but the time constraints to replicate that facility would be very, very expensive.

The dual commodity processing of both rare earths and uranium, I think, is unmatched in the Western world. And the history of uranium processing really provides us with an incredible track record for processing not only uranium but the rare earth feedstock. We are the only facility in the United States that can commercially process monazite at that mill.

When we look at our rare earth highlights, we are building a truly fully integrated mine to alloy supplier of critical minerals. We plan through the acquisition of ASM to capture value across the supply chain, and we're not beholden to any other part of the chain by having this self-reliance of the vertical integration. We have a fabulous team at the White Mesa Mill, and we're actively producing heavy minerals at the pilot plant that we've been sending out for validation.

As mentioned previously, we are preparing to expand Phase 1, and that includes Phase 1B, which will allow us to process terbium and dysprosium. Phase 1C will allow us to produce and process MREC. MREC, as I mentioned before, it comes from ionic clays and it's a valuable source of rare earth minerals that we're going to be excited to be able to produce both uranium and rare earths simultaneously.

Then we have Phase 2. And Phase 2, we're in the permitting process. We hope to have those permits by the end of next year. When fully commissioned, we'll be able to process and produce over 6,000 tons per year of NdPr. So we will truly be a substantial supplier of rare earths.

So the question we often get is why monazite? And what we like about monazite is it offers a number of benefits. First of all, it's a very high-grade source of rare earth minerals. It typically contains 50% to 60% total rare earth minerals contained, but it's high in neodymium and praseodymium. And equally, it's high in dysprosium and terbium. So those are very attractive.

In addition, it also contains uranium, which we recover and sell as a byproduct of the rare earth processing. So monazite has a lot of benefits. The other benefit is as a byproduct of heavy mineral sands, the production costs can be shared across a number of different commodities. And again, the White Mesa Mill is the only facility in the U.S. that can process that commercially.

So we did the acquisition. We announced the acquisition on January 20 of Australian Strategic Materials, ASM. ASM really provides a unique opportunity for Energy Fuels. Outside of China, there are very few rare earth metallization factories and ASM has a commercial operating facility in Korea. The vertical integration that this allows from mine to alloys provides a tremendous competitive advantage, including expanded margins, greater market share, and it's resulted in a very positive comments and views from our offtakers.

The acquisition is progressing very well. We recently obtained our FIRB approval. FIRB is the Foreign Investment Review Board equivalent to CFIUS here in the U.S., and that approval was an important part of that process. We're targeting closing that transaction in early July. And again, it's progressing quite well.

On the heavy mineral sand side of the business, heavy mineral sands, again, is a really important product. It allows us to obtain the monazite as a byproduct. But heavy mineral sands contain titanium, zirconium minerals. Those are used across a wide range of industrial applications, including pigments, metals, ceramics, chemicals, refractories, foundries and nuclear applications. Energy Fuels has 3 heavy mineral sands projects. And with the ASM acquisition, we'll hold an important polymetallic operation as well.

The Vara Mada Project is our project in Madagascar. We're advancing that. We're working towards obtaining a government stability agreement, also called an investment agreement. That work has been underway for some time. But with the change in government recently, we've had a little bit of a delay getting that investment agreement signed. But we continue to have very good engagement with the government in Madagascar, and we're looking forward to progressing that as we go through the balance of this year.

The Donald Project is a project in Australia, where we're earning a 49% joint venture ownership. Donald is shovel-ready. It's a project that has obtained all of its permits. We are looking to make a final investment decision here in the next few months. I think the one thing that's holding us back is we're finalizing our financing and offtake agreements. But we're making very good progress and hope to be able to announce that FID fairly soon.

The Bahia Project is a 100% owned project in the state of Bahia in Brazil. We're conducting drilling there. We will hope to have a scoping study or a PFS done later this year. And then finally, we have the Dubbo Project, which comes from the ASM acquisition. Dubbo is not a heavy mineral sands project. It's a polymetallic project, but it's got very high critical minerals grades in it, and we hope to have that provide further feedstock to the White Mesa Mill in the future.

The next slide is an interesting slide because it shows just how global we are and especially in delivering the rare earth minerals to the White Mesa Mill. So again, we have our 3 heavy mineral sands projects that will supply monazite, one in Australia, one in Brazil and one in Africa and Madagascar. Those supply the monazite feedstock to the White Mesa Mill.

White Mesa Mill will then process those rare earth minerals, produce oxides. The oxides will then go to either Korea or once we build our facility in the U.S. for metallization, it will go there and be processed in the U.S. From there, it gets sold to magnet manufacturers and to the end producers. So we truly are a global company and excited about our opportunities there.

So with that, I'd like to hand this off to Nate. Nate Bennett is our CFO, and he's going to talk a little bit about the financials for the quarter.

Yes. Thank you, Ross, and good morning, everyone. As we look at the financial updates for Q1 2026, if you can go to the next slide. We continue to maintain a strong financial position as we prepare to develop our long-term projects. We finished with $957 million in working capital and $1.4 billion in total assets.

This working capital continues to reflect the $621 million in net proceeds received from our convertible note offering that we completed last year in the fourth quarter that we have yet to draw down on. The working capital also includes 2.2 million pounds of uranium, which about half is in finished inventories and the other half is in process or in ore piles. Now this liquidity gives us the financial flexibility to advance our strategic projects and be opportunistic as the market evolves and deliver on our guidance.

Looking at the P&L, we continue to see improvement in our net loss with a net loss of $11 million in Q1 2026. This compares to a net loss of $26 million in the prior year Q1 2025 and a net loss of $21 million in last quarter, Q4 2025. Now this improvement is due to the increase in our uranium revenue and sales and also an increase in income from our marketable securities from invested cash.

And this is partially offset by higher operating costs and transaction costs, as you see in the P&L as we progress our global strategy. Now looking at our -- noting our guidance, we do anticipate uranium sales to continue throughout the year to help offset our burn rate as we progress our projects and our strategy.

Looking at our segment footnote in footnote 19 of the 10-Q, we did note that our uranium segment has shown promising results as we begin to be profitable, and we expect this trend towards profitability to continue in our uranium segment. As we look at our revenue and our sales, we took advantage of spot price increases during the quarter, we sold 100,000 pounds at an average price of $95.88. And looking at our long-term utility contracts, as forecasted, we sold 410,000 pounds at just under $64 a pound. We expected these sales at this price as it relates to some of our initial long-term agreements entered into back in 2022 and 2023. And we entered into these agreements when uranium prices were beginning to increase. And these contracts really supported the decision to go forward with mining on Pinyon Plain and our La Sal complex.

Now looking at our uranium production and moving forward throughout the year. For Pinyon Plain, we mined 375,000 pounds with an average grade of 1.12%, which was from a lower ore grade area as our mining moves between high-grade zones. Now these ore grade fluctuations are expected as we mine different segments of the ore deposit, and we expect these ore grades to increase throughout 2026. This is anticipated these ore grade fluctuations and were contemplated in our mining production guidance.

And looking at the mill, in accordance with our guidance, we continued processing Pinyon Plain and La Sal ore through Q1. We processed over 800,000 pounds, as Ross has noted through March, and we reached the 1 million pound milestone for the year during April. These are really exciting results as the last 2 quarters have really shown the mill's capabilities, which have been above expectations, having not run at these levels in many years.

Our all-in costs for mining, transportation and processing continue to be within our expected range of $23 to $30 per pound, and we expect this to continue throughout the rest of the year. We also expect processing at the mill to continue throughout 2026, but we do note that it will -- we will pause processing for planned maintenance downtime scheduled at the end of Q2 and the beginning of Q3. As the mill -- and we do know as the mill processes ore at a faster rate than we can mine, the downtime will really allow the mine production to catch up with the mill processing and replenish our ore piles at the mill. And we do expect our mill processing to continue to be within our guidance of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds for the year.

Now looking at our inventory and our cost. We continue to see a decline in our inventory cost as we produce low-cost Pinyon Plain pounds, decreasing to $36 a pound at the end of the quarter. This decrease is expected and we continue to see this -- we expect to continue to see this decrease as we mine throughout the rest of the year at Pinyon Plain. And we note our cost of goods sold, we expect it to decrease to closer to $30 per pound throughout 2026 as we sell through our inventory and add low-cost Pinyon Plain production. And this will really help improve our gross margins and our profitability in our uranium segment.

Looking at our inventory, we finished with 1.1 million pounds at $36 a pound with another 1.1 million pounds in process and ready to be processed. This really gives us the sufficient inventory to meet our processing and sales guidance and to meet our long-term utility contract commitments for the remainder of 2026 and the first part of 2027.

Now just giving an update on the guidance. As noted in our previous slides, we do continue to anticipate to be within our guidance ranges. Starting with mining, we mined 425,000 pounds between our Pinyon Plain and La Sal complex. We'll continue to mine during the downtime at the mill that's planned to replenish the ore piles at the mill. And we expect our ore grades and pounds at Pinyon to increase as we move into higher-grade zones.

Looking at the processing at the mill, like I noted before, we hit our processing milestone of over 1 million pounds during April, and we're starting to near the bottom end of the range by the end of Q2. And we expect to be within the range anticipated even with the planned maintenance downtime.

And now looking at the sales guidance, we sold 510,000 pounds during Q1. We expect sales to continue and to be in line with our guidance with both sales under our long-term contracts and spot sales depending on the market conditions.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Ross for some final thoughts on our 2026 activities.

Thank you, Nate. Well, look, I'd just like to finish our presentation by talking about some of our objectives for the balance of 2026. For me, it's all about execution. We have an incredible asset base, incredible mines to develop incredible facility at White Mesa, but now it's all about execution. So what we're going to be focused on is our Phase 2 permitting. We're going to focus on Phase 1B and 1C, get that construction going and finalized. We hope to be operational on Phase 1B and 1C late in '27.

We hope to make our Donald FID very soon. We're very heavily focused on that. We're going to continue to advance our Vara Mada Project, both on the engineering side, but also on the investment agreement, government relations side. We have a big social outreach program, big focus on the communities there that will continue. We're going to continue advancing our drilling and our engineering work at the Bahia Project. And finally, I would say that a big focus of mine is for our company to operate safely and in a sustainable way. Again, I'd encourage you to have a look at our Sustainability Report that we just released. I think you'll find it very impressive.

So look, I'm really proud of what this team has accomplished in the first quarter. I'm excited to be taking the helm of the company and moving it forward through the rest of '26 and beyond and very excited for what we have going forward.

So with that, I'd like to end our formal presentation, and I think we're going to open it. I'll turn it back over to Jim for questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] We'll hear first from Anthony Taglieri at Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe just starting with the uranium side of things. Just curious, how much finished inventory are you guys interested in maintaining? Obviously, we saw you guys sell 100,000 pounds in Q1 on the spot market, close to $100 a pound. Should we expect you guys to sell up to the high end of the sales guidance range if prices came back to around those levels?

Yes. Look, Anthony, I think, first of all, we have to maintain sufficient inventory to meet our contractual obligations. So first and foremost, I'd say that's a driver.

The other area -- the other way I would answer this is that we want to maintain some optionality where we can switch the mill over from processing uranium to processing rare earths depending on market conditions. So it's a bit of a balance. And when you look at our guidance, we have pretty high ranges of uranium sales. And it's largely because of that, because we want to maintain enough inventory to feed our contractual obligations. We want to have some going into the spot market, but we also want optionality and flexibility to transfer the mill operations from uranium to rare earths at any point in time.

So it's a great point, but we'll continue to process uranium as heavily as we can. When we see prices going over $100 like they did earlier this year, we'll certainly take advantage of that. And again, longer term, we do see uranium prices escalating. And again, we want to maintain some optionality around that. So it's a bit of a balance, and I'd say it's a bit of an art, but that's pretty much why we're going the direction we are.

Great. And maybe just as a follow-up to that. So in the first quarter, you sold about half of your long-term sales commitments for the year, it seems. Should we expect the sort of remaining portion of that to come in the second quarter? Or will it be staged differently throughout the year?

Look, I think it will be staged throughout the year. Again, we have big contractual obligations in the first quarter, and we'll be meeting those contractual obligations through the balance of the year. But there were some pretty big sales that came as a result of our contract -- one of our big contracts. But yes, I anticipate we'll smooth that out through the balance of the year, the balance of those sales.

Our next question will come from Soundarya Iyer at B. Riley Securities.

Congratulations on the quarter. My first question is on the -- is basically like rare earth companies as a standalone are trading meaningfully at higher multiples rather than diversified miners. Do you guys think about as this rare earth business scales when Donald, ASM, Vara Mada, all this comes together about spinning the rare earth business out and operating it as 2 distinct businesses like rare earth and uranium?

Yes. It's an interesting issue, right, because rare earth companies do trade at high multiples, uranium companies trade at a bit lower multiples, and then heavy mineral sands companies trade at even lower multiples. Look, our view is that we want to be integrated across those 3 sectors. It's vitally important from a technical perspective and from a commercial perspective that we control our own feedstocks.

And so when I think about it, Soundarya, I think remaining and being in the business, if we're going to be a monazite processing company, if we're going to be an MREC processing company, I think we want to control our own molecules. So spinning out the heavy mineral sand side of the business, I think, is something we might consider in the future. But right now, it's so important as a source of feedstock for us, and we want to be in control of it.

So I think I'll leave it to you and other analysts to figure out how to value us. But at the end of the day, I think that the bulk of our revenue, as I look at it going forward, will come from rare earths. We will have continuing revenue from uranium, and we will be ramping up revenue from heavy mineral sands. And so how you weight those across to come up with our valuation, I think we'll just have to sort of live with. But I would be hesitant to want to give up control over the feedstock going into our mill.

That's very clear, Ross. And just as on another line, how are you reading the uranium market right now? I mean prices have been really strong and holding up about the $80 a pound threshold. Are you seeing any utility customers signaling like urgency or to lock in domestic supply? Or is the contracting still moving slowly?

Yes, it's an interesting question. I think you certainly see all the headlines of different companies in the SMR business, for example, that some amazing future projections for selling SMRs. And the only way they're going to feed those SMRs is with uranium, right? So -- but we haven't seen the utilities ramping up their buying schedules yet. I'm fully expecting that we will see that. I'm confident that we're going to see much more focus on ensuring that they have supplies of uranium going forward. But I -- to the best of my knowledge, we haven't really seen a huge increase in demand or discussions from the utilities to date.

But look, I fully expect that's going to change. When you look at the projected demand, every research group out there that studies uranium and the nuclear industry shows that the supply and demand balance is going to start coming out of whack in the next few years, and you're just going to need more uranium. So look, I remain very, very bullish on uranium personally. And we talk about it internally here quite a lot.

Our next question will come from Brian Lee at Goldman Sachs.

Maybe I wanted to dig into the comments around Vara Mada, a little bit of a delay there. Can you elaborate a bit as to how much of a delay, what sort of needs to happen for you to maybe get that back on track? Any kind of milestones or triggers moving through the year that you could point to that might improve the visibility there? Just trying to gauge where you are in that process.

So let me just start by saying that the change in government that happened in September, October of last year really slowed the process down. We are very close to signing an investment agreement around that time. But with the change in government, that sort of slowed things down. We have been spending considerable time in country in Madagascar. And I'm joined here with Nathan Longenecker, who's our General Counsel and who's been personally spending a lot of time in Madagascar. So let me let him answer that as well.

Yes. We've been -- we continue to try to push it forward. What we have is a government that is relatively new, but we have been meeting fairly regularly with the highest levels of the government. And our discussions with them have been met with a fair bit of support from the highest levels. So the government has been supportive of the project, but there are a number of things that we need to get into place. And there's -- it's a bit of a -- the document itself has a lot of aspects to it and it takes a little bit of time to get that put into place. So that's generally where we are working with the government.

Okay. Yes. Fair enough. We'll continue to track the progress. I guess related to that, just any updated thoughts around sourcing monazite in the open market as you're waiting for some of these upstream assets to move to final investment decisions and also move to production? It seems like monazite pricing has come down a decent amount here recently, but any thoughts around maybe using that as more of a bridge to getting your assets online?

Yes, Brian, absolutely. We're going to need to source monazite. We have 3 sources internally of monazite. We also have an agreement with Chemours to source monazite from them. But look, to keep Phase 2, the expansion at White Mesa full, we are going to need additional sources, a small amount, but we will need some additional sources. So we've got a very active business development and partnership group out there searching and in discussions with a whole host of different suppliers of monazite. I think those groups that are in production today, they're selling their monazite almost exclusively into China. And those Western companies that are doing that are looking for alternative outlets to sell their monazite. So we have a lot of discussions going on with a lot of different groups, and we will have additional sources of monazite to feed our mill.

Next, we'll hear from Justin Chan at SCP Resource Finance.

My first one was just on the uranium processing side. I know there's some -- you could run a longer processing campaign or shift it over to rare earths or et cetera. So there's some choices there. I was just wondering what's your current thinking in terms of how long you intend to process uranium for.

Yes. Look, I think, first of all, the mill operates at a higher rate than our mines produce ore. So the mill will always outrun the mines, at least for now. And we're at a point where we're going to be able to process ore for probably another 4 to 6 weeks. Then we're going to shut down for maintenance and do some modifications to the mill, and that will allow us to build some of our uranium stockpiles up. And then we'll have to make a choice as to whether we restart with uranium or we -- or whether we restart with rare earths.

And a lot of that depends on market conditions. So we're -- as you can see, we're over 1 million pounds that we've processed so far this year. And we'll just have to make a decision as to whether we feel comfortable with stockpiled uranium or whether we want to continue producing versus producing rare earths. So look, I fully anticipate that we'll get through the next, call it, month, 1.5 months. We'll shut down for probably a couple of months for maintenance and then make a decision on whether we're going to start back up with rare earths or with uranium depending on market conditions.

Got you. I mean, I guess if nothing changes from now, I guess, how would that influence your thinking? Like what directionally would you be leading based on current conditions?

Yes. If nothing changes, we would probably start back up with uranium processing and continue our uranium processing through the balance of the year.

Okay. Got you. That's very clear. And then my second...

And look -- go ahead. Go ahead, Justin.

Sorry, go ahead. Please finish that statement. Sorry to interrupt.

Well, look, I was just going to say Phase 1C will really give us optionality to process rare earth minerals alongside uranium. Now Phase 1C is going to be geared towards processing MREC materials. But once we get that up and running, hopefully next year, that will allow us to not have to decide between processing rare earths or processing uranium, and we can do both simultaneously, albeit from MREC material. So that's why we're very heavily focused through the balance of this year on being able to process MREC next year.

Got you. That makes sense. So I guess, yes, maybe let's dig into that, if you wouldn't mind hearing me on that. So I guess you'll have your own separation lines and you won't need to like use the same tanks and everything for 1C. I guess to get the MREC, would you be receiving it from third parties? Or could you -- I guess you could presumably make your own MREC stockpiles at some point? Is that the thinking? Or is it mainly just source from ionic clay deposits?

Yes. It would be primarily sourced from ionic clays. Early on, when we did run the mill, we did produce an MREC material at our own facility from monazite. But we don't anticipate doing that going forward. We will likely source from third parties. And there's a number of third parties out there looking for a home for their MREC. So we think we could help fill that void.

Got you. And then if I could ask on, I guess, the longer term, when you do have your own dedicated rare earth processing lines and you're processing monazite, would you still retain the capacity to receive additional MRE for ionic clay?

Yes, absolutely.

Or does that create a blending issue?

No, no, no. This separate facility that we're building, this 1C will allow us to continue to process MREC in addition to processing monazite through Phase 2. So we will always maintain that capability to process MREC along with monazite.

Okay. Maybe just one last one as a follow-up to that. I know it's a bit of a leading question, but with that capacity, does that change your strategic thinking at all in terms of having your own potential upstream ionic clay feed? I mean you don't currently in the portfolio. I'm just thinking here that could maybe change your -- what your upstream asset base might look like in the long run?

Yes. Look, the way I would answer that is I would say we're always going to be opportunistic. And if there's an opportunity to acquire an ionic clay and MREC producer, we would certainly consider that if it made sense.

Next, we will hear from Noel Parks at Tuohy Brothers.

I just wanted to touch back on Donald. And I just wondered if you could give a sense of what remains on sort of finalizing the offtake agreement out there, which in turn will help get to the FID?

So yes, good to talk to you, Noel, and thanks for the question. So a couple of things. The Donald Project is going to produce a heavy mineral sand -- heavy mineral concentrate as well as monazite. So there's 2 separate offtake agreements that we need to finalize. One is on the heavy mineral concentrate. And then the second one is on the various -- it's not just one rare earth mineral, it's going to be 4, maybe more minerals that we get out of it. So coordinating offtake agreements across all those different commodities is time consuming. And unfortunately, it's taken longer than we had anticipated. And those -- once you get those offtake agreements locked in, then that impacts your financing. So they go hand in hand, and we're having discussions with various financing parties as well as offtake parties, and they're very different. They're different groups, and you got to coordinate between them.

And so it's created a challenge. And then that's also compounded on the fact that we have a joint venture partner. So we're partners with Astron, and we need to make sure that the financing agreements that we enter into, the offtake agreements that we enter into also are agreeable and meet with the needs of our JV partner. So what -- from the outside looks like it should be a fairly easy process to go through. It's actually quite complex and quite time-consuming. And unfortunately, it's delayed us being able to make that FID more quickly. But look, Noel, I would say we're very heavily focused. We want to get the FID as quickly as we possibly can. We want that mine to get up and running as quickly as we possibly can. So it's at the top of our mind every day.

Great. That does fill in some gaps for me. And in the past, we've talked a bit about just how on the rare earths, the -- what the market wants has been sort of changing and evolving, I guess, over the past year or so and that that's informed to some degree, your decisions about just which of the products you're pursuing and in what order at the mill. So I wonder if you could just maybe update us a bit on maybe how you see demand shifting for the particular elements going forward?

Look, I think what you're hearing in the market about demand shifting has more to do with what people are producing. I think what we're seeing is there continues to be very heavy demand for dysprosium and terbium. Now I mean, the fact is not everybody can produce dysprosium and terbium. I think magnet manufacturers are trying to design magnets that reduce the reliance on dysprosium and terbium, but by no means have they solved that puzzle yet. And so there remains big demand for DY and TV in these magnets. And I think that's going to continue for the foreseeable future.

So when I look at what we're doing at the mill, I think we want to be able to produce the whole suite of heavies. And that's not just dysprosium and terbium, it includes samarium, gadolinium, europium, yttrium because there is demand out there for those minerals. You take yttrium, for example, the demand and the request we're getting out of the aerospace industry is, is off the charts. So look, I think we're going to continue to see very heavy demand for the heavies. But I also think you're going to continue to see groups trying to design the heavies out of the system.

And just to add to that, the thing that the heavies add is the ability for these electric motors to operate at very high temperatures. And they haven't been able to figure out how to do that without the heavy minerals, the heavy rare earth minerals in there. So look, I think there's some wishful thinking in there. And perhaps that will happen at some point in the future. But up till now, we're not seeing -- we're seeing a lot of requests from potential offtakers on the DYMTB side of the equation.

And next, we'll hear from Matthew Key at Texas Capital.

I was wondering what market indications would you need to see to move ahead with some of those medium-term uranium projects? As you mentioned previously, mined ore is kind of the main bottleneck in the uranium segment. Would it be economic at current uranium spot pricing to bring a couple of those online?

Your question is really timely because we just had a meeting on this yesterday talking about our pipeline of projects and prioritizing those projects. Look, I think current prices, you start to consider bringing some of those online. And I guess one of the questions you always have is where is this pricing going to go? And if we see prices well over $100 a pound, which we anticipate we will at some point, that brings a lot of the pipeline into a real opportunity.

So at these prices, we're pretty happy with what we have operating. We have La Sal and Pinyon Plain operating. We have Nichols Ranch on standby. And I think our view is we ought to -- we will continue to permit the development projects. We'll continue to advance those projects and be ready to put them into production as soon as we feel like there's a long-term sustainable price above a certain threshold. And that threshold varies by project. But we do have this pipeline, and we will look to bring them online as prices permit. So look, it's something that's very topical. And I'm sorry, I can't give you like a hard number that over x dollars will bring this project into production, but we are thinking about that every day.

Got it. No, that's helpful. And just kind of on the back of that, I'm wondering if you would ever consider selling Nichols Ranch as an ISR project, it's obviously a lot different than the conventional portfolio. Like do you see that as a potential area where you could generate some incremental liquidity down the line? Or is the plan there to eventually develop that?

You're talking about Nichols Ranch? To be clear?

Yes.

Yes. Look, if you're making an offer to buy it, we'll certainly think about that. But we're -- look, we're pretty excited by Nichols Ranch. We love having the fact that it's ready. It's on standby. It's ready to be put into production. We could get it up and running probably in 4 to 6 months if we pull the trigger on it. So we like having that optionality. That doesn't mean if we didn't get a great offer for it, we wouldn't consider that. So -- but we like the optionality we have with it today.

Got it. No, that's helpful. And just one more quick one for me. While I understand the ASM transaction hasn't closed yet, I did want to ask a quick question on the Dubbo Project and what the plan would be for that asset if the acquisition closed, which is kind of my assumption. But could that be used as feedstock for White Mesa? Or would it have to operate more as a standalone project for you guys?

Yes. That's really a great question because it's not a heavy mineral sands project. It's a polymetallic project with high critical minerals credits like niobium, but also the rare earth minerals. The current plan from ASM is to use that -- to do a heap leach on that project and to do sort of semi processing to produce a rare earth hydroxide that would then come to the White Mesa Mill for treatment at White Mesa. That was driven to a large extent by capital cost considerations of ASM versus building a mill and producing more of a concentrate.

So we want to go back -- after we close on the transaction, we want to go back and look at those engineering studies make sure we agree with the path that ASM was going down or maybe not and then evaluate what is the best alternative for getting value out of Dubbo because it does have -- like I said, it has a whole host of other minerals in it, again, like niobium that would be a really interesting product or mineral to produce. But we just have to evaluate it and see what makes the most sense. But right now, they're planning to produce a hydroxide that we would then bring to White Mesa, and we could process in the White Mesa Mill, much like an MREC material.

And we have no further questions from our audience this morning. Mr. Bhappu, I'm happy to turn the floor back over to you for any initial or closing remarks you have.

Well, look, I would just say thank you to everybody for participating. This is my first earnings call as the new CEO, and I'm excited to be in this role and excited to take the company forward. And I just ask you to keep a watch on our company because we've got a lot of exciting things happening. So thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's Energy Fuels Q1 2026 Conference Call. We thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a great day.

Thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Annual Earnings Conference Call and webcast. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels. Sir, the floor is yours.

Okay. Well, thank you, Morgan. And again, my name is Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels. Thank you for joining the call today to discuss our financial and operational results for year ending December 31, and 2025.

2025 was truly a breakout year for Energy Fuels. We achieved numerous operational ramp-up growth milestones, and we believe set the stage for significant future cash flow generation, market differentiation and competitive advantages in the critical materials space. We also believe that we are showing the market that we have the financial, technical commercial capabilities to execute our aggressive plans. I'm just going to touch on a few highlights.

In short, we exceeded guidance on all fronts in 2025. Not many in the uranium space can say that. And we even upgraded our guidance during the course of the year, and we beat that guidance. We mined newly mined ore over 1.7 million pounds of uranium. And we processed over 1 million-ounce of finished [ U308 ]. And it's important to note that there's a bit of a lead lag between when we mine and we process. So really, the processing has to catch up with the amount of uranium we mine and we also started ramping up our sales volumes.

Looking to 2026, we plan to materially increase uranium mining production and sales. We made remarkable progress on our rare earth segment, including pilot production at dysprosium and soon-to-be terbium oxides and announced plans to expand our commercial heavy production in mid-2027. Our NDPR and [ DI ] products have been qualified for use by major automobile manufacturers and some of that product has gone into electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles as we speak.

We received all government approvals for the development of our [ Donald ] joint venture project in Australia. We completed feasibility studies for the Phase II expansion of the rare earth processing at our mill in Utah and the Vara Mada project, which was formerly called [ Tolar ], critical minerals projects and demonstrated that the combined net present value of those 2 projects could be in the order of $3.7 billion.

We significantly bolstered our balance sheet by completing an upsized $700 million convertible note at 7.75% coupon rate back in October. And at the end of the year, we had nearly $1 billion of working capital and the company has never been stronger financially. In short, 2025 was an extremely productive year and really, Energy Fuels has solidified its position as the largest and lowest-cost U.S. uranium producer and emerging large-scale, low-cost rare earth and critical mineral producer.

So joining me today on this call and presenting will be Ross Bhappu, our President; Nate Bennett, our CFO; and also Curtis Moore, our Senior VP of Marketing, Corporate Development; and Nathan Longenecker, our Senior VP and General Counsel. Following the presentation, our conference call will have replays that will be available on our website. And as always, there will be time for questions at the end of the presentation.

So let's get going. So I know every time I do a conference call, I start off with this slide and comment how beautiful it is down in San Juan County, and again, I love it. So -- but as I said from the beginning, and as I said for multiple calls, we're building a globally significant critical materials company and are continuing to make great strides.

Slide 2, I may be making some forward-looking statements, and those are included on Page 2. So again, when you look at our company, our company based in the U.S. has built a very significant critical mineral company on the foundation of our core uranium business. Uranium, we are the leading producer of uranium in the United States, the rare earths, which also contain uranium that can be processed at the White Mesa Mill and the heavy mineral sands would provide us a source of rare earth feeds that we can process at the mill and they all have a common denominator, which is the contain natural uranium that again, we can recover at the White Mesa Mill, and that is a significant differentiator.

This slide, and this slide is getting pretty busy. I don't think anybody can say that Energy Fuels is not an asset-rich company. And I think that would be a real understatement. And so when you look at the world and you look at the number of uranium and vanadium deposits that we have in the Western U.S., several of them are producing, several of them are permitted, and we're ramping up our production of our uranium assets. And then in addition to that, when you look at the heavy mineral sands projects that we have, both [ Donald ], Vara Mada and Bahia, in Brazil, Madagascar and Australia. It's getting to be quite an impressive list.

And I think when you look at the past few years, when we're acquiring projects around the world, it couldn't be better timing. In addition, look at the proposed assets with the acquisition of ASM in Australia. That's -- we have a scheme document that we're executing as we speak. We hope to close by June of 2026. But also in addition to these mining properties and deposits that we've secured would have the Korean metal plant in South Korea, the Dubbo project, which is another source of feed in New South Wales, Australia and also potentially a metals plant in the United States, which we call the [ AMP ].

So the list is getting long. And what's really exciting is when people ask us how we're going to fund this, we've been able to demonstrate in 2025, the great strides that we've made along that path, and we hope to have more updates in this year on how we're going to continue to move forward with this very aggressive strategy that is well funded.

So this next slide just sort of highlights, how we can take the uranium ores that we have that are currently producing or will be producing in the not-too-distant future, how we can process those through the White Mesa Mill and come up with uranium and vanadium and potentially medical isotopes. Well then, on the other hand, when we secure the [indiscernible] that we will get from these heavy mineral sands projects and including from [ Chemours ] in Florida and Georgia.

We can stop producing uranium, and we can start producing rare earth in the current mill which we call Phase 1, and that is the dual facility can do uranium or the rare earth. But when you go over to the far right and you see this list of the end products, we have the capability of commercially producing at least 10 critical materials or minerals, and that can expand based on the markets that are available to us at the time that we need to produce things. So it's a very impressive list, and I've said this many times that many companies in the critical minerals space are dependent on one element and Energy Fuels is not. And we've seen the advantages of that, when you look at -- if you have a high uranium market or low uranium market, same thing on vanadium, rare earth and/or some of the titanium zircon markets, they can fluctuate quite materially.

So 2025 was absolutely a breakout year, and I'll provide some of the highlights. We are producing more uranium than any U.S. company today in the United States and it's interesting because even a year or 2 ago, people thought we were getting out of the uranium business, and guess what, we haven't. And we're actually beating everybody in the United States and a number of companies around the world that are trying to restart the uranium production. Uranium mining, and we've been focused in '25 and '26, mainly on conventional production from the La Sal complex and the Pinyon Plain mine we produced over 1.7 million pounds, as I previously mentioned, at an average grade Pinyon of 1.6%, and those grades are continuing.

The White Mesa mill produced about 1 million pounds or process 1 million pounds of finished product, and that was really driven on the amount of time that the mill ran. And we really went through a processing run in Q4 of 2025, and we expect to continue that processing through Q2 of 2026 or longer. And we can produce about 250,000 pounds per month on average, but in December alone, we produced 350,000 pounds of uranium. So it really shows the capability of the White Mesa Mill depending on when it's running and what feeds we have.

When you look at the uranium inventories, at the end of December, we had over 2 million pounds of total inventories. And a lot of that was made up of uranium contained in raw ore and raw materials that will be processed this year or later, but including over 800,000 pounds of finished uranium and over 100,000 pounds of work in progress. So what does this all mean in terms of cost? It means that our costs are dropping materially. And we still are on course to have production costs and actually the current production costs at Pinyon Plain are in that $23 to $30 a pound. We're seeing our cost of goods sold, decreasing from $53 a pound to currently at the end of 2025 or $43 a pound. And as Pinyon Plain ore is processed in mind, those costs will continue to drop.

So we currently have 6 long-term contracts. We added a couple contracts late last year. And those contracts combined equal about 50% of our uranium production capabilities. So we are definitely not over contracted, but we definitely have enough contracts to give us a base load, which is required. You cannot run a company with just no contracts and trying to depend on the spot market. So we're really excited about where we are there.

In '25, we sold 650,000 pounds at an average price of $74.20 per pound. We're seeing stronger fundamentals when it comes to uranium prices, long-term prices and the growth of uranium demand looking out to the future.

So this will be the last slide I'll talk about at the moment before I turn it over to Ross. The White Mesa Mill is truly a remarkable asset. We've taken a uranium vanadium project and turned it into a critical mineral hub. And we see that as a very unique accomplishment over the last few years. It is the only operating conventional uranium mill in the United States. It is the largest uranium processing facility in the United States, fully licensed, permitted producing license capacity of 8 million pounds, and we have the operational and expertise to both process the uranium, the rare earth and the [indiscernible].

It is the only facility that can process what we call alternate feeds. It is the largest primary vanadium production facility, and we're getting a lot of additional inbounds now on our vanadium production capabilities, and it is the only facility in the U.S. with the ability to process monocyte and that is a material differentiator. So now I would like to turn it over to my good colleague, Ross to talk further about company's activities.

Great. Thank you, Mark. Look, as Mark said, the White Mesa Mill, it's the jewel in the crown of our portfolio. It is -- it's the only operating conventional mill for processing uranium, but it's also got the capability of processing commercial quantities of monocyte producing meaningful amounts of DPR.

We can -- we have a current capacity of 1,000 tonnes per annum of [ NDPR ], but we can also process some [ Arium ] concentrates, [ Merian Plus concentrate ]. So the heavies. We've demonstrated the use of our NDPR in various applications. Most importantly, it's been qualified and validated. It's even in some operating electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles coming out of Asia. So it's an exciting aspect of our business.

Late last year, we reported that we produced 29 kilograms of dysprosium oxides, and that's been validated by rare permanent magnet manufacturers as well. Next month, we plan to produce our first kilogram of terbium oxide and then following that, we plan to produce pilot circuits for both samarium, europium, as well as gadolinium oxides. So we're doing some incredible things at the White Mesa Mill and it's a credit to our incredible team that we have on the ground there.

This year, we're working on our Phase 1 expansion, and that's going to allow us to produce commercial quantities of both mid- and heavy RE oxides. That again includes dysprosium, terbium, samarium, europium, and gadolinium. We also could possibly produce [ atrium ]. We're planning to install equipment this year that will allow us to produce and process [ MREC ] material, mixed rare earth carbonates.

As you can see, we have not only an incredible facility there, but we have an incredible team of scientists and engineers that are allowing us to do some truly groundbreaking work at the mill. Just a few weeks ago, we released the feasibility study of our Phase 2 expansion at the mill. This is separate from the Phase 1 expansion that I was talking about just a minute ago. This Phase 2 expansion is going to allow us to process up to 50,000 tons of additional [ monazite ]. That will allow us a capacity of 5,500 roughly tons per annum of [ PR ] plus approximately 50 tonnes per annum of terbium and another 165 tons per annum of dysprosium.

Phase 2 is going to allow for a dedicated rare earth circuit that will be separate from uranium, so we can simultaneously produce both uranium and rare earth minerals. And we've already applied for our permits for this expansion. And we're hoping to get those permits sometime next year with planned commissioning in late 2028 or early 2029.

Just some highlights. It's a pretty impressive feasibility study that the results of the feasibility study include about a $1.9 billion NPV. That equates to almost $8 per share. We have a 33% IRR on the project, will generate over $300 million a year of EBITDA over the first 15 years and all that's being done with a CapEx of only $410 million.

With the inclusion of feedstock of our [ monazite ] from the Vara Mada project, that feed will result in [ NDPR ] costs of under $30 per kilogram, truly revolutionary and making us competitive anywhere in the world, including China. One of the interesting things that we are seeing is the trend in rare earth oxide prices.

This slide shows the oxide prices for NDPR for dysprosium and for terbium. These are the non-Chinese prices and it's interesting that there's a slight premium for the prices outside of China for [ NDP ]. But when you look at the [ DY ] and [ TV ] prices, there's over 400% premium to the Chinese prices. At our projected Phase 2 volumes and at these prices will generate almost $1.2 billion per year of annual revenue. So truly remarkable for our company.

As Mark mentioned, we've got a proposed acquisition of our strategic materials, ASM. In January, we announced this acquisition, and we're making good progress. Again, as Mark mentioned, we're hoping to close on that acquisition in June. It's a great acquisition for our shareholders, for our customers and for national security.

For our shareholders, it provides enhanced margin capture, it's accretive on an NAV per share basis, it accelerates our ambition to become a mine to metal and alloys producer and it positions us to capitalize on reshoring of U.S. manufacturing with a strong customer base. For our customers, it significantly expands our product capabilities. We'll be the lowest cost producer and have ability to deliver oxides metals or alloys depending on customer needs.

The company has a proven track record and an ability to meet Western demand, and it's already got a number of top-tier customers acquiring or treating their metals and alloys. From a national security perspective, we'll be able to deliver ex China supply chain. We'll have unmatched technical capabilities in solvent extraction and metal and allay making and the vertical integration allows us and support supply chain resilience with 100% U.S. controlled supplies. It's also an additional source of rare feedstock from our double projects in Australia, as Mark mentioned earlier.

So this next slide kind of shows how it all fits together. With the ASM acquisition, we created a near-term mine to metal and alloy supply chain. We now have 4 owned or controlled mining assets, including the [ Donald ] project and the Dubbo project, both in Australia the Bahia project in Brazil and of course, our Vara Mada project in Madagascar. All of these supply high-quality rare earth speed to the White Mesa Mill [indiscernible], Utah and all of the rare earth oxides from the mill will supply feed for either the existing Korean metals plant that we'll be acquiring from ASM or to our new newly planned American metals plant where we will produce metals and alloys here in the United States.

As you can see, we're truly a global rare supplier that's 100% U.S. controlled. I'd like to get a little more detail now on the Korean metals plant that we're acquiring. This slide provides a pretty good summary of what the capabilities are at that facility. It's located in the [ Chang ] foreign investment zone in South Korea, and it has a current capacity of 1,300 tonnes per annum of neodymium [ iron Boron Alloy ] plus [indiscernible] metal.

Today, it has 4 furnaces and 1 strip testing machine, but we've got a Phase 2 plant expansion that will include 18 furnaces and 2 strip casters. That will give us about 3,600 tonnes per annum of neodymium [ boron alloy ] manufacturing capability. We're planning to expand our product mix by producing heavy rare earth metals and alloys, including [indiscernible] metal and [ TV ] metal in the future. And then for even going beyond that, we have a Phase 3 plant expansion, which takes us to 30 furnaces with 3 script casters and that gets us to a capacity of 5,600 tonnes per year of [ neodymium iron born alloy ].

Our [ A&P ] facility will replicate what we have in Korea, and it will give us the ability to produce all these metals right here in the United States. We currently have sales and offtake partnerships with vacuum [ Schmeltbac ] with [ Neo Performance Materials ] and with [ Novion ]. So you can see that the relationships are with the very top-tier producers of magnets and we're very, very happy to be acquiring this asset.

The [ Donald ] project is our shovel-ready project. It's the first mine that will supply heavy and light rare earth minerals to our White Mesa Mill. It's in Australia, we're getting very close to making a final investment decision perhaps as early as the end of March. This project provides exceptional sources of heavy rare earth oxides and it will provide feedstock to White Mesa by 2027 -- late 2027 or perhaps early 2028.

The attractiveness of the [ Donald ] project, there's the very high levels of dysprosium, terbium and samarium. It's also in a great jurisdiction. The project is fully permitted. And as I said, it's shovel ready. I think most people are aware of this product -- project, it is in a joint venture with [ Aston ]. We are earning a 49% interest in the project, but importantly, we're going to receive 100% of the rare earth offtake. Projects received conditional support from the government of Australia through Export Finance Australia and total funding required for the project is about USD 340 million.

The final slide I'm going to talk about is Vara Mada, which we used to call [ Toliara]. It's our heavy mineral sands and rare earth project in Madagascar. In January, we released the feasibility study results and it's truly one of the largest and highest grade heavy mineral sands and rare earth projects in the world. It will produce titanium products that include [ rutile, ilmenite ] as well as zircon and it will produce high-quality monocyte that gets fed to the White Mesa mill. Again, very attractive project economics. It's got a $1.8 billion NPV, a 25% IRR. CapEx of just under $800 million and EBITDA generation of about $500 million per year.

The mine has a 38-year life but there's additional resources there that we haven't put in the reserve category. It's got the potential to go well over 100 years. So it's truly a world-class project, and we're currently working now to convert our MOU to an investment agreement so that we can advance that project. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Nathan Bennett, and he'll talk about our financials for the year.

Thank you, Ross, and good morning, everyone. I'll start with our balance sheet and liquidity, followed by a discussion of our financial performance for the fiscal year '25. So we ended the year in a very strong financial position as we prepare to develop our long-term projects, finishing with $1.4 billion in total assets.

Our working capital was $927 million which includes $862 million of combined cash and marketable securities with the majority of our marketable securities being excess cash invested in highly liquid interest-bearing securities. This also reflects the $621 million in net proceeds received from the convertible note offering completed at the beginning of the fourth quarter. This liquidity and profile provides substantial flexibility to fund ongoing operations, advance our strategic projects and remain opportunistic as market conditions evolve.

Now turning over to the income statement. For the year, we reported a net loss of $86 million or $0.38 per share compared to a net loss of $47 million or $0.28 per share in fiscal 2024. Now this year-over-year increase in net loss was anticipated and primarily reflects higher ongoing costs with the expansion of our global operations following the acquisition of [ Base Resources ] in the fourth quarter of 2024 as well as continued investment in our core projects.

Specifically, we incurred approximately $15 million higher ongoing SG&A expenses, largely driven by our expanded workforce to support the execution of our global strategy. In addition, exploration and development expenses included an increase of $9 million as we advanced priority projects across our portfolio, including the Juniper zone at Pinyon Plain, La Sal, Bahia and delineation drilling at Nichols Ranch. It also included an increase of $7 million in noncash write-downs related to changes in tax laws and exploration projects that we're no longer pursuing.

Finally, market conditions also impacted the results. The average month-end uranium spot prices were approximately 13.8% lower in 2025 compared to 2024, which reduced our revenue per pound and our gross margin percentage, which was 31% in 2025. We did increase uranium sales year-over-year by 200,000 pounds to 650,000 pounds, which was an $11.8 million increase in uranium revenue year-over-year.

Now as we continue to mine and process ore at the mill and increased uranium sales throughout 2026, we expect our gross margin to increase to 50% and above as our finished inventory weighted average cost continues to decrease from $43 per pound to the low 30s and as uranium prices continue to strengthen during 2026.

Now turning to the next slide. I will briefly touch on our $700 million convertible note offering that was highly successful, being oversubscribed by more than 7 times and closed at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Now without going through all the details of the terms, I just wanted to mention that overall offering places us in a strong financial position to fund our expansions of the White Mesa Mill and our [ Donald ] project joint venture and doing it with very low-cost debt. Now with that, I'll turn it back over to Mark, who will discuss our 2025 and 2026 guidance.

All right. Thanks, Nate. Look, as I've mentioned earlier, we're really excited that we exceeded guidance for mine uranium process uranium and sales of uranium in 2025. And I think it would be very rare for a uranium company to do that. And really, it's because we have experience of producing uranium. It was a transition year for us because we were ramping up back into commercially raining production. And that kind of leads us into our guidance for 2026.

And you can see that our projected guidance for mind uranium is increasing materially from 2 million -- to a low of 2 million to 2.5 million pounds. And I know that for a lot of time, I've been telling people that our first goal is to get to 2 million pounds of production and then go and increase from there. The process uranium also increasing materially from 1.5 million pounds to 2.5 million pounds, and that really is just a function of how long we run the White Mesa Mill.

I talked about the mill produces about 250,000 pounds per month. So you can see that if we ran for, say, 10 months, we would get to the 2.5 million pounds and I also highlighted that we did 350,000 pounds in December of 2025. And then on sales pounds, we'll have the ability -- well, we certainly have the ability with the process and finished goods to cover all our contracts and also figure out where we're going to find home for those residual pounds, but we can also keep them in inventory, we can also sell them or go into other long-term contracts.

So it is materially changing our cost of goods sold is going to decrease as we ramp up the production, and we still are focused on basically using our uranium business of fund a lot of the company's expenditures going forward over the next several years while we build out this world's significant critical mineral company.

So before we go to questions, I just want to talk a bit about CEO transition. And I just want -- and I'm going to tag team this with Ross. So Ross, you just jump in wherever, but I want to just tell people that, that succession plan is proceeding as expected. We've had this in place over the last couple of years. Ross has anticipated to become the President. While he's the President and current President, he's worked with us for 7 months and to become CEO in April and I will be retiring.

But I plan to stay around as a consultant exclusively to help Ross and excited about that. I'll never really -- I mean, it may be shifting from a full-time role to a consulting role, but I'm not retiring as professional because I still want to give more, but I also want to spend more time in Australia in the coming years. So Ross, I don't know if you want to --

Yes. Look, I just want to express my gratitude to Mark. He's -- when I look at where this company has come from over the last -- well, 10 years, but really over the last couple of years, you think about it being a single product, single jurisdiction sort of company to now very much a global company with over $5 billion market cap.

It's a tremendous credit to Mark and his leadership that we've been able to grow. And we've been able to do it without taking on debt and we've been able to do it with limited resources to grow this company into a truly world-class company with amazing assets. But the other part of it is the team. Mark has been incredibly successful at putting a team together that has been able to execute to this stage. So it's an exciting company, exciting time but it's a tremendous credit to Mark and his leadership in getting us to where we are today. So thank you, Mark. Looking forward to continue to work with you.

Yes. Thank you, Ross. And we are building that team out even further. I mean, with our office here in Denver, Lakewood, in Australia, in Perth in some of these operations around the world, we're able to attract some remarkable people to grow with the company and I can say this that we have an aggressive strategy that we're not slowing down.

We're not slowing down. There are not enough hours in the day. People are calling us. People are watching this. I was at the BMO conference in Florida earlier this week, and it is amazing how many people are watching energy fuels and they see the progress we're making. So anyways, I'll stop on that note and open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Brian Lee with Goldman Sachs.

I guess, first off, Mark will we'll miss your leadership, Ross, looking forward to working with you closely going forward. But as you think about the projects and having put them kind of in position to ramp up here over the next few years. Kudos to you guys for all the work through this point. I guess the question I had would just be around the time lines. Has anything shifted on your heavy mineral sands projects?

I know looking through the deck and you guys have some of the most detailed decks out there. it looks like some of the time lines may have shifted out a little bit. I don't know if that's a more updated view or if that's something that -- it sounds like you may have expressed earlier this month in an updated corporate deck. But can you just kind of talk about what's happening with the project time lines for heavy mineral sands projects and if there's any significant drivers of the updated views on kind of maybe pushing out the time lines of [indiscernible]?

Yes. Look, the [indiscernible] project is our shovel-ready project. I mean, really, the focus there is coming to a final investment decision on that. We're very, very buoyed that the timing of a shovel-ready project like [ Donald ] with the -- particularly the heavies in addition to lights is really optimal, and it's very important for not just the company but for the United States of America and the world in general.

So yes, it shifted a little bit, but we're very confident that we're very close to making a decision there. We still got to look at sort of the final numbers and looking at homes for the product is produced there. Vara Mada, we're still making significant progress with the government. We've had meetings even this week with the Madagascar government.

We've been working with the communities and kind of rebranding that project. But we're really taking maybe a little slower in the fact that we want to make sure that, that project has all, certainly the permits, but also the social license to operate because it's an exceptional extraordinary project, but we're -- we couldn't be more excited about it because it's a game changer in the whole rare earth business. Bahia, we're making progress there with coming up with a resource there. And then you got Dubbo now, another one in the queue. So Ross, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

No. Look, I completely agree with what Mark has said. I think Vara Mada maybe slowed down by a quarter with the change in government. With this government we've met with, as Mark said this week, and they are -- they seem to be very supportive of and recognize the value that a project like that brings to the country. So yes. No, I think we're progressing pretty well on all fronts there, Brian.

Okay. That's great. I appreciate the color. And then, I guess, in terms of timing, [ Donald ], like you said, shovel ready, it doesn't sound like anything is really shifting out there. So is the time line still for FID here? In the early part of '26 and then deliveries in late '27, any kind of updated thoughts around the time line for getting volume out of that project?

Yes. That's still the time line. And as we said, it's a very important first major step for us in the rare earth space. And to put it into context that the expected heavies from the [ Donald ] project is equivalent to about 25% of the U.S. requirements, and that's the first phase and the second phase could be up to 50% of the heavies required for the United States.

So yes, we're on that time line. We've been doing things behind the scenes to make sure that we can maintain that time line, but we've got to just look at the final numbers and make a decision at board level on how we proceed.

Okay. Great. Last one for me, and I'll pass it on. Mark, you mentioned you've obviously got a very unique asset, and you just alluded to the fact that you could represent a significant percentage of the heavies for the U.S. with [ Project Vault ] having been officially announced recently, what is your discussions with your government contacts? How have they evolved? Sort of where do you sit in the positioning of potentially having some sort of government support or offtake given that heavy is exposure in your asset mix?

Look, everyone in the critical minerals space is spending a lot of time in D.C. and including energy fuels, I can't go into too much detail, but I can say one thing. When people look at the number of assets that we've acquired and how we're advancing, it's getting noticed by everyone around the world. End users, upstream, downstream, midstream and with these the Australian government and the U.S. government.

So I mean, I think that the differentiator for us is the quantum of -- scale of what we put together. I mean I think a lot of people are used to small little fragments in the business, and we don't have fragments. When you look at the potential acquisition of ASM with -- through alloys and you look at the multiple projects, it's a good look for the right reasons. Let's leave it at that. And Ross, I don't know if you have anything to add.

No, I think -- well, I would just say that I think -- yes, the attraction for us is that we have a real facility. We have the White Mesa Mill that you can go out. You can see -- we have bags of [ DPR ] that are sitting there. We have [ monocyte ] on the ground there. We are for real. And I think that's caught the attention of a lot of people. And so we're hoping that we'll continue to progress in that area. But nothing definitive on that end yet, Brian.

Yes. One other comment, Brian, but it's not just the rare earths. People are looking at our uranium production and our vanadium production. So there really isn't anybody else that they can compare to that has this multi-element really, everything we're doing is in the wheelhouse of the U.S. government and these OEMs and stuff in terms of how to reshore some of these elements and final products.

Yes, we're in a good spot, I think.

Your next question comes from [ Anthony Taglieri ] with Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe starting at White Mesa. Given your uranium production guidance of 1.5 million to 2.5 million pounds, what factors sort of drive the potential high end of that range, maybe producing for 10 months versus the low end around 6 months? And if you process uranium for 10 months in 2026, would you still switch over back to uranium in Q1 '27? Or could this be pushed back a bit?

Yes. The -- it's really a function of the run time of the mill, and we also have to be mining fast to because the mill is very hungry. When we're doing a uranium run, we really don't want to switch the mill on and off very much because once it gets to equilibrium, it perpetuates and you get the efficiencies of just continuous operations.

So I mean, one of the things that we've -- and we've talked about the Phase 1, we have what we call Phase 1b and Phase 1c that will allow us to commercially produce both the lights and heavies in 2027. So we've always given ourselves some flexibility that we can shift the mill to rare earth run, if need be, and we're trying to -- what we are showing the world that we have that flexibility. So I would say it's really a function of the critical mass in maximizing the economics of running longer, if required. So we're just giving ourselves some maneuvering room there in that regard.

Okay. Great. Understood. Maybe switching gears a bit. So with your '26 uranium sales guidance, there's obviously some room there for some spot sales. We all know where spot prices are right now, around $87, $80 amount. Are we at levels where you guys would consider selling more into the spot market? Or do you want to see prices reach a certain threshold before you do that? Could the decision to sell more or less on the spot market, be tied to a potential strategic uranium reserves. We talked about [ Project Volt ] earlier. Maybe some color there would be great.

Yes. I mean we certainly don't want to sell a significant amount of uranium at low prices on the spot, and we really haven't. I mean if the prices go low, we're a buyer. Prices go high. That helps us with our contract pricing because of the formulas and 5 out of the 6 contracts that we have. And so we always want to try to time spot sales when it makes the most sense. So we have sold a bit under 80, like 77, 70 a little bit here and there, but we're always targeting higher prices.

So right now, I still believe that the true replacement value on a pound of uranium is still in excess of where the spot is right now and we always keep that in mind if we do make itself. But I also think that companies need to show they're building the revenue and they're moving towards profitability and so we're not just going to not sell uranium just because we're not happy with the price.

If we've got a margin on it, and we do have a material margin when you look at our production costs, we want to keep growing our revenue, our profitability and reducing the burn as we build out the rest of our strategy. So -- and we're in a unique position with the ability to use this uranium business to provide a material bridge for the next few years.

Yes, I would just add Anthony, when you look at the long-term supply and demand fundamentals, you can't help but be pretty bullish on uranium, and so we're trying to maintain good optionality between our spot and our term contracts that give us that optionality to play it if it does go stronger, like we think it will.

Your next question comes from Heiko Ihle with HC Wainwright.

Mark, congratulations on your retirement and on that same token, Ross, congratulations on your appointment here. Mark's done a wonderful job with the [ Farm Ross ], and I actually just looked this morning and we initiated coverage of the company. On June 29, 2015, with a $6.30 price target. So that's [ 10.5].

We've come a long way.

I was a little bit hesitant to ask this question on a public call, but I just can't help myself. The firm has changed so much since then. And presumably, with the near-term appointment of you, some changes will be in the area. And I assume that most of these changes are going to be minor given how well the old company and air quotes has done. But do you want to just give us a touch of color on your expectations for the company going forward? Maybe things that are not as obvious in press releases or in guidance or anything along the lines of that you think you're going to bring your expertise and maybe change things around just the touch?

Sorry. Yes. Heiko, I'm letting Ross answer that question.

So -- yes, it's a great question. Look, when you look at our growth plans, they're pretty ambitious. We're going to have 4 major construction projects going on simultaneously. So I think the key is we're going to have some significant additions to the team that are around execution in multiple geographies. So it's really setting the company up for execution success with some very diverse geographically and commodity projects. So it's all about execution going forward and ensuring that we have the right additions to the team.

Fair. And then just on guidance, and you sort of hinted at this in the prepared remarks. You're building off of a good year. But I mean the 2.5 million pound, can you go through some of the factors that could get you all the way to 2.5 million? You mentioned earlier in the prepared remarks that it's obviously dependent on the mill. But besides that, anything that we should be looking out for in our models, please?

Look, I think it's -- we're getting Pinyon Plain into more of a routine when it comes to the mining rates. So we're very confident that we can be in that range or even beat it potentially. And the same thing is happening at La Sal. We've got miners and trained a lot of miners because one of our impediments was getting miners know how to mine conventionally. So -- but at the same time, we'll have -- we're win.

We're planning to do more work to get it back up and into production, actually first time, it's never been in production in 2026. It would be in 2027. The same thing with [ Energy Queen ]. We're still doing drilling and looking at when to start up [ Nichols Ranch ] in Wyoming. So it's really with the conventional mining, it's really about having more work areas, more miners, and we can ramp up accordingly. So it's pretty low risk for us right now when it comes to getting there. And also, what you're seeing, Heiko, is that we're mining more than we typically plan to either process or sell.

So we plan to be building inventories that are quite material. And those inventories, particularly the unprocessed uranium can be turned into finished goods pretty quickly with the mill restart or if the mill is running at the time. So we have a lot of flexibility others won't have, and we plan to use that to [indiscernible].

Your next question comes from Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers Investment Research.

Just on a couple of things. The additional oxides you're going to be pursuing in Phase 1 that you announced last night. Is it -- is that essentially sort of the Phase 1c that you've been mentioning late last year?

Yes. I mean, one of the things that we're doing with our Phase 1, which is the existing constructed and operable rare earth [ SX ] circuit is we're adding what we call 1B, and I know it gets a little confusing because we've got a lot of Phase 1s and 2s but we've got Phase 1bs and Cs. So the Phase 1b is to allow us to take the [ SMS ], which is [ Submarine Plus ], is really heaviest concentrate and go ahead and separate out the [ DYTB ] and some of these other rare earth as well. And so we see that as a real differentiator to have a commercial plant in the United States that have it quicker, faster than others.

The ones really kind of emerged last year, mid late last year. And it is really focused on being able to take MRC. And that is sort of an intermediate product that could come from either other cracked and leach monocyte, but it also could come from potentially [indiscernible] or other sources, which will allow us to maximize the usage of that Phase 1 infrastructure for the rare earths, both for lights and heavies with 1B for the heavy separation and 1c for an [indiscernible].

It's really giving significant flexibility quicker, faster. And when we talk to people, whether it's the OEMs or government agencies, they want fast and 1b is something that we see as fast and quick. Now looking to Phase II, which should be approved in '27 going into construction '27 with a FID decision that will be scaled up about 5x greater and it will be the more permanent facility even though we're planning to continue to have that 1B and 1C for the long haul.

Great. And I just wanted to ask about the progress with -- or toward closing of ASM. And any updates you can give on that? And I was wondering -- do you know specific South Korean regulatory approval for the plant there and also, I mean, for the sale of the plant there? And also, just wondering if you have any ballpark on the capital requirements for the future phases of the Korea plant?

I'll answer some of it, but also have Ross jump in. We have a scheme document that we're executing that was signed by ASM. And again, we're planning to close June of this year. We have to get a firm approval, which is foreign investment review board in Australia. We had to do the same thing for base resources. So the good news is we've gone through the scheme process recently in Australia.

We still got to get shareholder vote. We've got to get all the various other approvals in the jurisdictions that they have assets in. So we're advancing that. Ross, do you want to add on things like capital or approvals?

So yes, I should have mentioned the Phase 2 is already funded for ASM. So that's adding the 18 different additional furnaces in the strip additional strip caster. So that is already budgeted and funded. Yes. And then going forward, if we do Phase 3, we don't have numbers around that just yet. But they're relatively modest numbers. I think the key time line, as Mark mentioned, is really getting the FIRB approval and the scheme document approved by the shareholders in Australia. So it's something we've done recently with the Base acquisition, and I think we're pretty familiar with the process there.

Your next question comes from Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners.

I think most of the mine have already been answered, but a couple of small things. I guess on the uranium sales guidance, what's the breakdown there between existing contracts and spot sales for this year? And then if you guys can give any color on what we should expect for pricing either over the remaining, call it, 3.5 million you have under contract or just for 2026 to those contract panels?

Yes. Look, at this one, I'm going to flip to Curtis because he's on the call here, and he's in charge of our uranium sales, but go ahead, Curtis.

Sure. Glad to hear from you. So we have -- this year, I believe the number was about 650,000 to 80,000 pounds of total contract sales, of which we've already done some here in Q1. So that's the number. And that range, offered some flex on those contracts.

These were some of our first contracts that we signed back in 2022 that where we had to offer some flex in order to get those contracts in place. But keeping in mind as well as those contracts enable us to get the Pinyon Plain mine going, which, of course, is the largest, lowest outline in the United States today.

So yes, the rest would theoretically be on spot midterm, maybe there's sold on the core price curve or something like that this year. And again, we're not going to -- the price drops, as Mark said, we're probably going to be buyers of uranium to replenish inventories. But I'd say we're likely to be price-sensitive to sellers.

Okay. And can you give any color on what the contract pricing is kind of set around either for this year or if you are more comfortable just over the remainder of the book?

Yes. We haven't put any guidance out on that, Joe. If you look at our contract pricing from the last couple of years, that's a pretty good indication of where the prices are for our first sort of tranche of contracts. We have 3 contracts, 3 were signed kind of in early to mid-2022. And we got a little better pricing on those contracts than what was reported at the time, but they weren't high priced contracts.

And the base -- and the fixed price component on those contracts, they're hybrid contracts. It has been escalating with inflation. But then we've signed 3 more contracts here in the last 18 months or so, which obviously has some higher prices. And so we still have those 2022 contracts that we're delivering into this year. But we also have, I believe it's one of the more recent contracts that has deliveries this year.

So I think you're going to probably hopefully see our contract pricing increased throughout the year, though Q1 is likely to have a little lower because that's when we had, again, one of our other 2022 contracts come into place. And so we made a delivery there. But that one will be done for the year. So you'll see Q1 come out, but then it will probably start going up pretty significantly after that.

But I will say this, it will be in the 70-plus okay. And depending on how uranium prices are, you can go into 80s. So -- but it's not in the 60s, Joe. A lot of people have 60s, and we're not in the 60s.

Okay. That's very helpful. And then you guys also provided updated reserves and resources with the K. It looks like numbers went up a little bit. Can you kind of talk through what some of the gains were from? Was there some just stuff that came into resource because of higher pricing or any other revisions? I know Pinyon was a big part of it, but just overall.

Yes. I don't have my geologist here. He's in transit on a plane, I think. But looking at Pinyon, when you look at Pinyon originally, and that's -- at least right now, that's the one that's generating cash flow. The original estimate on the what we call the [ Upper Zone Main Zone ] was like 1.6 million pounds. And this most recent estimate, they increased that 2, threefold greater on the main zone. And it's really hard.

And what's interesting is that main zone that the [ SLR ] did the estimate on was the most drilled out zone I've ever seen in my entire career and they're off by an order of 2 or 3 or greater. So it's hard to really get what I can -- I believe is accurate estimates, particularly in the Juniper zone. But so what we're seeing is we saw the substantial increase in the main zone, substantial grade, the grade was almost double.

So that was one of the reasons that it was off so much as a great but higher and in the Juniper, we have an area in the Juniper, which is 600 feet, and we're currently mining the top 200 feet, which is above that. So it's 800 feet of total area to mine and I see a lot of exploration potential in the Juniper zone.

We already know that we have some very, very high-grade intercepts in the Juniper zone, but it doesn't have a lot of drilling particularly 200, 300 feet below the Juniper zone is very open ended. So it's going to be kind of a work in progress. I've worked at a couple of mines over my career that had 1 year of resource or reserve, and it just went and went and went. We know that Pinyon Plain isn't going to go for 20 years, but I feel very optimistic it's going to go for a number of years and going to really materially keep our costs very low because of the grades.

Your next question comes from [ Matthew Key ] with Texas Capital.

I want to drill down a little bit on the 2026 guide on [ MIND U308 ]. I was wondering if you could provide maybe an asset breakdown on that total particularly as it relates to Pinyon Plain? Should we be expecting a similar run rate in we saw in late 2025? Obviously, that mix would be important just as we kind of model out costs. So just trying to get a sense of the breakdown there.

Yes. Look, we -- we're pretty comfortable with Pinyon Plain on its own. We'll do at least 2 million pounds plus just as Pinyon Plain. And so the residual of that would be made up from the La Sal complex, which is currently 2 mines. And so we do have another mine at La Sal that we're looking at refurbishing and start up and then we have the world in mind.

So the bulk of the pounds are coming from Pinyon Plain. But it's also interesting to note that the La Sal complex right now all we're doing is recovering the uranium. We're not recurring to vanadium. And vanadium is about 5x the grade of the uranium. And if the price of vanadium keeps going up, we may start talking about recovery in the vanadium and getting another byproduct that drives our cost down even further on the La Sal complex in our uranium vanadium mine.

So what I think you can see is that we're comfortable with that range with probably Pinyon being around $2 million plus in the La Sal complex topping that up. And then you can see that with [ Energy Queen ], [indiscernible] and even [ Nichols Ranch ]. You can see where it's really quite possible we can get up towards 3 million pounds if we elect to. And again, this is 3 million pounds with limited capital.

We don't need a lot of capital. We need basically working capital to get there. But you could also -- if the price of an [ ADM ] starts continues to increase, you could see us getting a credit for vanadium production as well. which can drive cost down a lot because it's significant when the price is up.

Got it. No, that's super helpful. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about the medium-term projects there as well. What market signals would you need to see to make that go-ahead decision on [ Nichols Ranch ] and [ whirlwind ]? Would you say it's likely those assets come online sometime in 2027? And if you could just remind me just at a high level, the CapEx requirements to kind of bring online those medium-term uranium projects?

Yes. I think it's very high probability in 2027 that [indiscernible] comes on as well, [ Energy clean ]. And really, depending on your aim prices, [ Nichols Ranch ]. So I mean, the capital cost, I mean, if you look at [indiscernible] and you look at [ Energy Queen ], I mean, it's like $5 million, $10 million each. It's very, very small. When you look at [ Nichols branch ], it's really about putting in the well fields and you're probably talking $25 million or something and thereabouts for [ Nichols Ranch ].

And most of that capital is going into the well field, which is really the mining process, okay? So you put that -- those wells in and then you attract uranium. So between all 3 of them, it's really small compared to others. But I do think very high profitability that a couple of more conventional mines come on and [ Nichols Ranch ] I think, is a very good probability it could come on.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I will now turn the conference back over to Mark Chalmers for any closing remarks.

No, thank you, everyone, who are listening in and ask questions. I think in closing, we've -- and I've always said this, that we've had an aggressive but not reckless strategy. We want to keep a strong balance sheet. We need good people to advance the strategy. We're working on that and we're really getting a lot of attention globally and it's really been a pleasure to be a part of this over the last 10 years.

I plan to continue to be available to work with Ross and the others because I've spent a fair amount of time with a lot of these assets over the years, but I'm really excited. And there's more to come. There is so much going on. I don't want investors to think like we've reached some peak because we're still driving this company to become a $10 billion-plus company, and I'm just looking forward to not working 7 days a week and having a little bit more time to have more fun, go skiing, spend time with my grandkids and family, friends, which over the last 10 years has been a little bit short supply. So Ross, do you want to say anything else to that? Or ...

Well, again, I'd just reiterate that Mark is going to be on a 2-year contract going forward, and I fully intend to utilizes expertise. He brings such an incredible wealth of knowledge. But look, the company is set up for just incredible success, incredible continued growth. To Mark's point, we have a lot of exciting things on our plate right now and yes, excited for the future of this company.

Thank you for today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful rest of your day.

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" H.C. Wainwright & Co, LLC, Research Division

" ROTH Capital Partners, LLC, Research Division

" B. Riley Securities, Inc., Research Division

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Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Q3 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Mark Chalmers, CEO and Director. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Eric. And again, Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels. I want to thank everybody for joining our Q3 conference call today. And I can say with absolute confidence, the entire team continued to deliver on our promises this quarter, which is rather unusual in today's world when it comes to getting projects restarted in advance. Namely, we had increased sales, increased revenues. We continued our buildup of low-cost and increased our uranium production. So we're lowering our costs as we increase our uranium production. And we're setting the stage for increased gross margins in 2026, and the timing could not be better.

We're making remarkable progress on our rare earth segment, including heavy rare earth piloting and plans for commercial production. We've received a qualification for our NdPr production, which is going into major automobiles manufacturers as we speak. We received all government approvals for the development of our Donald joint venture project in Australia, which has significant heavies as well as NdPr. We received a conditional letter of support from Export Finance Australia, more commonly known as EFA, for up to AUD 80 million, and that's with respect to our senior debt project financing for the project. We also completed an upsized offering of a $700 million convertible note on very favorable terms. And post-quarter, we had a working capital balance approaching USD 1 billion.

As many of you understand, these accomplishments are not the norm for many in our sector because it is tough. It is tough to produce uranium. It is tough to produce heavy mineral sands, and it's tough to produce rare earths. And we are a company that is playing the long game. We've been doing that for a long period of time. We deliver on our promises. We have the right team with the right skills, and we have put the company in a unique position of all things, critical minerals, including uranium by design. Not an accident. We're capitalizing on our advantages, which are skills, infrastructure, permits, and capacity globally in all 3 of those sectors.

So just a reminder, there will be conference call replays or a replay, which will be on the website later today. And as always, as Eric mentioned, there will be time for questions at the end of the presentation.

New for today's call and for the presentation, I will have Ross R. Bhappu, our President; and Nate Bennett, our CFO, to discuss overall company finances, and Ross will be talking about the convert. And in addition to that, at the end of the presentation, both Nate, Ross, Dave Frydenlund, our Executive VP and Chief Legal Officer; as well as Nathan Longenecker, our Senior VP and General Counsel, will be available to answer any questions I am unable to answer. So let's get going.

Again, I always say this, I love this slide because we're building a globally significant critical mineral company in the U.S., and this picture is taken not far from the White Mesa Mill. Next slide.

I may be making some forward-looking statements. Those are included on Page 2 of this presentation. Next slide.

An investment in Energy Fuels is really these 3 investments that I discussed: the uranium, where we are the leading producer of uranium, lowest cost producer of uranium in the United States, the rare earths, which are rapidly emerging, globally significant, and the heavy mineral sands, which will provide the rare earth feeds, the monazite for our rare earth processing. And so basically, you get 3 companies in 1. We are focused and we build these 3 companies on how they fit together, Energy Fuels around the foundation of our core uranium business. And all of these materials contain naturally concentrations of uranium that are found alongside the minerals that occur with these minerals. Next slide.

We talk about the uranium mines. And as I mentioned, we're producing more uranium than any other company in the United States today. The Pinyon Plain mine in Arizona, which is in production and it's conventional. We're ramping up our production there. And it's got -- I believe it's the highest grade uranium mine in the history of the United States, and we're actively mining and shipping ore to the mill right now. That's going very, very well. And we'll be seeing and hearing more about that during this presentation as we ramp up the scale of the Pinyon Plain mine.

At the same time, the LaSalle complex, also conventional in production. That actually is the Pandora and LaSalle incline, but there are also several other mines along 11-mile trend in that area. And that mining is advancing, and we're doing additional work on other mines there that are being reactivated as the uranium business improves. Next slide.

So let's talk about uranium production moving forward. At the mill in Q4, we've commenced processing with the newly mined Pinyon Plain ore in this quarter, and that's the first uranium that has been produced at Pinyon Plain at the mill were actually processed at -- the Pinyon Plain ore processed at the mill. We expect to produce between 1.1 million to 1.4 million pounds of uranium to Q1 '26. That run could go longer. And when we run the mill, basically, we produce about 200,000 to 250,000 pounds per month for every month we run the mill.

At Pinyon Plain in Q3, we mined around 415,000 pounds of uranium at an average grade of 1.27%, that is a bit lower because we're mining kind of the upper part of the main zone, where the grades are lower. So that is all expected. Year-to-date, we've mined 1.15 million pounds of uranium at an average grade of 1.66%, and we expect to be mining over 2 million pounds per year at the Pinyon Plain Mine in 2026. Truck haulage has been an impediment earlier in the year, but I'm pleased to say that we have improved that significantly. We've been averaging about 250 trucks per month, and that is more than sufficient to get to about that 2 million-pound run rate for production, getting that ore to the mill.

The relationship with the Navajo Nation is going very well, and we've seen that turn out to be a significant positive for both Energy Fuels and the Navajo Nation. And we had a number of those from the Navajo Nation at our open house, which was held a month or so ago, and it was really pleasing to see how they've received the relationship and how we've been executing that relationship together.

Uranium cost of production cost of sales are expected to decline. We have previously mentioned that we believe the Pinyon Plain cost will be in that $23 to $30 per pound range as we ramp up production and as we process this material. We have existing inventory right now at the mill of 485,000 pounds, and that is currently at a cost of goods sold of around $50 to $55 per pound. And it's sort of a mixture of various feeds that we processed, including LaSalle, including some of the cleanup material that we've done, and alternate feeds. But as we start ramping up the Pinyon Plain run, we see those same -- the costs dropping pretty materially, should be in that $30 to $40 per pound range in Q1 of this '26 and lower as time progresses. Next slide.

So on the contract front, we still have 4 existing contracts. I believe that we are seeing a strengthening in desire for long-term contracts with utilities. In 2025, we have contracts for 300,000 pounds, of which we just in this last quarter, sold 140 into contract. And -- but those commitments are increasing in 2026, and they ramp up to 620,000 pounds to 880,000 pounds and could be higher in due course. We're looking at various spot and midterm sales for the additional uranium inventories that we have that will be greater than our contract sales, and we have a significant margin to benefit from that because we didn't overcontract where other companies have overcontracted and are having trouble meeting those commitments. But we're also looking at other long-term contracts in due course, and the terms just seem to improve as time progresses. And lastly, we have also received a small amount of ore from third-party miner in Colorado. Next slide.

So let's talk more -- a bit more about rare earths and heavy mineral sands highlights. We are becoming the leading rare earth producer in the United States, including heavies. I mentioned earlier that we have been getting our NdPr oxide validated by outside manufacturers and confirmation, particularly with POSCO, with that material or some of the surplus material going into the production of electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles. The piloting has been going exceptionally well. We have recovered around nearly 30 kilograms of Dy oxide, 99.9% pure and that's through September of '25, and we're getting ready to start piloting Tb later this year.

We're also -- based on the results that we have from the piloting, we are expecting to advance commercial production of heavies later in 2026, and that in itself is a major milestone to pull that off, where we'll be able to commercially recover Dy Tb and perhaps other elements like Samarium through that circuit. Phase 2 feasibility study at the mill is progressing very well. We expect to have that completed towards the end of the year. And the design of that facility, given sufficient feed, would be up to 6,000 tons of NdPr oxide, 275 tons per annum of Dy, 80 tons per annum of Tb, and potentially other rare earth oxides. So that in itself is world significant by every measure, and it is approximately the same quantums as Lynas is in Australia and Malaysia. Next slide.

And I've used this slide and talked about this slide before, but monazite is our structural advantage. It is simply a superior rare earth concentrate, super high grades, more NdPr, more heavies, more mid and heavy rare earth oxides. It's a low-cost byproduct of HMS mining. We get the uranium credit. It's easier to process if you have the facilities that can receive the radionuclides and high recoveries. You can see the existing SX circuit in the mill building that recovers the rare earth lights, and you can see the bulky bags. And what we're planning to do is to include a circuit in that building or very close to that building for recovery of the heavies with the commercial facility. So we're the only facility in the U.S. that has the ability to process monazite into lights and heavy oxides. Next slide.

So let's talk a bit about the Donald project in Australia. It is shovel-ready and is an exceptional source of heavy rare earth oxides. We expect that potentially as early as Q1 of '26 that we will be in a position to make a final investment decision, a FID, and potentially have monazite deliveries from the Donald project by late 2027. As I mentioned, has exceptional high concentration of the heavy oxides, the Dy, Tb, and Samarium and others, and it is allied country and friendly jurisdiction. It is a joint venture with Astron, where we're earning our 49% JV interest. But we will receive 100% of the monazite.

I mentioned the conditional support from EFA for project development financing, and the total capital cost of that project is approximately USD 340 million. And Energy Fuels has agreed to fund approximately the first $120 million. And after that, that will be split between the joint venture. Next slide.

Now this is an interesting one showing that at the design capacity of Phase 2, in the capacity at the White Mesa Mill and reflecting on the current rare earth oxide prices, particularly those prices that are outside of China, where NdPr prices are -- have increased 13% over September of 2025 and then looking at the prices outside of China in the European Union for dysposium and terbium, which are all at premiums to the China prices and you look at the production capacity of the rare earth oxides at Phase 2, you can do some simple math there, and that's about $1 billion if you achieve those prices in those production quantities. So it is very, very material. Next slide.

Talk about Toliara, heavy mineral sands, and rare earths and Madagascar. It's economically robust and scalable. It is a large-scale operation. It is a high-grade heavy mineral sand deposit. We believe, and many others do and agree that it is considered one of the best heavy mineral sand deposits undeveloped in the world and includes the significant byproduct of rare earth monazite. It's very simple from a mining perspective and tailings perspective, technically straightforward, exceptional project economics. We plan to provide an updated feasibility study by the end of 2025. It has a long project life. There has been some unrest in the country, and a new government is in the process of being appointed. And while the outcomes are not fully known, initial indications are that the new government is pro-economic development. So it's been a little choppy there, but things are starting to settle down, and we're just basically adjusting our plans as prudent as that settles down.

We do have people in country that are resident in country that are still working on the project. As a matter of fact, we are still working on the project. And so this work is ongoing. And I believe that Toliara is a company maker. And when you look at when we acquired Toliara, we acquired it because we believed it was a company maker. And I think our time is coming in due course to have this contribute materially to the company going forward. Next slide.

Again, you've seen this timeline, and it really hasn't materially changed. There's been a few additions where we've added the rare earth processing of heavies with the Phase 1, also the uranium production ramping up at that 2 million pounds plus over those time horizons and looking at both the Bahia project, the Donald project, the Toliara project, the material we received from Chemours and potentially others that basically position us in the same quantum as Lynas going forward. So we're still executing on all fronts. And again, I don't think the timing could be any better.

So now for the tricky part, we are going to show a video explaining our heavy mineral sand processing. [Operator Instructions].

Okay. Hopefully, that provided some information on how the heavy mineral sand mining process advances and how we end up with a monazite concentrate that then is transported to the White Mesa mill for further processing. So -- and again, we're trying to add some of these videos to just mix it up a bit and provide additional information on the company.

So now I'd like to hand over to Ross Bhappu to talk about the convertible note. And then after that, will be Nate Bennett, our CFO.

Thank you, Mark. Well, as Mark mentioned, the company is in very strong financial position right now. On the back of about a $700 million fundraising we just recently did, we intend to use those funds to expand our Phase 2 project at the White Mesa Mill. We also intend to use some of those funds for the Donald project development. Again, it was a fantastic outcome. And really, the funds were very, very inexpensive. It's an inexpensive source of capital. We used an unsecured convertible debt structure that gave us maximum flexibility. The interest rate on that note was 0.75% coupon rate, which is incredibly low. It gave us a 32.5% conversion premium. So the reference pricing was $15.30.

The premium with the premium it gave us a $20. 34% conversion rate. The all-in effective tax rate on that note is about 2.1%, again, a very, very inexpensive financing. The nuance of the note was that we put in a capped call feature. The capped call effectively gave us insurance against future dilution and gave us an effective conversion price of $30.70. So it was a very successful offering. Again, we raised $700 million, and it was oversubscribed by more than 7x. The use of the funds is shown there on that slide, the Phase 2 expansion. And if we go to the next slide, it gives you a sense of just how big White Mesa will be.

Effectively, we're planning to double the size of the facility to give us individual lines for both processing uranium and rare earths simultaneously. So it's an incredibly impressive project that we're undertaking, and we've got a great financial position to undertake these future plans.

And with that, I'll hand it to Nate to talk a little bit more about the financial structure.

Okay. Thank you, Ross. During the third quarter, we continued to strengthen our financial position as we're preparing to develop our long-term projects in the next couple of years, and we finished the quarter with $750 million in total assets. We also increased uranium revenues leading to an improved net loss of $16.7 million compared to the second quarter's net loss of $21.8 million, and we continued low-cost uranium mining at our Pinyon Plain mine. We expect this to continue to improve as we mine and produce low-cost uranium inventory and increase future uranium sales in the fourth quarter.

At the end of the third quarter, our working capital was approximately $300 million, which includes $235 million of combined cash and marketable securities with the majority of these marketable securities being interest-bearing securities, treasury bills and bonds. This does not include the $625 million net proceeds from the senior convertible note completed in the fourth quarter, and this will be reflected in our fourth quarter balance sheet. And by the end of the year, we expect working capital to be somewhere between $900 million to $1 billion in working capital.

During the third quarter, we sold 240,000 pounds of uranium at a realized price of $72.38 per pound and a gross margin of 26%. We expect similar margins for our fourth quarter sales as we sell and average down our 485,000 pounds of finished uranium inventory that we had at September 30 and as we start to add our approximate 670 pounds of low-cost finished uranium inventory during the fourth quarter as we process those pounds at the mill.

As we continue to mine and process ore into 2026, we expect our finished uranium inventory cost per pound to decrease from approximately $50 to $55 per pound to approximately $30 to $40 per pound with our gross margins expected to increase to approximately 50% or above and above.

And with that, I'll turn it back over to Mark.

Thank you, Nate and Ross. Look, these last few slides are a bit repetitive, so I'll try not to repeat too much. But look, we plan to retain our status as the largest uranium miner and processor of uranium ores in the United States. There was a time where people questioned if we were leaving the uranium business. Well, we're not. We're still going to be #1 in the U.S. We're processing ores. As discussed, the White Mesa Mill is running with Pinyon Plain alternate feed materials and some LaSalle material. We're increasing or have the ability because we have not overcontracted. We're looking at opportunistic spot sales and other opportunities to add to our contract sales volumes, and we'll have a material amount of additional uranium to do that, whether that be later in '25 or in '26.

The cost of goods sold is decreasing, as Nate has mentioned, with the addition of the Pinyon ore. We're increasing our ability to produce uranium of 2 million pounds plus per year. And we could probably do that with Pinyon Plain alone without alternate feed, without LaSalle complex and other projects. So we're very comfortable in saying that. The margins are expected to improve material with lower cost and increasing improved uranium prices. We've talked about the 3 conventional mines that are currently in production.

We're getting a number of other mines ready for production. Some of those are already permitted. Some are not, but we're advancing the ones that are not fully permitted to get our ability to produce 4 million to 6 million pounds per year, particularly once Phase 2 is completed and the mill is able to be dedicated 100% to uranium production. And we're still continuing advancing the R&D work on the uranium recovery. Next slide.

And just talking a little bit about guidance. We haven't really changed this since Q2. But I want to say that we are always conservative on guidance. And I am very, very hopeful and positive, and we mentioned in the press release that we are on the higher ends of a number of these areas, and we hope to exceed guidance in some of these areas. And for example, on the mined uranium, I'm quite confident we're going to be well above that. Look at sales. We have 350,000 pounds. Well, we've already sold 290,000 pounds year-to-date, and we've got contract sales of another 160,000, which would put us at 450,000 and whatever spot sales that we might have on top of that. So we want to be conservative because we deliver on what we say we're going to do, and I like to surprise people on the upside or the company does and the team does.

Last slide, just talking about the rare earth and the mineral sands. We mentioned the piloting on the heavies. And we also mentioned the fact that we're planning to have the ability to commercially recover heavies later in '26. Phase 2 expansion project going along very well. I already talked about the quantums for NdPr, the Dy and the Tb. And we will have that -- we're planning to have that update for the feasibility study at the end of this year. Donald project, we discussed with the FID. We think it is in a unique position to supply a material amount of heavies and lights to the United States as required. Toliara FID is still expected in 2026. We're still working through this -- the -- pursuing the permits and approvals with this new government. But as I mentioned earlier, they appear to be pro-business, pro-development. So we just have to kind of see how things shake out there.

And we also have all our exploration permits to restart some of the drilling at the Bahia project in Brazil. And on top of that, we're always looking at other opportunities. We do not stand still at Energy Fuels, and we're looking for value-accretive opportunities on a number of fronts, and we'll continue to do so. We have a strong balance sheet to deliver on our existing projects, but we also have a strong balance sheet to look at other opportunities that may come our way.

So last slide is just this pretty picture again, the diversified nature of our business with these multiple critical elements. And now I'd like to turn it over to questions for those that are listening, and we will do our best to answer those questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle with H.C. Wainwright.

Conceptually, for the Donald project, I mean, you got the final government approvals. You got the $80 million from EFA. You actually discussed that earlier on this call. We might see the FID as soon as next month. But I mean, just again, conceptually past that, you got the balance sheet and liquidity to put whatever number is needed really into this. Why are we not doing that? And I know the time line is quite accelerated, but I feel like we might be able to shave 1 or 2 quarters off of that now.

Yes, Heiko, it's ready to go. I mean what we're looking at is, as you know, there's this huge interest in getting these materials like from the Donald project in the United States, particularly the heavies. And we're just looking at our options potentially with offtakers for that project. And we're working through what that can look like. We've been talking to and basically out seeing what the opportunities could present. And I think there's also this opportunity when you look at that project and you look at these higher prices that are being placed on non-China material, there can be premiums there. So we're really looking at what those are and to help us make the best informed decision there.

And that's really what we're doing is we're shopping around to see what interest in those products that are out there, whether it be private or even government agencies that might be interested in those products.

And it wouldn't make sense to essentially skip that into the secondary step and just move forward now while you're looking for that?

Yes. I mean, Heiko, we're going to -- we're looking at all these opportunities in a holistic way. Yes, we have the capacity to do that right now. And so we're just looking at all our opportunities on how we best go forward. I don't know, Ross, if you want to add anything on that front?

Well, look, I agree. I think we're waiting to try to secure some offtake agreements. We also have a number of different options on financing, and we're just trying to run those to ground, Heiko, and do the best thing that's -- do what's best for shareholders on utilizing the money that we have in the bank right now.

And then just one quick clarification on your preliminary guidance for next year. It says there you expect to sell between 620,000 and 880,000 pounds with the long-term uranium sales contracts. Where is that delta between the 620,000 and the 80,000 come from? Is that a timing? Is that a pricing issue? What exactly could make it go from one end to the other end of that range, please?

It's really the flex up or flex down, is what that is, Heiko.

So it's purely your choice.

No, no, that's a selection of the contracts. So I know some companies have said they're not going to do flex up or flex down. We have. It doesn't really bother us too much because we're -- a lot of these things are evolving as things progress. So that flex up, flex down. We're still looking for homes, whether it be spot, midterm, other contracts for the future. So if you look at -- if we're up at 2 million pounds of uranium production, thereabouts, 1.5 million, 2 million, and we've currently got that kind of contract portfolio, you can see we have a lot of headroom there for doing other arrangements as we see fit.

Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners.

So I guess first thing on the rare earth separation plant at White Mesa, I know you guys have floated a cost of $300 million to $500 million, but there hasn't been a lot of like ranges put on IRR or NPV for this project. When do you think we'll get those numbers? And then as we're leading up to that, is there a range you're comfortable putting on that so we can start to try to build these into our models?

Well, Joe, first of all, thanks for asking the question. We're really on the cusp of getting a number of these feasibility studies completed. One is for the Phase 2 separation plant. We're also completing the feasibility on the Toliara project and also getting the final investment numbers for Donald. And with that publicly disclosed, you're going to have all the information you need to figure out what all those costs are going forward.

When it comes to the Phase 2 processing plant upgrade, we are adding -- we've added -- since those earlier estimates, we've been adding a lot of additional infrastructure including the ability to recover heavies. And so some of those costs are going up, but the actual facility is actually becoming more capable to do more things. So we expect to have, again, all these studies completed by the end of the year and then the dots can be connected with certainty because they will be done by third parties or signed off by third parties, fresh and updated to give you the most recent information to make your calculations on.

Maybe a follow-up to that then. Would it be fair for us initially to assume that the economics are roughly similar to what we see for this kind of thing historically, where CapEx and NPV are roughly equal and IRRs are in the high teens, low 20s?

Look, I don't want to really overspeculate until those studies are completed. But we believe that what our plan, our strategy with the multiple assets we have is going to deliver a very low cost compared to our peers option for producing these multiple rare earth oxides and some of these other critical elements. So we're very confident that our focus on monazite is going to be a very attractive and low-cost opportunity for our shareholders going forward.

One other thing on the uranium production side, you guys kind of gave guidance for Q1 only. And is this to say that mining at Pinyon Plain is going to wrap up and then the mines to go back on care and maintenance or just that you're not comfortable giving a guide yet for next year?

The main reason that we've only given guidance into part of 2026 is that we have a rare earth plant as part of the White Mesa Mill in that Phase 1, where we share the mill. And we're also doing trade-offs on how much rare earths we have to process versus uranium versus our ability to stockpile. For example, when we process the Pinyon Plain or, we're going to keep mining Pinyon Plain, we'll put it out in the yard, and it will be stockpiled for future processing. And that may be extending that run in 2026, but we're also giving ourselves the option to be able to recover both lights and heavies later in the year, if need be. So that is the reason why we haven't gone too far out, but we will have, and we do have -- frankly, we do have enough mining capacity and pounds that are coming out of those mines to keep running that mill if we elect to do so on uranium only.

Your next question comes from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

Maybe starting on the uranium side. You mentioned blending Pinyon Plains higher-grade ore with LaSalle's lower-grade material through early '26. So can you quantify the margin differential between Pinyon Plain as a stand-alone campaign versus the blended approach? And then just given Pinyon Plain's superior economics, I mean, why wouldn't it make more sense to process higher-grade ore from that asset now while spot prices are above kind of the $75 level and preserve the LaSalle material for potential toll milling arrangements further down the road?

Yes. Look, it's a combination of things. I mean the Pinyon Plain is obviously absolutely our lowest cost source, with the exception of on occasion with some of the alternate feeds can be lower. And we look at how -- what feeds we have to process, we have the ability or will have the ability in 2026 to run just Pinyon Plain ore alone. We've made some modifications in the mill to do that. But also when we look at like towards the end of this year, we have -- and we need to do some blending to cut the grade down to some extent. The LaSalle complex -- and right now, we're not recovering the vanadium, okay? So when you look at the LaSalle complex, Pandora, our costs are, say, in the 70s, low 70s, recovering just uranium, but not recovering the vanadium. The vanadium gets put out the tails. We can bring the vanadium back at a later date.

And so when you blend in those costs with Pinyon Plain and alternate feed, we can still come up with a very, very attractive combined production cost at those sites. But I believe that where we are with our processing is we're going to push the Pinyon Plain as much as we can. We'll complement alternate feed and La Salle, looking at that blended cost, but we're also likely going to be gaining inventory of mined unprocessed material this year and going forward, we should have a material amount of unprocessed ore at the mill that will be ready for processing at whatever rates we really choose up to complete design capacity of the White Mesa mill as we get Phase 2 rare earth circuit online in due course.

Maybe switching gears. You've signed the MOU with Vulcan could lead to an offtake agreement for downstream magnet production. I mean I think we'll be getting something on the product validation front in the near term. But can you just remind us what really the critical steps beyond that validation would be and kind of how that plays into commercial production decisions later in '26?

Yes. Well, these various groups that are looking for are oxides Initially, it's about the validation. And after that, it is working together to come up with potential offtake arrangements, pricing, whatnot, which we really aren't at that stage yet. I mean we are in some initial discussions on those fronts, but we haven't really advanced those. So as you are aware, between POSCO, Vulcan, and we're talking to others, it's pretty dynamic at this point in time. And -- but we haven't really secured any binding agreements for offtake at this moment.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Tatiana Lauder with Merger Markets.

I just wanted to speak to the excitement around the Toliara acquisition. And the statement earlier that you guys are always looking at value-accretive opportunities. I wanted to ask what those opportunities might look like and what your forward-looking appetite to expand via acquisitions on any part of the uranium supply chain would be or if there's any excitement around some bolt-ons, divestitures or JVs?

Yes. Look, we look at every opportunity on its own. I mean we've expressed our desire to do further integration and from one aspect, but we're also looking at having additional feed and diversification of our feed as we go forward. So I think what you're seeing is when you look at the market and the people that are in the business, whether it be heavy mineral sands, rare earths or uranium, they're seeing our -- the strength that we have, the momentum that we have, and it's really a unique market.

The world is wanting an integration story of scale. And that is what we're building. And there are companies that routinely come to us and trying to see how they can potentially join with us in different ways. It could be a number of different options on how they might be able to join us. And so we look at them on their merits. So all I'm saying is we will look at each opportunity opportunistically and see how that fits with our strategy and go from there. But I think that when you look at the market cap that we have and the momentum we have, it's very attractive for a number of these parties that are kind of isolated in a small portion of the business, and they don't really have that critical mass.

And I'll ask Ross to say a few things on that front, too, if he--

Yes, Tatiana, it's a great question because there's so much activity going on in the market right now. I'd say we're looking at probably 2 dozen different opportunities on our plate that are very potentially opportunistic. And so to Mark's point, I think we're going to remain opportunistic. We've got a lot on our plate with our own assets. But that being said, we're always going to look for unique and good opportunities to bolt on to what we have. So there's no shortage of those, and the key is finding ones that are going to be accretive and good value for us.

And I would just add that, that both in uranium and rare earths tied to mineral sands. So monazite is really critically important.

It sounds very exciting. Were most of those 2 dozen opportunities just around traditional mining or anything around uranium extraction or other parts of the supply chain?

They can be anything really. I think as a general rule of thumb, I'd say most of them are more rare earth oriented, but they can be different things. I mean, again, we've got the infrastructure, we're processing uranium. There's people that would like to have us purchase their ore, the same thing and whether it's monazite producers, heavy mineral sand producers, they're just seeing that momentum and capacity that we've established over the last few years.

And how soon do you anticipate going back out to the market? I know you guys just did the $700 million fund raise that was oversubscribed. How soon should we expect to see you guys going out again to raise more capital?

Look, we're in a strong position right now. And you look at our balance sheet, you look at the convert, you look at the building revenue from uranium, we're in good shape. So I'm not going to speculate on how soon we're going to go out to the market again. But again, we're only going to go out to the market whenever that is, when we think it makes sense. And we think it made sense to go out to the market on the convertible, and it was a real successful execution. We're very proud that we were -- Goldman Sachs took the lead on that, and we couldn't be happier with the outcome.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric is a retail investor.

So I had a broader question. Given that this current administration is a lot more active about making strategic investments in critical mineral producers, including the Pentagon's equity stake in MP or the DOE's investment in Lithium America or the even more recent Westinghouse partnership. I was just wondering if you guys were in talks with the administration regarding any sort of strategic partnerships? Yes.

Yes. Look, that's a loaded question. But I think everybody in these critical minerals sort of sectors, whichever one they are, are in D.C. talking to the administration on what support might be available or not. Look, we're no different. I mean, we spend a lot of time in D.C. We're not prepared to speculate on what the U.S. government may or may not do. But I do believe that really, we've been driving our own bus. We've secured multiple projects. We're producing a lot of the elements that the government is interested in, whether it be uranium, the rare earths, even some of the heavy mineral sands elements are also critical elements. And we are just basically moving forward on our own strategy.

Does that mean that might be attractive to a government agency or potentially private entities that are interested in securing U.S. processed non-China material, I think it does. And that's where I'll pretty much leave it at that. So I just think we're positioning ourselves. We're playing the long game, and we'll see where we go from there. But yes, there are these investments that are going on. And just look at the assets we have and where we kind of fit into the picking the chain or food chain when you start looking at MP, Lynas, ourselves and others.

Your next question comes from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

I just wanted to really go back to your long-term contracting philosophy on the uranium side. I mean you have fresh capital. Utilities are out there discussing supply concerns. So I think you're uniquely positioned to sign baseload contracts that would really derisk production. So can you just speak to what percentage of 2026, 2027 production capacity you could target for term business? And what would be the remaining spot exposure?

Yes. Look, again, a tough one to fully quantify. Generally speaking, with my experience in this business, if you're not highly leveraged, I generally say 50% of both one or the other is not a bad place to be because you're either 50% right or 50% wrong, and you're not overcommitted. And we obviously are not overleveraged here from a debt perspective with our projects at the moment.

So -- but we also want to make sure that we don't have to put too much material on the spot market because it's really not really -- it's thinly traded, and we recognize that we don't want to hold back the spot price. So it's something that we discuss frequently, and it's how to position what new contracts that we're willing to commit to. I believe that the price uranium has to continue to increase because of the true cost of producing a pound of uranium currently isn't at that, say, $80 per pound-ish.

Yes, we're just going to play it by ear. But also at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, we currently use the mill to process both uranium and rare earths. And we're also looking at how if we decide or elect to process more rare earths and we're not going to process uranium that we don't overleverage ourselves in terms of too many long-term contracts. So it's that balance that we're looking at. But I think you can safely assume we're going to have 50% of our production contracted in some form, maybe a little bit more, but not less.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mark Chalmers for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Well, again, thank you, everyone, for your interest in Energy Fuels. It's been an exciting time for Energy Fuels. I mean you've looked at our share price and how it's appreciated over the last number of months. I think people are finally getting our strategy and the importance of our strategy. I don't think that we could ask for better timing when it comes to the realization by governments around the world that we've become overly dependent on Russia, China, and we plan to continue to execute. And so watch this space. We are focusing for the stars and doing things that are extraordinary.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.

Good morning. My name is Jeannie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Second Quarter 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Thank you. Mr. Chalmers, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Jeannie, and thank you for that introduction. Again, Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels, and thank you for joining our Q2 conference call today.

And I can say with absolute confidence that we had a big quarter with regard to momentum on many fronts, and I don't believe our timing could be any better; namely, rapidly advancement of our Uranium production with very high grades being mined, dropping unit cost, increasing production rates as we ramp up to 2 million pounds per year, and we expect the Pinyon Plain costs looking forward to be around $23 to $30 per pound of finished goods of Uranium, which are exceptional and Q1 cost.

We're also rapidly advancing our Rare Earths separations with the expansion of the White Mesa Mill Phase 2 and significantly improved Rare Earths pricing, particularly ex China, where the prices ex China for Dy and Tb are approximately 350% higher than China prices. And at the same time, NdPr prices are up about 20% in the mid-70s in the last month.

Our Heavy Mineral Sands portfolio is also rapidly advancing. So, there's no shortage of things to do at Energy Fuels. We received our final regulatory approvals on the Donald project, which is rich in heavies. We're also advancing our feasibility study and nearing the completion of our feasibility study on Toliara, and the other agreements with the Madagascar government and the permits and drilling at Bahia.

We have improving financial results, and we have strengthened balance sheet as compared to Q1 '25. Our cost and margins of Uranium production are improving materially as Pinyon Plain ore is planned to be processed starting in Q4. No Pinyon Plain ore has been processed as of this date.

As I typically do, I'm going to be making a short presentation to update listeners on the overall strategy of the company and the state of play of the company.

I believe that you're going to be controlling the slides. Is that correct? Kim there will be conference replays available at the completion of this conference call on the website. And as always, there will be time for presentations at the end of this presentation.

Nate Bennett, our CFO; and David Frydenlund, our Executive VP and Chief Legal Counsel, will be available for questions that I'm unable to answer. In addition, it is my pleasure to have Ross R. Bhappu, our new President, with us. While Ross is new to our organization, he is not new to mining. Feel free to ask questions of Ross at the end of the presentation on his past experience in the resource sector or his first impressions on day 4 with Energy Fuels.

So, let's get going. So again, our story is different because we are building a global critically significant critical mineral company. I always tell everybody; I love this picture. This is in San Juan County. It's not far from the White Mesa Mill, which is our critical mineral hub that is advancing in leaps and bounds.

Next slide. Okay. I may be making some forward-looking statements. Those are included on Page 2 of this presentation.

Next slide. Again, many of you have seen this, really Energy Fuels is basically 3 businesses in 1 with the 3 sectors that we've been advancing and focused and built around our core Uranium business, which, as I said, is ramping up very quickly and turning into immediate cash flow at large scale and low cost, I believe, largest scale and lowest cost in the entire United States and competitively lower quartile in the entire world. And we're very excited. We'll talk more about that. Certainly, the Rare Earths, we're emerging as a global leader on the Rare Earths fronts with our ability to separate NdPr, Dy and Tb and Heavy Mineral Sands with the Heavy Mineral Sands projects that we've acquired for titanium and zirconium minerals.

So really 3 sectors basically in one company, Energy Fuels, which those 3 in one equates to about 10 critical elements, which gives us broad diversification in sort of the peaks and valleys and the volatility of a lot of the critical minerals that we've seen over the last couple of years. But all 3 of these segments have one common denominator, and it has a natural occurring Uranium, which is all our basically significant advantage that we have as a company and our ability to deal with that at the White Mesa Mill.

Next slide. All of this is in demand. You're hearing about these critical minerals every day, whether it be for energy, defense, mobility, health or improvements in electrification. Uranium, certainly the focus on fuel for clean baseload energy, data centers, space travel, Uranium is back front and center globally and particularly in the United States and developing countries where you're now seeing bipartisan support.

Rare Earths Energy Fuels is becoming a leading producer of Rare Earths oxides also used in energy efficiency, automotive, advanced manufacturing, defense and robotics and other technologies. The Heavy Mineral Sands projects that we've acquired are world-scale, world-class and basically contain the titanium and zirconium minerals and monazite. So that is part of those 3 sectors that we have that all fit perfectly together.

We also are a leading producer of Vanadium, and we have a Vanadium circuit at the mill. It's currently not operating, but it is the only conventional Vanadium circuit in the United States, and it is also a critical mineral. Medical Isotopes, we're still advancing our R&D work on the potential to recover radium for emerging medical technologies.

Next slide. Uranium highlights. We're producing more Uranium than anybody else in the U.S. today. We're mining high-grade ore. As many of you will have seen in Q2, we mined newly mined ore of over 660,000 pounds of Uranium, which was from both the Pinyon Plain Mine, La Sal and Pandora Mines. Now if you extrapolate out that 665,000 pounds, that would be 2.7-million-pound rate. So again, we had very high grades at that point in time. We're not changing our guidance at this point in time, but it just gives some examples of capacity when the right stars align.

In 2025, our guidance, so we haven't changed it yet, is between 875 million to 1.4 million pounds of Uranium, newly mined Uranium, where you can see what we produced in a quarter. So we're really getting all the pieces in place when it comes to our mining, including additional trucks to haul the ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine to the mill. But again, this is all ramping up very quickly.

And working towards a 2-million-pound run rate, which many of you know I've been talking about for years, well, we're getting there. And this is a run rate that we don't require a lot of capital. We've already spent the capital, and it really is just getting the mining going, getting the miners hired, getting the reagents in place. And, but it is also going to be at very attractive costs. So, watch this space as we ramp up the mining, which then goes to processing.

So processing at the White Mesa mill, while we're also building significant inventories at the mill in the first half of the year, we produced 330,000 pounds of finished Uranium, and most of that was a mixture of La Sal ore, alternate feed and cleanup material. So it wasn't at this ultra-high grade that we have at the Pinyon Plain Mine. So for 2025, we expect to have finished Uranium between 700,000 pounds and 1 million pounds by the end of the year. And one of the reasons, if not more, is we're preparing the mill to run hard.

The mill has not been asked to run this hard for decades. So, there's a lot of work that's being done on the mill. There's a lot of ore that's being mined and delivered to the mill to get that material to be available for feed as the mill starts up. And we're also looking at things like critical spares because, again, the mill hasn't run this hard. So, there's a lot of work going on.

But when the mill is actually running with Pinyon Plain ore, it can be doing approximately between 230,000 and 250,000 pounds of finished Uranium per month that it runs. So, there is a bit of a lead lag between the time we mine things and we process things and we do a campaign run. And I think that's important, and we'll go into more detail today on that because it's important for investors and analysts to understand those dynamics.

Next slide. So Uranium moving forward, the newly mined ore I expect that we're going to be able to mine 1.6 million pounds per year or greater going forward from 2026. We still have a lot of exploration to do in the Juniper zone. But what we're seeing, we're super encouraged with the grades we're seeing, the increases in Uranium that we're finding in the main zone, the Juniper zone and literally pretty much everywhere we drill, we're seeing to find additional ore, but we have more work to do on that front.

The mill run, the next mill run is planned to be beginning of October, and that's going to go from the kind of Q4 into '26. With this mill run, the next mill run, we expect to produce between about 1.1 million to 1.4 million pounds of finished Uranium during that run. When you look at Pinyon Plain, and this is what's extraordinary.

On average, Pinyon Plain ore, mining and transport costs are expected to be $10 to $14 a pound recovered. That is remarkable. And when you look at that after it's processed, so now for $10 to $14 a pound, it's delivered. And then when you process that ore, the cost of processing about $13 to $16 per pound. So, when you combine those, that's when you get cost of $23 to $30 per pound recovered.

And we believe those are absolutely exceptional to our peers, not just in the United States, but globally. So right now, when you look at our cost of goods currently, we have 725,000 pounds in inventory of finished goods, and those are currently on the books between $50 and $55 per pound. And a lot of those pounds need to be sold at that cost of goods pricing at those prices because that was the cost of making those pounds.

So, as we ramp up our Uranium production, particularly with these lower cost of Pinyon Plain alternate feed and other mining feeds from wherever we're getting from Pandora or La Sal, we see these weighted costs to start dropping, and we expect them to be between $30 to $40 per pound in Q1 of '26. But as more Pinyon Plain ore is mined, these costs should continue to drop. So, we're in a position where we have to clear out the existing cost of goods in inventory to this transition as we ramp up our Uranium production and get the economics of scale and the benefits of the higher grades.

Next slide. So, Pinyon Plain, and I've said this to many of you, I built that mine in 38 years ago, and it is exceeding my expectations on every front with regard to the grades, the low cost and larger than originally expected with upside exploration potential.

In an earlier part of my career, I mined 4 breccia pipes. As a matter of fact, the largest, most successful breccia pipe ever mined on the Arizona strip was Hack 2, and it was about 7 million pounds of Uranium. And it is my hope that Pinyon Plain is going to be much better than Hack 2, but we still have exploration to do to further quantify that. But it absolutely has better grades than Hack 2. So that's a really great outcome for our company, particularly at this point in time.

So, we discussed, and I said, we mined over 600,000 pounds in the 3 months ending June 30, great outcome. The grades have been double, in some cases, triple what we expected in certain areas. There we likely believe that there's going to be more ore in what we call the main zone, and then we shift to the Juniper zone, which is lesser explored, and it starts just literally a few hundred feet, 100 to 200 feet below the main zone.

The recent exploration drilling that we've done has confirmed super high-grade areas just below the main zone. So we're driving drift down to that lower zone, and we'll be putting in additional drill stations to expand that. Approximately half of the breccia pipe that this ore is contained in has had very limited exploration. So that's why we're really encouraged about the upside.

So, in the little box, that little yellow box, I talked about the $23 to $30 per pound really commencing in Q4 of '25 and going into '26 as we are able to deplete this existing cost of goods sold that I mentioned at that $50 to $55 per pound and shift over to more Pinyon Plain ore, our cost of sales will drop materially.

And as I said before, and I want to repeat, none of the high grade from Pinyon Plain has been processed to date. We have to get that ore processed where we see those very low costs that I mentioned about getting that material to the mill at these exceptional costs.

Next slide. So we continue to grow our portfolio of long-term Uranium sales contracts. We have 4 existing contracts. We are continuing to look at other opportunities as they present and particularly as they present with the growing Uranium production that we are seeing and expecting this year and into next year and on for a number of years.

We have 300,000 pounds of contract deliveries that are happening in the last 2 quarters of this year. So you're going to see a real increase on our contract sales coming in strong, but we also have the ability to make spot sales if we elect to even in 2025, '26 going forward. We will have plenty of finished goods to do that if we elect to.

There has been a reluctance for us to put product into the market at like the $70 per pound. We did sell a small amount for $77 a pound. We still believe the price of Uranium is going up. And so we're going to just play that by ear, but we're really looking at ramping up our revenue stream and our margins over the next, literally over the next few months. We also have an agreement to purchase ore from a third-party miner, not too far from the mill, and we have ore coming in from that third party at this time.

Next slide. I flipped one page too soon. Okay. So we'll shift gears from Uranium to Rare Earths and Heavy Mineral Sands. As I said earlier, we're making rapid progress on that front and really getting a lot of recognition as an emerging rapidly expanding producer of Rare Earths oxides. NdPr that we've made with our Phase 1 run that we did last year is currently being validated with a number of metal alloy and magnet manufacturers.

We're very encouraged with the results that we're getting from that feedback. We announced the arrangement or the relationship with POSCO. We're piloting heavy Rare Earths as we speak, and we've had a few releases on that. We plan to have 1 kilogram of Dy oxide, 99.5 pure in August this month, expanding that to about 15 kilograms of Dy by October of '25 and then a kilogram of Tb expected 99.99% pure in October.

So all that information gives us the ability to have our plans solidly in place for going towards a commercial production plant quite rapidly as these things evolve. And we have the technical ability to produce all the Rare Earths oxides that are currently under Chinese export restrictions.

We are advancing the Phase 2 feasibility study at the mill. That should be completed October, November, and that increases the capacity to produce monazite or process monazite from 10,000 tonnes, which is our Phase 1 capability to 60,000 tons per year of monazite. And that is equivalent to Lynas scale. So this is a large-scale facility in the United States of America.

The final investment decision on Donald is still pending. It could be as early as December of '25, but it is fully permitted, shovel-ready Heavy Mineral Sands project with exceptional heavy Rare Earths oxides, very high grade, over 2% Dy and about 0.4% Tb.

So we're really excited about that and very few companies have fully permitted projects that are shovel-ready. We're also advancing Toliara project in Madagascar. We're advancing the final investment agreements under negotiation with the government and the Toliara feasibility study is very advanced and should be out fairly soon, but we got to make sure that we clear all the final reviews by legal and whatnot, particularly with regard to United States compliance. But the final investment decision for Toliara could be as early as 2026.

Next slide. Let's talk about monazite because monazite is our structural advantage in the Rare Earths business, the ability to process it at the White Mesa Mill, and it is simply a superior Rare Earths mineral concentrate. Super high grade, 50% to 60% more NdPr more mids, more heavies, lower cost, includes a credit for Uranium, easy to process and high recoveries, and we are the only facility in the United States that can process monazite.

Those pictures on the side, those are commercial scale recovery SX circuit. Most people are still doing things on a desk or on a lab scale, and this is a commercial facility that operates in below 1-ton bags, super sacks of NdPr, not in a beaker. So, we have proven our ability to produce NdPr at specification, and we're rapidly advancing the ability with our piloting and our future plans for commercial scale recovery of both the mid and the heavy Rare Earths oxides that could be used for defense needs.

Next slide. So growing leader in the industry. If you compare our market cap to MP and Lynas, we're the third largest publicly traded company outside of China in the world focused on these critical minerals and Rare Earths. I've talked about certainly the Rare Earths, the heavy Rare Earths are in high demand and the shortage because the world is so dependent on Rare Earths, heavy Rare Earths, particularly from China.

And we talked about the work that we're doing on the separations. We are, the Donald project is a world-leading heavy deposit in the [ Break ] [Technical Difficulty] Spot. Benchmark has done a new update of both in China and out of China prices. NdPr prices have gone up about 20% in the mid-70s, as I mentioned. But what is really extraordinary is benchmark is publicizing Dy prices in Europe of $800 per kilogram as compared to $230 in China.

So that's almost 3.5x higher for Dy. And when you look at Tb, it's effectively the same thing that the China price is around $1,000 per ton, but in Europe, it's $3,600, which is 3.6x. So, this is really an unusual circumstance that we have where people are saying they will pay more than China prices for products that are not coming out of China.

Next slide. So, this time line, many of you have seen this before, as we're advancing the Donald project, the Bahia project, the Toliara project, those all equate to Lynas scale in due course once those are fully permitted, constructed and operating. But at the bottom, I just want to highlight that we are ramping up this Uranium production from 2 million pounds in due course, could be up to 5 million pounds, while the Uranium sector of our business is generating cash, material cash. Material cash! And when you look at the margins that we can generate with the increased Uranium production and even current Uranium prices, it is extraordinary.

Next slide. We'll talk a bit about our financials. Next slide. So really producing low-cost Uranium end of June 30, developing Tier 1 critical mineral assets, maintaining a strong balance sheet. We had liquidity at the end of June 30 of over $250 million. That's about $253 million of working capital. A large component of that is cash, cash equivalents and liquid market securities and also inventories and various trade receivables.

The finished product inventory was nearly $60 million. And if you add that at current commodity prices, you could add about $13 million to liquidity. I talked about the finished goods of Uranium. We also have nearly 1 million pounds of Vanadium, 9,000 kilograms of separated NdPr and carbonate and, well, I should say, 9,000 kilograms of high-purity, partially separated mixed Rare Earths carbonate and 37,000 kilograms of separated NdPr in inventory.

No debt. We have a lot of assets and no debt, and that in itself is exceptional. We did have a net loss in Q2 really on a number of factors, but mainly we elected not to sell a bunch of Uranium due to the low and weak Uranium prices. We're also spending a lot of money on development and general operating costs to advance these 3 projects that we have.

The net loss was $22 million or $0.10 a share. That is an improvement from Q1, which was a net loss of $26 million and $0.13 a share. And as we start getting to this increased Uranium production, the Pinyon Plain ore and everything, you should see a very dramatic improvement because of the investments we've made and the positioning and the momentum that we're securing there.

We did sell 50,000 pounds of Uranium at $77 per pound. I think I've mentioned to a number of you that I don't want to sell Uranium below $80 a pound. We took a small sale there. But we, again, are focused on cash flow and our margins and moving the Uranium sector to profitability as quickly as we can. We did have a 31% margin on that material that we sold.

Next slide. Let's go back to the kind of the wrap-up on Uranium. We're actively mining ore, 3 conventional mines. We're actively processing Uranium ore, including alternate feeds and cleanup material at the mill, increasing levels of contract sales, as I mentioned, later this year into next year and building on that going forward. The cost of goods is going to go down, trending lower starting in Q4 with the low-cost Pinyon ore being processed.

We will opportunistically look at selling Uranium on the spot or in the midterm markets. Again, we'll play that by ear, but we are actively looking for a home for a lot of the Uranium that we'll have that will be marketable and sellable at short notice. We are increasing the Uranium production up to around that 2 million pounds plus.

And as I mentioned, we expect the Pinyon Plain mine to be producing 1.6 million pounds or greater. So you can see we're going to get there with alternate feed and the other feeds that we have from the other mines. We are advancing the permitting on 3 large-scale Uranium mines. We have the Roca Honda on the Fast-41 government list, and we can increase production over time beyond the 2 million pounds up to 4 million to 6 million pounds. And we're continuing to do the R&D on the radium recovery, which potentially can be used for Medical Isotope cancer treatments.

Next slide. So, we haven't materially changed our guidance on any front, but I do want to point out a few things because I think this slide says a lot and it's important, certainly for analysts that as we mine the Uranium, that doesn't mean it's instantly processed.

So, we have guidance of 875,000 pounds to 1.435 million pounds. But I want to point out, we did over 600,000 pounds in a single quarter. So, if we're mining Uranium at full tilt, we can get well past that. But we're keeping guidance where it is right now because we're ramping up our trucking and we're getting our mining fully in place. The alternate feed, we haven't changed anything, but alternate feed still is a very material part of our business, up to 200,000 pounds for the year.

The processing of Uranium, the 700 million to 1 million pounds. I talked about getting the mill ready, the critical spares ready. When the mill is running Pinyon Plain ore, 230,000 to 250,000 pounds of finished goods per month when the mill is running. So you can see you run it for 4 months or 6 months or 7 months or 8 months reliably and you get large quantities of finished goods at large margins.

Sales under contract and the small sale that we did earlier at 350,000 pounds, we are going to focus on making spot sales if it makes sense or additional contracts to find a home for some of that product.

Finished goods by the end of the year, and again, this could be subject to any spot sales, but between 900 million and 1.2 million pounds of finished goods. That is enough for all our contracts this year, next year, a matter of fact, all the way through next year, depending on how many pounds we sell under spot. So total inventories at the end of the year between about 2 million and 2.5 million pounds. Now if you go up just the next level above, you can see a big chunk of that is finished pounds, but it's also Pinyon Plain pounds, but are yet to be processed.

Next slide and last slide. 2025 activities for the Rare Earths and Heavy Mineral Sands. We are looking at potentially being in a position to commercially produce heavies in 2026 following our current Uranium run, but we definitely will have the piloting complete, and we'll be looking at how we can ramp that up in due course. And only Energy Fuels has unique capabilities and how we can respond and do a lot of these things that others can't do because of our unique capabilities at the White Mesa Mill.

The Phase 2 Rare Earths expansion at the White Mesa Mill, which is the complete separate facility separate from the Uranium mill, have the capacity of 6,000 tonnes of NdPr, which is 6,000 tonnes of monazite and also the ability to produce Dy and Tb, and we should have the feasibility study out in a few months' time.

We're currently piloting the heavies, as I mentioned, the Donald project FID could be as early as this year, later this year. Potential offtake sales financing options are being evaluated, including the increased cost and value, not cost, but value of the heavies. Toliara project, we're getting close to finalizing the feasibility study, but also could well be in a position to make a final investment decision as early as 2026.

We're pursuing the final agreements at Toliara that basically memorialize and formalize the fiscal terms with the government of Madagascar. And we're, the drilling at Brazil and permitting of the Bahia project is advancing. We hope to have a resource estimate soon later '25 or '26.

And front and center is developing a final comprehensive project financing strategy because we have a lot of projects, but we again are going to maximize this Uranium sector to generate as much cash as possible and take off some of the burn on these other 2 sectors that are developing rapidly.

So I'll stop there and say I'll now open it for questions that anybody might want to ask.

[Operator Instructions]

And your first question comes from the line of Nick Giles with B. Riley Securities.

My first question, obviously, there's a ton of excitement across Rare Earths. And I have to imagine others are trying to have discussions with agencies like the DoD that I think you hinted to last quarter for potential offtake in funding. So my question is really, what do you feel is the most critical differentiator, specifically in the eyes of those agencies that gives you a greater likelihood for either offtake or funding so on?

Well, I think we, when we say we're going to do something, we do it. And we also have the infrastructure to actually do it. You can take people to the White Mesa mill, and there's a built operable site with 100-plus people working there, laboratories, a Phase 1 separation circuit. You've got product that has been qualified by some of the end users. And you see the number of projects that we've accumulated.

I mean we're not just a one mine company. I mean we have Bahia, we have the Donald project. We have Toliara. We have an agreement with Chemours. We secured the monazite from Florida and Georgia. So what they see is scale, low cost infrastructure in place and the skills required to advance.

And I think that really sums it up at a high level. And you can go touch and feel it. It's interesting. A lot of people are in D.C. talking about their projects. Well, they don't have any project. They have a PowerPoint presentation. And we actually have a fully constructed site in multiple projects that are advancing in a lot of cases, permitted to advance. The molecules. We are the molecule machine and a lot of people are short of molecules.

Mark, I appreciate that perspective. Maybe just a follow-up. Can you just walk us through your plans to procure sufficient levels of feedstock as we think about processing as early as Q4 '26? I mean, should we think about this is coming from Chemours, or could you explore other sources outside the scope of energy fuels?

Yes, that's a good question because really on the Rare Earths front, and we're constrained on feedstock. I mean, right now, the only feedstock we have is what we get from Chemours. And they, once or twice a year, they send us a few hundred tons, and we're stockpiling. We're getting a fairly reasonable stockpile built up.

But there are other companies that come to us and ask if we would be willing to procure monazite from them, and it could be from pretty much any place in the world. A lot of them are shipping to China right now. There are companies from Australia and the United States that are still shipping monazite to China. It's not a good look.

So, we're always open to looking at what opportunities may be out there to procure additional material. and stockpile it at the White Mesa Mill and then run it in due course. So, it's dynamic. I don't have a complete answer there, but we're building up inventories. We're still talking to people about buying inventories. But once we get projects like the Donald project, if it passes the final investment decision, it gets built, then we start having world material commercial scales that are coming from our own operations that we can depend on because it will be coming at a regular rate and an expanding rate as we get these progressive projects in line and operating.

Your next question comes from the line of Heiko Ihle with H.C. Wainwright.

Congrats on another good quarter. It's been nice to watch you guys transform the farm over the last few years here. Let's talk about Pinyon Plain a little bit. The site is obviously a big driver for the farm right now. I mean I searched your press release and Pinyon Plain has mentioned 20 times in it. You mentioned $23 to $30 per pound in costs earlier on this call. And then in the release, you actually break it down $10 to $14 for transport and $13 to $16 for milling costs. Great margin at those prices. Let's talk about what things could move us from the lower to the upper end of this guidance range, if you'd be so kind. I mean, especially on the mining and transport, you got a 40% range. And is it labor? I mean you know the mine, sorry, the mill quite well. So I assume there's only so much variability there in that part.

Yes. Heiko, I mean, on the guidance, we're always trying to be conservative on our guidance. And I was trying to hint a bit that if we get 600,000 pounds in a quarter, we can put a lot of pounds out there or send it to the mill. Our biggest limitation has been the truck and trucking from the mill, and we're building that up. We currently have about 10 trucks per day, 5 days a week, and we're trying to get that up to, well, it will average no more than on an average on a daily basis, 7 days a week, no more than 10 trucks per day.

But that's really the limitation. I can tell you, if there was no limitation on the amount of ore that we're hauling from the mill or to the mill, we could be putting a lot of more Uranium down on the ground right now. But what we're doing is, as we're producing the Uranium, we're also doing the required development work down to the Juniper zone as we are advancing the development there so that we can put in additional drill stations and we can do more drilling. So we're trying to keep it balanced.

And, but yes, the trucking is the major impediment there, but we're working to resolve that, and we're building up momentum on that front. And also, it's grade dependent. So you have to have the trucks and you have to have the grade. The average grade we've mined thus far has been about 2%, which is very, very high grade. So you can get about 30 pounds per tonne in every truck. And so that's the reason for the range.

We hope to beat guidance, okay? But we haven't changed the guidance. And our goal is always to exceed guidance. But until we have all those pieces together, Heiko, we're being a little conservative.

Fair enough. Fair enough. It's, one can read between the lines here a little bit better now. You, completely different question. You have the strongest balance sheet the firm has ever had since I started following it the way it is right now. Arguably, this is even more impressive given your recent M&A. Conceptually, has your internal thought process on minimum cash or minimum working capital changed over the past, call it, 12 or 24 months?

Well, look, I mean, we've got a lot of activities, Heiko. And a lot of these activities could require cash in different shapes and form, whether it be an M&A transaction potentially. It could be some of the certification payments required for Toliara, which can take a pretty large load on us. I've always been of the believer to have a very strong balance sheet because Murphy is out there somewhere. But I think really from a management perspective and a Board perspective, the focus has been just to maintain that strong balance sheet to have plenty of cash and be in a position that we are not short cash because the last thing you want to be in this business is short cash, particularly when your success makes you short of cash, depending on what makes you short of cash.

Your next question comes from the line of Katie Lachapelle with Canaccord Genuity.

Two days ago, we actually saw some reports out of Australia that the Australian government is considering setting a floor price to support critical minerals projects, specifically Rare Earths. So that would be very similar to what the DoD did with MP Materials. I'm just wondering in your discussions with you and your partners at Astron, have you been in discussions with the Australian government regarding potential funding support for the Donald project or potential floor prices? And then similarly, do you also think you could see similar support from the U.S. government?

Yes, Katie, thanks for calling in. Yes, this whole world is talking about floor pricing to provide some protection to China manipulation and China costs. Yes, we have had discussions with Astron. I've had discussions with the Australian government on all these things similarly to what we've had discussions with the U.S. government. I think the realization is that you will never be able to material break away from China unless you have some level of support.

And so I'm very encouraged with these announcements and with what we're seeing with MP, because it just gives an insurance policy that China isn't going to flood the market and put you out of business. So it's all work in progress. I mean, really, when you think about it, the floor pricing discussions are fairly recent. They've come out over the last month or so, month or 2, but it obviously is getting additional traction.

So again, I think we're ideally placed. As I mentioned, when you look at MP and Lynas and we're the third largest market cap publicly traded Rare Earths company out there and you look at the scale that we have, I mean, I think we're just so well positioned that the activities we've had, Katie, over the last 5 years with the acquisitions and the advancement of our processing just puts us in a very, very unique position.

Definitely. And then maybe one follow-up on potential support from the U.S. government. are you of the view that the U.S. government will be more likely to allocate funding or support towards the expansion at White Mesa? Or do you think they would extend beyond the United States and actually look to potentially provide support on the development projects to Toliara and Donald?

Yes. Look, I think the U.S. government in the first instance, prefers to advance and fund projects that are in the United States. But you also have to get back to the realities of the United States. With the exception of Mountain Pass, there really aren't a lot of quality Rare Earths deposits in the United States. I mean you look at the monazite we get from Chemours in Florida and Georgia, it's high and heavies.

So, I think they prefer the United States, but they recognize they have to have a global footprint. I mean you look at how they've reached out to Australia in a number of cases, certainly Canada and even into Africa. The U.S. government is interested in securing reliable material scales so that they have some geographic diversity.

So, I mean, they prefer, but yet at the same time, the realities are there are not a lot of heavies in the United States of America, unless it comes really from the monazite. And in the case for us, you have the Donald project in Australia, which is high and heavy. So, but we think the appetite is there from a number of different angles with the U.S. government to help finance projects globally. And it could be floor prices alone would be sufficient.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Chan with SCP Resource Finance.

Congrats on being where the puck start being where the puck is starting to go early, strategies coming together. Just a few questions. One is on Astron and Donald. So just to confirm the financial side of things in FID, can I confirm that, so you will essentially make a payment if you both elect to go ahead with the project of AUD 183 million, and that will secure your 49%. And then that amount is payable towards your share of CapEx? Or would your share of CapEx for Donald be in addition to that $183 million?

No. The $183 million is really our buy-in to the project and the equity portion is really what is geared around. Both parties will have to pay their own debt portion pro rata on their share and any additional equity that might be required to obtain financing. So, but yes, really our buy-in. And Dave, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Yes. No, that's right. The $183 million would basically cover the equity contributions of both parties, and that would be our buy-in. Our buy-in would be paying Astron's equity contribution, and then we would pay our own, and that would all total to $183 million. And as Mark says, if that increases at all due to financing needs, that would be paid pro rata by the partner.

So basically, our buy-in on that project was about $60 million or thereabouts. And so far, I mean, with some of the prefit work and everything, I think we've invested about $20 million or something around that at this point in time. So yes, we're pleased that we have that project, and we have that project permitted and it's at a good address in Australia and permitted.

Got you. So that, just to make sure I'm clear on this. So that $183 million goes into, let's say, the Donald Project Co? Or does that go to Astron? And then I'm just trying to calculate like what the balance to fund is.

Yes. It goes into the joint venture.

Right. That $183 million is available for both of you?

Yes, the $183 million goes into expenditures by the joint venture in advancing the project. Right.

I see. So, you could effectively as a group, debt fund the remainder then?

Yes, absolutely. Yes. As Mark said, that's Australian dollars. They're a lot smaller than U.S. dollars.

Yes. Okay. Got you. And then could you maybe talk us towards sort of what the next steps are for confirming FID there now that it's got its permits? Is it just investigating offtake? There was a revised capital estimate, I think, less than a year ago. I'm just curious what the next steps are.

Yes. It's really focused on bankable offtakes, both for the Heavy Mineral Sands and the Rare Earths products is really what it boils down to. And we're looking at that in relationship to the capital operating costs, returns on the project. So that's really the bit is getting the bankable offtakes, securing financing and getting the position, the project ready to go, [Break] [Technical Difficulty] but it's not over until you get all the money to do the project. it is relative to the Rare Earths world, it's a pretty small strike rate. I mean if you look at in U.S. dollars, it's around $300 million for the project, the combined both parties in terms of, so yes, watch this space, Justin, but we've really got to get the bankable offtakes and be in a position to get the financing to make the FID decision.

Got you. And maybe just a bit more color on that. So is it offtakes more on the titanium and zircon products or on the Rare Earths side of things or both?

Both.

Okay. Perfect. And then on Pinyon Plain, especially, I mean, you've been way outperforming the reserve grade. The drilling has been encouraging. Just wondering what your time lines are on putting out an updated either reserve or mine plan to help the market kind of start pricing this into the long-term outlook for your company?

Yes. We've got SOR working on that right now. I don't know, Dave, have you heard the exact time line on that. I mean they've got some stuff that's still into the laboratories for analysis and they're pulling together. What's interesting about the Pinyon Plain, and Justin, you'll appreciate this, is that the, what we think we're seeing is that when the original modeling was done, the model constrained on high grades and the area influence of the high grades to be conservative.

And what we've seen and what we think we've seen is that we didn't need to constrain it because those high grades actually were, could be projected out for quite a large distance. So that's why we're getting this significant increase. Also, even though we've done drilling in the Juniper zone, as I mentioned, over half of that Juniper zone still has a whole pile of drilling to do. So, I think what you're going to see fairly soon, probably, I'm guessing by the end of the year, an update on the resource and then there's going to be this geologic potential to expand this further.

And what you're also seeing is that when you look at some of these grades like 5%, 7%, you can fit a lot of Uranium in a very small space like you see in Athabasca. Effectively, the Pinyon Plain mine is a miniature Athabasca mine with the grades that we're seeing, and it doesn't take a lot of space to hide a lot of pounds if it's very high grade.

Absolutely. Yes, it's doing great. Just can't wait for, I guess, more data to just price it into the long term. And then just one on, I guess, Toliara and maybe the Rare Earths master plan here. In terms of, I guess, pressing the button on the Phase 2 expansion for White Mesa, you imagine that you would, that would be around the same time as FID on Toliara, i.e., you're mentioning you could make that decision next year?

Yes. I mean, right now, our main focus is on the projects that we have that are fully permitted and can go forward right now. So, when you have Donald, you have the ability to receive material from Chemours and you can receive from others. And then you look at where we are with the White Mesa Mill. Now we still have to submit our Phase 2 documentation to the state of Utah for final approval. I don't believe that we may pull the trigger on Phase 2 even without all the permits in place on Toliara.

Now in the perfect world, we'd like to have both, right? But it takes time and how we phase things is still work in progress, Justin. But we want to have the larger scale. We want to have the separate plant and the ability to process both Uranium ores unimpeded and Rare Earths ores unimpeded as soon as we can. And we'll just be evaluating how best to do that. So just quickly, the Pinyon Plain resource update should be December, not to change topics. But we see the expansion of the White Mesa Mill in the United States is something very attractive for whether it be the government or even private parties because of its ability to produce monazite. And we'll just see how that unfolds with the various other projects we have.

Your next question comes from the line of Zach Perry with Robertson Stephens.

Mark, congratulations on another good quarter. People have really kind of hoped at the financing of Rare Earths, obviously, is a big geopolitical game, as I've always said. And I hate to have you try to read the mind of the government. But does the U.S. government understand both the structure of your supply chain, what you need to do? And if you get to scale your superior volume and cost structure? Because if so, you would think that you guys would be a very high priority after they sort of walked in with saving MP.

Yes. Look, Zach, thanks for calling in. I think with the U.S. government, it's part of it's an education process because most of the people in the U.S. government are not like Rare Earths technically skilled mining engineers, processing engineers. I mean they have some of that. But, and you just have to keep telling your story and showing that you can advance your story.

And I think, though, it is resonating with them that there are a lot of stories out there, but there really are only a handful of legitimate stories. I mean a lot of them are more hopes and wishes, and we can do it if you give us money stories, and we're not that. So I think that they're getting more up to speed with how this market interrelates and the importance of each step. And I think they're also aware that they can't have investment in a single project that they have to have multiple projects because, as you know, Zach, a lot of projects will fail or underproduce, or may never produce.

So I think they're getting up to speed. But what's remarkable is how keen they are to reshore a lot of these capabilities and get world-scale molecules and not just world-scale molecules for the Defense Department in the U.S., but countries like Canada and the European Union, even places like Japan, they need molecules, too. And you don't have those mines in Europe and you don't have those mines in Japan. So it's kind of a global issue. So I think they're getting it more, but it's been a learning process, and it's been a learning process for a lot of people.

Got it. And could your time lines be sped up if the government push fast forward on their support?

Look, money can speed up a lot of things. But you also have to look at the practicalities, too, because you have things like how much can you speed up the permitting, how much can you speed up the construction and long lead times and things like that.

So yes, it can be sped up. The question is how much. And, but what's interesting and unique for us is, for example, we have the Phase 1. It's already constructed, and we have Donald permitted. So we can speed up at least to the capacity of Phase 1 for the lights and potentially the heavies quicker than others can.

So that's a unique position that Energy Fuels can do Uranium. It can do the Rare Earths at the Phase 1 scale, and/or in the future at the Phase 2 scale. So we have stepping stones that others don't have.

Got it. And then real quick on Uranium. Congrats on proving an incredible cost structure. Now Uranium market has sort of been in a Mexican standoff for, I feel like a couple of years in terms of pricing. Pricing has gone up a lot, but we haven't seen true contracting at what you would expect high prices needed to create increased supply. And obviously, I think that's what you're waiting for. What actually finally breaks that standoff where you actually see contract pricing come in at volume at a price that we might think clears the market?

I think it's just the beginning, but I think that the utilities are starting to see where a number of new producers are failing to deliver on time and are struggling. And we've seen that starting to emerge over the last year. And a lot of the discussions we have with utilities is that they need more product. In our case, they flexed up on some of our contracts because they're short of material from new producers that are not producing.

So, I mean, there is a pretty active market right now. I mean we're getting quite a few RFPs coming in. And again, the term prices are $80 or even higher. So, you do have a higher term price than the spot, which I think reflects that the utilities believe that the price is going to be higher. and the ceilings are going higher, and the floors are coming up. So, I think all the pieces are in place to see these improvements in the spot price and the term price going forward.

Your next question comes from the line of Noel Parks with Tuohy Brothers Investment Research.

Just a couple. I just wonder, and I apologize if you touched on this earlier, but could you just talk a little bit about, there's still all the excitement with the SMRs versus the different projects for restarting existing legacy reactors. And could you just talk a little bit about sort of a reality check on the legacy versus the SMRs and their sort of their impact on Uranium demand because I feel like they tend to get sort of discussed as a little bit lumped together. So, any thoughts there would be great.

Yes. No. Look, the quickest way to increase demand is restart a reactor that's already built. And I think that's surprising people because you're seeing even reactors in the United States that are being restarted. I mean you look at Japan, Japan shut down all these reactors after Fukushima and they're restarting them.

So, the demand is going to increase quicker with restarts because given 6 months or a year or 2 years, they can restart and they have to be reloaded and you see that where they have to go out and buy the Uranium.

SMRs are ways off, quite a ways off. And so, I think the disconnect is that it's just that, the existing, it's really no different. If you have a permitted mill, you can do something with it. If you don't have a permitted mill, you can't. So, when you look at from the mining or processing side of things.

So yes, I see the restarts as immediate demand, and you can bank on that, particularly when you see big tech companies putting the money into the restarts and the utilities signing an agreement. That's the way to get the demand up quicker. And SMRs are work in progress and you're looking out probably at least 2030-ish or so before that starts to become a real factor. But it takes time for all these things. It doesn't matter if you're mining or you're doing nuclear power plants. It takes a lot of time to get the permits and to build them. And, but I'm really encouraged with what I'm seeing with restarts.

Great. And just to clarify a bit for me. So is there a time horizon, and I know I'm asking you to predict the future, which is always hazardous. But do you have a sense of a threshold where perhaps the SMRs, some of those go into FID, their plans become more concrete where the market starts to sort of backfill a bit and start thinking about what premium, what sort of time premium really should be built into the price to sort of make sure that wherever the demand is coming from, that any given party can lock in supply and not be the last one trying to crowd through the door. And any sense of in advance of the SMR going live that you could see the pricing ripple into the market?

Yes. Look, I think that the best way to get a handle on that is you go to TradeTech or UX, and they have forecasts that are a lot more scientific than I can give you over the phone or on this call. But I do see this that I, and after being in the business for coming up on 50 years, I don't know how we're going to fill the demand, with new Uranium projects.

And I think when you look at existing projects that are becoming mined out and have to be replaced, whether it is anywhere around the world, if you start to double the demand for nuclear fuel products, you're going to have to double the mining of new Uranium. And people haven't explored for Uranium for decades in any material way, and I don't know where it's going to come. So I think all these pieces, including the restarts, SMRs, but also the build rate in China, I don't know where they're going to get all their fuel.

Your next question comes from the line of Gary Steele.

I hope you can hear me all right.

I do, Gary. Thanks for calling in.

Absolutely. Absolutely exciting quarter beyond belief after having watched the company for many years, what a treat. A couple of questions. With all the press and excitement around this Ramaco thing up in Ranchester, Wyoming and of course, Mountain Pass, is there anything you can share or would be at liberty to share regarding any synergies or opportunities with those 2 projects?

See, I have to think about that, Gary. I think, again, we go back to this differentiator being monazite, monazite sands, very high grade, good distributions of NdPr and heavies and the economics. So I mean, our strategy is different than theirs. And for me, as a mining engineer, grade is always keen when you're processing things.

So yes, I mean, I don't really know the synergies between the groups other than we will have probably likely more heavies than any of them with the projects we have and the monazite deposits we have. But everybody in the Rare Earths space is getting attention right now. And I do think that the realities of the cost of production and the grade of these deposits is really going to, something that's important in the scheme and the economics going forward.

And we know with what we've done thus far and the monazite that we've received and the project we have that we're going to be a low-cost producer. So we're focusing on being a low-cost producer. And the others will have to do their studies and make sure they can process and do the things that they say they're going to do.

Sure. Another totally separate question. I assume that your Uranium runs and your Rare Earths runs have to be done separately and involve a cleanout and turnaround between runs. Is that accurate?

Yes. We're trying to be flexible here. Right now, and just conceptually, when we talk those 2 million pounds per year or thereabouts, that's about an 8-month run or 9-month run. And we can have a window between that run, a Uranium run and the next Uranium run and a Rare Earths run. So, but we're going to be flexible because we can generate really exceptional margins on the Uranium.

We've got to have enough Rare Earths feed to justify a run, but it does take time to switch over. I mean the mill; you don't just flip a switch. It probably takes a month to retrofit and take certain equipment out of the tanks and whatnot about a month each direction. So, we want to minimalize that as much as possible, but we really want to make sure that we're really focused on our best margins for our shareholders going forward. But we have the ability to do both, but it isn't a switch, until we have Phase 2, okay? Phase 2 will be completely separate, and they can both run independently, and then we will not have to do that.

So Phase 2 will add new front end to the SX circuit so that you can run both materials independently from one another?

Correct. Completely independent. And Gary, you know this. The mill has not been ran at capacity for a lot of years. And I think that our best years are ahead of us because I think we are going to need to run both our facilities at or near capacity going forward, including the Phase 2 plant.

And your final question comes from the line of Aaron Vadakkan with Alta.

Congrats on all the progress this quarter. I was, I'm glad you brought up the benchmark ex-China pricing. It's really exciting and something that I've been looking at, too. I was just wondering if you could share how those prices and how those changes have impacted your offtake conversations?

Well, the benchmark prices came out a week ago or so. So, it's recent, okay? But what's interesting, I did get a text message this morning from another forecaster and said, they think they're low, okay? They are actually higher.

No, I haven't verified that. So, I mean, I think it kind of goes back to this whole story on these floor prices that people are realizing that you got to pay more if you're going to compete with China. And I have to admit, it surprised me when you had 350% more with this first publication.

So, I mean, it's certainly not going to hurt them. And we think that this whole concept you have to pay more is a reality. And I think that's gaining traction. I think the MP deal proves that the government thinks you have to pay more. And let's see where it goes. But the Australian government talking about floor prices, I think everybody is just realizing that there's got to be a different market. Otherwise, you're truly not independent.

I just want to thank you all for calling in, for watching the webcast. We very much appreciate your participation. I just want to remind and let everybody know that our management team will be attending several upcoming industry and investor conferences. I'm just going to run through a couple of them very quickly.

It will be the Citi’s 2025 Natural Resources Conference, EnerCom Denver, U2025 Global Uranium Symposium, the World Nuclear Symposium 50; Jefferies Industrials 2025, the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference, the Pinyon Plain Institute, Critical Minerals Symposium, Uranium Summit, and the Power Up BNP Paribas.

So thank you again, and we'll try and get all of that information uploaded onto our website so everybody can follow along. And now Mark will just say a few closing words.

Yes. Again, thank you for those of you who joined. I think that really the closing words I have is we've been playing a long game. We're not playing short games, flash in the pan. We've been focused on Uranium for decades or at least the assets have. But when we added the Rare Earths, I mean, we started a journey about 5 years ago. We held to that. There were criticisms from people that we shouldn't be getting into Rare Earths critical minerals. And it's interesting because a lot of them are calling me up now and saying, "Wow, that was great. Why didn't, we're happy you did that.

So, we are focused on continuing the journey to build a world significant cost competitive critical mineral company that has 10-plus critical minerals that can be produced commercially and at scale. And really, I don't know anybody who's done that. So it's been a unique strategy. We're starting to bear the fruits of that. And even with our Uranium peers, year-to-date, we've been the best producing Uranium share this year, year-to-date.

And even when you look back a year or even start looking back over 5 years, we have outperformed our peers in many cases in the Uranium space. We're performing well in terms of our peers in the Rare Earths space. So this is not an accident. It's a strategy that we've been committed to and will continue to be committed to.

So thank you very much. Thank you for participating in the Energy Fuels conference call. Please reach out to the company directly for any additional investment questions. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and welcome to the Energy Fuels Inc.'s 2025 Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders. Please note that this meeting is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

Good morning, everyone, and welcome again to the 2025 Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders of Energy Fuels Inc. My name is Birks Bovaird. I'm speaking to you from Lakewood, Colorado. I'm the Chair of Energy Fuels Board of Directors, and I will act as Chair of this meeting. The Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of the company, Dave Frydenlund, will act as the Secretary of the meeting. Also with us today are Mark Chalmers, President and Chief Executive Officer; Curtis Moore, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development; Nathan Bennett, Chief Financial Officer; and Katherine Miner, KPMG Audit Partner of the company.

I'd also like to acknowledge our Board of Directors, all of whom are here in attendance with us today with the exception of one who is logging in from France.

This is Mark Chalmers, President and CEO of Energy Fuels. We welcome each of you to this year's meeting, which we are pleased to be holding virtually so that you, our shareholders and guests can meaningfully engage with us from the convenience of your own homes and offices.

We welcome your participation throughout the meeting and may pause intermittently to accommodate questions on the matters before you today. After the official business has concluded, I will invite you to stay on for my presentation, during which I am pleased to share with you our vision for the company as we continue our diversification and global expansion strategy to create a worldwide critical mineral hub focused on our White Mesa Mill in the United States U.S.A.

This is David Frydenlund, Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary of Energy Fuels. This meeting is held in accordance with the Ontario Business Corporations Act, which permits shareholder meetings by electronic means. Under the act, this meeting is deemed to be held in Toronto, Ontario since that is where our registered office is located.

Should you wish to submit a question during the meeting, please click on the messaging icon on the top left side of your screen, type your question into the text box, then click the send icon. Please note that in the interest of all shareholders, we will only address those questions that are pertinent to the business of the meeting.

If you are eligible to vote at this meeting and have already voted your shares and do not wish to change your vote, no action is required at this time. If you are eligible to vote at this meeting and have not yet voted or would like to change your vote, you may do so by clicking the proxy voting site link on the left side of your screen.

Only shareholders and proxy holders who have been provided an 11-digit control number located on the form of proxy you have received or obtained from your broker are entitled to vote at this meeting. If there are any registered shareholders or duly appointed proxy holders who have inadvertently logged into the meeting as a guest, but intend to vote by online ballot during the meeting, please log back into the meeting as a registered shareholder or duly appointed proxy holder as per the instructions provided to you.

The 2025 Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders of Energy Fuels Inc. will now come to order. To make the best use of our time, certain shareholders have been asked to move and second the resolutions, which we will consider here today and which are set out in the notice of meeting. This will allow more time for voting as well as any questions and comments later in the meeting.

We welcome both shareholders and meeting guests to submit questions as they arise, though we may address them at a later point in the meeting or on a private basis depending on subject matter. We will pause periodically throughout the meeting to review questions directly related to any of the motions of the meeting, during which you will have -- may experience brief periods of silence.

Subject to any time constraints, general questions relating to the company's business and operations will be addressed after the CEO's presentation following the meeting. Duplicate or similar questions may be consolidated and paraphrased when read aloud in order to minimize repeat answers.

We will conduct the votes on the matters before us by a poll. In this format, every shareholder or proxy holder who has been provided an 11-digit control number and is therefore entitled to vote on the matter has one vote in respect of each share entitled to be voted at the matter and held by that shareholder.

If you have previously voted by proxy, please note that voting in the poll will void your previously cast votes, and any votes submitted here will govern. We note that the proxies received to date indicate that the company has sufficient votes to pass all matters in accordance with the recommendations of management.

The poll will be open for all resolutions at the same time. This will allow you to vote either on each resolution immediately or wait until the conclusion of discussions on all resolutions prior to casting your vote on any of the resolutions.

Your votes may be changed until voting is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting. Equiniti Trust Company, LLC will act as virtual scrutineer of this meeting to report on the shareholders present virtually and by the number of securities represented virtually and by proxy at this meeting and any adjournment thereof to compute the votes cast by proxy and by the poll conducted at this meeting or any adjournment thereof and to report to me on these matters.

The notice of Internet availability of proxy materials was mailed to all registered shareholders and was also mailed or notice was delivered in accordance with the notice and access requirements to all nonregistered shareholders in accordance with Rule 14A-16 of the United States Securities Exchange Act 1934. Accordingly, the company is also in compliance with the Canadian National Instrument 51-102, subpart 9.1.5, which allows compliance with SEC notice and access rules.

The affidavit of mailing has been duly filed, and I direct that the affidavit be attached to the minutes of this meeting as a schedule. If you're entitled to vote at the meeting, you may address the meeting when there is a call to discuss a motion before the meeting.

Should a shareholder or proxy holder entitled to vote at the meeting like to address the Chair or any other speaker on any motion, please type in your question or comment in the message section provided on your screen. Subject to time constraints and the applicability of the matters being discussed, the secretary or another speaker may read the question aloud and provide a response during the course of the meeting.

As previously noted, duplicate or similar questions may be consolidated and paraphrased when read aloud in order to minimize repeat answers. A quorum for the transaction of business at a meeting of shareholders is at least 2 persons present, in this case virtually, each being a shareholder entitled to vote at the meeting or a duly appointed proxy holder or representative for an absent shareholder so entitled. I will now ask the Secretary to report on attendance at the meeting.

Mr. Chair, we are pleased to report that there are 116 shareholders holding 109,225,842 common shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting. This represents 50.84% of the over 214 million issued and outstanding common shares.

Thank you, Mr. Frydenlund. I declare that the requisite quorum of shareholders is present and that the meeting is properly constituted for the transaction of business. I direct that the final scrutineer's report on attendance be annexed to the minutes of the meeting as a schedule.

The first item of business is the presentation of the financial statements of the company for the year ended December 31, 2024, together with the auditor's report thereon. Copies of the financial statements have been publicly filed and mailed to all shareholders who requested them. Are there any questions concerning the financial statements?

This is Curtis Moore, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you, Mr. Moore. As there are no questions, receipt and presentation of the financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2024, is hereby acknowledged.

The next item of business is the election of directors. It's proposed that 11 directors be elected at this meeting. As described in our proxy statement, the company has adopted a majority voting policy that provides for individual director voting by the shareholders.

Under the policy, if any nominee director receives a greater number of votes withheld than votes for election, such nominee director will tender his or her resignation for consideration by the Board of Directors following the meeting.

In addition, the company's bylaws require that shareholders submit a notice of director nominations at least 35 days and not more than 65 days prior to the annual meeting. No notice of nominations was received by the company within the specified time period. May I have a motion to nominate individuals recommended by the Board of Directors?

Mr. Chairman, this is Mark Chalmers. I nominate for election as directors of the company for the ensuing year the following 11 persons whose nominations have been authorized by the Board of Directors. J. Birks Bovaird, Mark S. Chalmers, Benjamin Eshleman III, Ivy Estabrooke, Barb Filas, Bruce Hansen, Jaqueline Herrera, Dennis Higgs, Robert Kirkwood, Alexander Morrison and Michael Stirzaker.

As no other nominations were received by the company in accordance with the advanced notice provisions of the company's bylaws, I now declare the nominations closed. All of the nominees have signified their consent to act as directors of the company. May I have a motion in respect of the election of the nominees as directors?

This is Mark Chalmers. I move that the individuals I have nominated be elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed.

This is David Frydenlund. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

As there are no questions, I now call for a vote on the motions before the meeting -- the motion before the meeting. All persons eligible to vote may enter their votes by clicking on the proxy voting site link on the left side of your screen at this time. You may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting.

The next item of business is the appointment of auditors. As described in our proxy statement, management is proposing that KPMG LLP, an independent registered public accounting firm located in Denver, Colorado, be reappointed as auditors of the company for 2025. I now ask someone to make a motion.

Mr. Chairman, this is Mark Chalmers. I move that KPMG LLP of Denver, Colorado, an independent registered public accounting firm, be appointed as auditors of the company until the next annual meeting of the company at such remuneration as shall be fixed by the Board of Directors.

This is David Frydenlund. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

This is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

As there are no questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All persons eligible to vote may enter their votes by clicking on the proxy voting site link on the left side of your screen at this time. You may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting.

The next item of business is the consideration and, if deemed appropriate, the ratification and approval of the amendment of the company's Omnibus Equity Incentive Compensation Plan to increase share authorization limits as described in the proxy statement. To be effective, this resolution must be approved by a simple majority of the votes cast. I now ask someone to make a motion.

Mr. Chairman, this is Mark Chalmers. I move that the ordinary resolution of the shareholders of the company in the form set out in the proxy statement ratifying and approving the amendment of the company's Omnibus Equity Incentive Compensation Plan to increase share authorization limits as described in the proxy statement be approved.

This is David Frydenlund. I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion on this motion?

Mr. Chairman, this is Curtis Moore. There are no questions at this time.

Thank you. As there are no questions, I now call for a vote on the motion before the meeting. All persons eligible to vote may enter their vote in Lumi at this time as indicated on your screens. You may cast or change your vote until the poll for all proposals is closed just prior to the termination of the meeting.

If you have not yet cast your vote on any of the matters to be voted on at this meeting, you must now cast your votes. I will pause for about 30 seconds to allow time for all votes to be cast.

[Voting]

Based on the preliminary scrutineer's report, proxies were received from a sufficient number of shares relative to the total number of votes cast at the meeting such that I declare the following: one, with respect to the election of directors, I declare the motion carried and confirm that all of the nominees have been elected as directors of the company to hold office until the close of the next Annual Meeting of the Shareholders or until their successors are duly elected or appointed.

Each of the nominees for director received more votes for than the number of votes withheld. And accordingly, each of the directors has been duly elected, and none of the directors is required to tender his or her resignation under the majority voting policy.

Two, with respect to the appointment of KPMG LLP of Denver, Colorado, an independent registered public accounting firm, as auditors of the company until the next Annual Meeting of the shareholders at such remuneration as shall be fixed by the directors, I declare the motion carried.

Three, with respect to the ratification and approval of the amendment of the company's Omnibus Equity Incentive compensation plan to increase share authorization limits, I declare the motion carried. I hereby direct that a copy of the scrutineers' final voting results be annexed to the minutes of the meeting that a report on voting results be filed on SEDAR in accordance with Section 11.3 of National Instrument 51-102 continuous disclosure obligations and then a Form 8-K in accordance with Item 5.07 be filed on EDGAR pursuant to the filing requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

That concludes the scheduled business of this meeting. Is there any other business that anyone entitled to vote at this meeting wishes to bring to the attention of the meeting?

Mr. Chairman, this is Curtis Moore. There is no further business to be brought before this meeting.

Mr. Moore, as there is no further business, I declare the meeting terminated. The formal part of this Annual and Special Meeting of Shareholders is now adjourned. I invite you to stay online for a presentation on the company's activities to be given by Mark Chalmers, the President and CEO of the company.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm very excited to give an update on the company's activities, which have been extraordinary. And I may be making some forward-looking statements as given on this page, and those are included as part of the presentation.

Next slide. When you look at Energy Fuels, and I think everyone that's a shareholder is aware of sort of the remarkable transformation that we've made over the last few years and we're focused on building a globally significant critical minerals company.

And so when you make an investment in Energy Fuels, you really are making investment in 3 different companies with the foundation being the uranium business in that first part. Uranium has always been our foundation, and it will continue to be our foundation, and we'll talk more about it, but we're making, again, outstanding progress as we ramp up our uranium production.

The rare earth elements, as many of you are aware, we got into the rare earth business about 4, 5 years ago because the best rare earth feeds contained uranium, and we could process that and recover the uranium at the White Mesa Mill.

And then lastly, the heavy mineral sands. Now the best feeds of rare earths, monazite are a byproduct of the heavy mineral sand business, and we've aggressively been advancing that to become a global emerging producer of titanium and zirconium. So when you have an investment or a shareholding in Energy Fuels, you get all 3 of those. And again, the common thread is the natural containing uranium that is found on all 3 of those business sectors.

Next slide. So again, when you look at the world as our oyster, well, it really is because you look at the -- in blue, which is really our core assets that the company was built around over decades, previously. And we still have those.

When you look at the conventional mining operations and mainly the Western United States, also our in situ operation in Wyoming and our headquarters in Denver and of course, the White Mesa Mill in Utah, where we can process the conventional ores and also process the rare earths.

So in the Northern Hemisphere, the focus on uranium, vanadium and the processing of rare earths and the hydrometallurgy is really what we're focused on in the Northern Hemisphere. Now in the Southern Hemisphere, we are focused on the heavy mineral sands and the heavy mineral sand opportunities that we've accumulated are world significant.

We now have an office in Perth with a very capable team of people that have worked in the heavy mineral sand business for decades. And the acquisition of the base resources on October 2 of '24, which includes the Toliara project to help advance both the Donald joint venture that we have and the Bahia project in Brazil has been an outstanding opportunity to have two management teams, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere.

Next slide. So this graphic is sort of an attempt to explain where White Mesa fits into the mix in the center and how we're building this complementary critical mineral production suite and where things go. In the blue, you have the uranium and vanadium ores. And that is what is currently or most recently been processed at the White Mesa Mill. And that -- those feed streams come from the Pinyon Plain Mine, the La Sal complex, in time, the Roca Honda Bullfrog projects and even some of the final packaging of Nichols Ranch ISR slurry when that project is operating.

So what you have there is you have the mill in the center, the single facility that can take the uranium ores, process them and recover uranium and vanadium. And to the right, you have the end products, which is the uranium, vanadium and potentially medical isotopes.

Well, we retrofit the mill a few years ago, as many of you are aware of, what we call our Phase 1 process capabilities, and that is the yellow, and that it shares the mill processing infrastructure. So any time we receive monazite concentrates, and we're not running uranium ore and we decide to do a rare earth run, we can convert the mill to process the rare earths. And I think that is the only example in the world currently of anybody that can do that.

So the rare earth, the monazite or xenotime comes in, gets processed and comes out as rare earth oxides, and that all is dependent on how we orchestrate the mill processing. The heavy mineral sands, rutile, ilmenite and zircon, which eventually will be coming from Toliara, the Donald project, Bahia and Chemours, where we're currently receiving feed, don't have to go through the mill. So that's where these other titanium zirconium products go, but are not dependent on the mill.

Next slide. So some of our uranium highlights. We have the three mines that are up and running and actively processing at the mill. In Q1, in the uranium mines, we produced about 115,000 pounds of uranium as we're ramping up the Pinyon Plain Mine, the La Sal mine and the Pandora mines. It's now being stockpiled at the mill.

In 2025, as the whole year, we're expected to mine somewhere between that 875 million to 1.4 million pounds of uranium and about 55,000 to 80,000 tonnes of ore. And so that's ramping up very quickly. In April and May, at the Pinyon Plain Mine alone, we produced 400,000 pounds of mined new ore. Well, that's a lot. I mean, if you extrapolated that over 12 months, it would be 2.4 million pounds.

Now we still have some work to do as we're getting enough trucks to haul that ore to the mill, but we are really moving in leaps and bounds on our conventional mining. We are focused on, as we've told the market many times, to get up to about that 2 million pound per year production rate, which we can do with very limited capital, and we're making leaps and bounds of progress there as we speak.

So once this ore is mined, it has to be processed at the White Mesa mill. And in Q1 '25, we processed 150,000 pounds. But by the end of the year, we hope to process up to 1 million pounds. But as the mining continues to ramp up, that allows and provides additional feed for the mill to ramp up as well.

So there's a little lead lag there, but it will catch up quite quickly as we run the mill because the mill is hungry. The mill can process up to 2,000 tonnes a day of ore, and it historically has been able to process faster than you can mine the feed for. So again, making great strides there.

Next slide. So again, with the improved outlook and support in the nuclear fuel industry and the growing need for uranium, particularly uranium from the United States of America, we're continuing to grow our portfolio of long-term uranium sales contracts. These contracts, and we have 4 currently with 3 different utilities have fixed and market price components, floor ceilings escalated for inflation and the deliveries in those contracts go from 2025 to 2030.

Our -- one of our contracts or contracts due in '25 have flexed up. So that means that the utilities have asked to go to the upper margin on the delivery quantities, and that is now 300,000 pounds. I think previously, we had said it was 220,000 pounds. And part of that is because the utilities need more uranium.

We also entered into an agreement with a third-party miner that is providing feed to the White Mesa mill at this point in time, and that could also expand feeds for the mill going forward.

Next slide. So let's talk about the White Mesa mill. It's the only operable uranium vanadium mill left in the United States. It is the largest processing facility in the United States. It's fully permitted, licensed and it has a license capacity of up to 8 million pounds per year of uranium. It also has the ability to recycle uranium-bearing alternate feed materials at very low cost. That is a strategic advantage for our company and has been and really the only reason the mill survived since the '80s, the early '80s to now.

We have 40 years of operational experience and expertise, and we also have the ability to take material from the cold war era, particularly from the Navajo Nation, and we're very excited about participating in that in due course, and there seems to be a lot of interest there.

Now before we turn slides, I just want to point out on the left, that is a picture of the solvent extraction building at the White Mesa Mill, which was originally built to recover uranium and vanadium, and now we have uranium on that right side, and on the left side, where the building is a bit longer, we have the capability to recover vanadium and the rare earth oxides, and I don't know of anyone else in the world that has a facility that can cover so many critical elements, and we were able to do that in that building up to 1,000 tonnes of NdPr oxide per year or up to about the 8 million pounds per year is a license capacity for uranium production. So it is really a really outstanding initiative that the company took on to have those capabilities.

Next slide. So we'll talk a bit more about the mines themselves, where the ore comes from that gets transported to the mill, the Pinyon Plain Mine in Arizona. And I have to always tell people, I built that 38 years ago, and it took 38 years to get the high-grade ore from the Pinyon Plain Mine to the White Mesa mill. So we're very, very proud and happy to finally see that date. And it is the highest grade uranium mine, I believe, in the history of the United States, and it's up and running right now.

The La Sal complex is in Utah, and there's 2 mines there. It's a very long trend. We're looking and expanding the mining areas that we have there, and we're also shipping ore from La Sal Complex. The Nichols Ranch ISR mine in Wyoming, we're continuing to do some delineation drilling there. And so it is ready to go in production when we think the time is right with proper price incentives. And combined, these are all critical pieces to us to get to that 2 million pounds per year production.

Next slide. So we'll talk more about the Pinyon Plain Mine. And again, we couldn't be more excited because we're seeing exceptionally good high-grade zones, and we think that there's room to expand the resource there and mining for multiple years going forward.

I mentioned the 2 months of the 400,000 pounds in 2 months. And I can say that I don't think anyone in the United States or very few places in the world can say they produce or mine that much ore in 2 months' time. And the future looks bright as we get more trucks on to continue with really strong production out of the Pinyon Plain Mine, and the grades have come in up to 100% higher in a number of the areas. And so again, we see a very positive future for Pinyon Plain Mine going forward over the next few years.

Also, in addition, the exploration we've done, what we call the Juniper zone, exceptional high grades, grades between 2% to 7%, even in some cases, over 20%, and we see that as really exciting news because there is a lot of exploration potential in the Juniper zone. We're going to have to put in multiple drill stations, and we see that as being able to hopefully expand this high grade at the Pinyon Plain Mine for a number of years to come.

Next slide. So in the development pipeline, we have 3 very significant projects. The Sheep Mountain project that is mainly as a starter is an open cut mine or open pit mine also has underground, and that is located not far from the Sweetwater mill in Utah, which isn't operating, but is a potential source for the Sheep Mountain property.

The Henry Mountains, we announced updated scoping studies on that, very -- increased the resource on that, a very competitive project, a very good project, uranium-only project that is also in Utah. So we're advancing the Bullfrog project. And then Roca Honda is a very large high-grade underground project in New Mexico, which recently got put on the FAST-41 covered projects, which is this acceleration of permitting. We're advancing the EIS on that project, and between those projects, we could potentially increase our uranium production up to 6 million pounds per year.

Next slide. So shifting a gear towards monazite, and we see this as a structural advantage in the rare earth business as a rare earth feed because it is a superior rare earth mineral, there's more NdPr, there's more mids and heavy oxides, there's more uranium, it's relatively easy to process if you can handle the radionuclides and currently is mined globally as a byproduct of the heavy mineral sand business. So that is where the connection is.

And the White Mesa Mill is the only facility in the U.S. able to process monazite and produce these high-purity oxides. On the right there shows some of the rare earth solvent extraction circuit, which goes -- is located in that photo I mentioned a bit a few slides back on the SX circuit where you have the uranium, vanadium and the rare earths. And then below, you can see the 1-ton super sacks of NdPr oxide. So we have proven that we can produce NdPr at scale. And we also have developed the technical capability to produce both the mid and the heavy rare earth oxides for defense needs if required.

Next slide. So where is some of that monazite going to come from? Well, with the acquisition of Base Resources, we also acquired the world significant Toliara critical mineral project. And we see this as a generational critical mineral project located in Madagascar that the likes of Rio Tinto and BHP and a number of the heavy mineral sands companies would love to have.

We acquired Base on October 2 of '24, including their entire management team, 6 weeks later, the Madagascar government lifted a suspension on development, allowing us to go back to work on that project. Now the reason it was suspended is there was the Madagascar government did some reviews on the sort of the stability and social payments that they felt were necessary to get more value out of the mineral projects in Madagascar, and they had already advanced that on a couple of other significant projects in Madagascar and Toliara was really third in the queue.

So they lifted that suspension. And then in early December, they signed an MOU advancing the development terms. We expect a final investment decision once we get all the investment agreements in place, which we're working on very diligently right now. We have a number of lawyers working on that as we speak.

We plan to -- once we get the certification of that project that we can have an FID in the first half of '26. It is a massive resource, as I mentioned, both ilmenite, rutile, zircon and monazite. And when it's up and running, we think it will provide around 26,000 tonnes of monazite, which is nearly 50% of what our Phase 2 plant, which is the expanded plant beyond the current Phase 1 plant that we'll have at the White Mesa Mill.

And we also expect to have an updated definitive feasibility study coming out in the next month or two. And it has a life of at least 39 years with potential to expand significantly. Next slide. So in addition, we acquired the Bahia project in Brazil that we're currently doing exploration on, and it is a smaller project than Toliara, but could be very significant and additional feed of monazite to the mill. It also has good distribution of Dy, Tb and is a nice smaller heavy mineral sands project, but it is being advanced.

And because we have a management team with Base, we also have Base helping with the exploration and development of that project in Brazil. In Australia, we have the Donald project and the Donald project joint venture, where we're currently earning in for 49% ownership, but we would get 100% of the monazite, the xenotime, which are the rare earths from that project. And it has very, very high grades of the heavies and the xenotime, which makes it a standout project to providing those -- particularly the heavies that are so highly sought after in this world we're in where China has a stranglehold on that.

Now we are advancing that. We expect to have the potential for a final investment decision on the second half of this year. And we're excited about that project. But right now, it's really kind of focusing on what are the ultimate economics, getting the very final permits, which are largely in hand, all these things in order to make a well-informed decision on this project.

Next slide. So this slide is really focusing on integration of the rare earth business. And that is what the world is screaming out for right now because China is fully integrated, but the rest of the world is not. And so when you look at this, I just want to draw people's attention first to the left, where you see the White Mesa mill, you have feed currently coming from Chemours, you have the Donald project, the Toliara project, Bahia project, all feeding the White Mesa Mill with monazite.

And when you add those projects, if we successfully execute and get these projects up and running, we will be at approximately the same scale of Lynas, which is the largest producer of rare earths in the world outside of China. So on the right, you can see what we've already accomplished is the ability to mine -- or mining and receiving the natural monazite.

Now we're receiving that from Chemours, as I mentioned, currently, but we have these other projects that we're advancing. We have the ability to make the rare earth carbonate, which is basically the rare earth materials that you've extracted the radionuclides from.

We have proven with Phase 1 that we can do the separations into the oxides, and we can do that, and we've done that, and we did that in the first part of last year, meeting specification. And now we keep moving down that integration steps, and we're looking at metal making and alloying very seriously, and that maybe could be a next step.

So to really have the full advantage of the rare earth supply chain, you need to be integrated with as many steps as possible so you are no longer dependent on China. So we're very excited about the steps we're making and the steps we plan to make in the future.

Next slide. So let's talk about some of the rare earth news. Back in March, we announced a collaboration with POSCO International and POSCO is based out of South Korea, a global leader in EV hybrid drivetrains, and we're continuing our discussions with providing them a non-China supply of rare earths to them in due course if we can come to a final agreement.

We also announced in March a strategic alliance with Chemours. And Chemours, we've been dealing with for a number of years with the monazite, and we're just looking at what we can do to expand that relationship bolstering the U.S. critical mineral supply chains.

And again, it's a great look with 2 U.S. companies working together to bring these critical elements back to the United States of America. And then in April, we made an announcement about our capabilities to produce a number of these heavy rare earth oxides, and that is also very important because very few people in the world can do it. The Chinese can do it, but Energy Fuels can also do it. And I'm not just talking about talking about doing it, but doing it.

Next slide. So again, talking about the heavy mineral sands and some of the highlights, it provides -- the strategy that we have is providing low-cost world-scale titanium zirconium mines that contain the monazite as a byproduct, and we try to use those heavy mineral sands revenues to pay for the monazite, in some cases, could be largely for free. And that gives us a distinct cost advantage.

And these things, basically, the titanium zirconium minerals, which are also critical elements are mainly used in industrial applications like pigment, metal, ceramics, chemicals, refractories, foundries and those type of -- including nuclear applications.

So we purposely went out and searched the world for low-cost heavy mineral sands mines that contained monazite as well, and that's how we built our plan around securing the projects that we have. And again, advancing the Toliara project, we own 100%, the Donald project, earning the 49%, but getting 100% of the rare earths and the Bahia project, which we also own 100%.

Next slide. So let's just talk a little bit about the time lines, and I just want to draw people's attention. If you look at that 2025 on the middle there, we're kind of in the middle of that, and you can see that we're advancing multiple heavy mineral sands projects towards FID.

And so over the course of the next year, we should have 3 projects that are at the point where we can look at them objectively with the most recent estimates on capital, operating costs, production recoveries and whatnot to make final investment decisions.

So if you go down below, but in the meantime, we'll be running the White Mesa mill producing uranium in really material quantities that helps fund these other projects and studies that are advancing. It won't fund all of it, but will make a significant contribution when you look at how we march forward with our strategy.

And then when you move over towards about '28 or '29, you see a company that has both the uranium production capabilities and revenue streams, but also has these multiple projects supplying feed to the White Mesa to what would then be the Phase 2 plant, which would be a separate plant separate from the uranium processing facility, the size of Lynas.

So we have a fair amount going on. And I think that what people are going to see is that when we talk about our uranium production and the strategies that we're executing, we actually deliver on them, and we're very proud about the fact that we don't just talk, we do.

Next slide. So we're still advancing the medical isotope strategies on this TAT targeted alpha therapy technology, which is a very, very interesting and potentially lucrative business here where people are looking at needing the Radium 226 and 228, which are elements that are naturally occurring that we still have the potential to recover at the White Mesa mill.

And actually, the Pinyon Plain Mine with the high grades we're seeing, there is a lot of radium in that project. So we're still advancing our R&D on that, and we're still looking at trying to potentially produce commercial quantities in the coming years and future offtake discussions. So there is a critical global shortage of the Radium 226 and 228 that prevents the advancement of these technologies and Energy Fuels is in the best position of just about anyone.

Next slide. So over the course of the last several years, we have done more in community, local development, looking at the regional benefits at all of our project sites, but specifically and most focused has been on San Juan County, Utah, and we set up this foundation that we've talked about, and that's worked out very, very well, really supporting education, environment, health, wellness, economic advancement and a number of North American priorities.

We've continued to ramp up our employment. We have 120 employees at the White Mesa Mill, and we have in the order of about 70 miners at the mines that we currently have, either in Arizona or also in San Juan County. The Phase 2 rare earth expansion project that I've talked about, taking not just having the Phase 1, but building the separate facility could result in hundreds of millions of dollars of additional investment in the poorest county in Utah.

We're also making really great strides on our relationship with the Navajo Nation. We're very, very proud of the agreement we did with the Navajo Nation for the transport of uranium and also assisting them with cleanup of these cold war era mines that have been sitting there for decades. So we're hoping to expand that relationship.

And really interesting because we had the legal rights to transport that ore. We stopped for 6 months, but we chose to sit down with the Navajo Nation with multiple meetings that were very collaborative and working with them to come up with a better outcome. We didn't take the heavy hand of going legal. We went with collaboration to advance that. And we're really proud of that outcome and very, very, very happy with the relationship with the Navajo Nation and look forward to clean up some of these mines in the not-too-distant future.

Next slide. So let just talk quickly about some of the financial strength that we have. Next slide. We still -- we're building out and producing low-cost uranium, developing our Tier 1 critical mineral assets and always focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet.

At the end of Q1, we had over $200 million of liquidity, mostly made up of cash and some inventories, and so a very strong position there. We had finished product inventory of nearly $50 million. If you looked at current prices, you can flex that up another $10 million or so, and we had about 600,000 pounds of finished uranium. Now at this point in time, it's closer to 750,000 with some of the recent production we've had and no debt.

We have substantial assets constructed, permitted and no debt, and that puts us in a great position. During the Q1, we did have a loss because of the development activities that we had. We elected not to sell uranium. We had a lot of things moving. But right now, we see as the uranium sector of our business is ramping up, that is going to provide additional cash flow from now going on, and we're looking at how we can maximize that as much as possible.

Next slide. So I talked about a lot of this, so I won't talk word for word. We have these 3 mines going. We actively are producing ore at the White Mesa mill. We have bought a little bit of uranium. We're not acting as a trader, but we have bought some. We bought some at $64.75. Now the price is around $70. We entered into this ore purchase agreement that I mentioned earlier. We could do more of that in due course.

We're ramping up to that 2 million pounds plus of uranium production with our existing assets that we -- and we don't require a lot of capital to do that. We're advancing the permitting on these pipeline assets that I talked about, the 3 large-scale assets that can increase our uranium production in due course, and we're continuing with the R&D on radium.

Next slide. So we upgraded our guidance back in early May at a time when most people were downgrading their guidance. So we increased our guidance on mined contained uranium by over 20%. We alternate feed, which I mentioned, has been a very important source of uranium for the company for decades.

It's currently -- we're estimating between 160,000 to 200,000 pounds of low-cost uranium by recycling uranium that others can't recycle, processed pounds. We've upgraded that materially from the beginning of this year to this up to 1 million pounds of contract sales. Those have flexed up from the 220,000 pounds that we had talked about previously, up 20%.

Finished goods at the end of the year, we believe even after these sales, we'll have between 900 million and 1.2 million pounds of finished goods. And then we look at inventories because when we talk about mining the ore and it's not yet processed, we have stockpiled material yet to be fed through the mill.

So between finished and unfinished material between about 2 million pounds and 2.6 million pounds of inventory, which puts us in an excellent position to meet our future contract requirements and we're going to do everything we can to hopefully beat some of these numbers, but this is our current guidance. So I'm not making a forward-looking statement too much here, but we're really excited about the momentum we're gaining.

Okay. Next slide. I think this is our last slide. Just talking about the rare earth titanium, zircon side of the business. We may, after we do a pretty material uranium run, look at another rare earth run, likely would be 2026, subject to market conditions, project validation or product validation and mill schedules.

The Phase 2 engineering project that I've talked about at the mill which would increase the capacity up to 6,000 tonnes of NdPr, which is the size of Lynas, 225 tonnes per annum of Dy and 75 tons per annum of Tb. We'll be getting the updated -- the feasibility study should be complete in the fall, and we're really excited about that because we think that White Mesa, again, just so strategic to the United States of America. We're currently piloting Dy, Tb and other rare earth oxide separations, the Toliara FID. And again, we're hoping for advancements with the Madagascar government with these final agreements.

And hopefully, there will be news in the due course on that front, but we could have an FID on that project in the first half of '26, pursuing -- and I've talked about the fiscal terms of the government, Donald, the FID second half of this year with potential offtake sales and looking at various finance options and then drilling at the Bahia project in Brazil. And we're very, very focused on developing a final comprehensive project finance strategy for all these projects.

So really, in conclusion, we are making progress in leaps and bounds. And I've said to many of you that people in the industry say, Energy Fuels does more in the rare earth business in 1 year than most people do in 10 years and watch our uranium production.

It is our plan to continue to be the largest producer of uranium in the United States for years to come, and we're off to a great start, particularly with the production we're seeing out of the Pinyon Plain Mine. Thank you very much. And I believe we'll have it open for questions. Is that correct? If there's any questions at the end of the presentation?

Mr. Chalmers, this is Curtis Moore. There are no further questions at this time.

Well, I'm waiting if there's any questions, people can chime in. I just want to say thank you for those that have participated in the AGM. Thank you to our shareholders. And really, this is an exciting time for this company. And I know we took a path that others didn't take. And we're proud of that because we're executing a strategy that nobody has really executed before, probably the closest to that is the Chinese, but we're doing it in the United States of America at world significant scale. So on that note, thank you very much. And again, thank you.