 Well, hello, everyone. This is Byron King with the Critical Materials Corner with Investor Intel. I have Jack Lifton, who many of you I'm sure know. And today we have John Cash, who runs a company called Or Energy. UR Energy, trades on the New York Stock Exchange, URG, or Toronto, URE. He's in the, if you can't figure this out yet, Uranium Business, which is a hot, hot, hot business. My goodness. I'll even say a bad joke. It's getting radioactive. Terrible. John is a graduate of the University of Missouri at RALA with an undergrad and a master's degree. One of the great geology and mining schools of America. He knows a lot of things. John, you know, give us, give us really just a one or two minute shot about what is Or Energy doing, you know, Uranium in Wyoming, and what else do we need to know? Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for having me on. But yeah, UR Energy, we have two flagship projects that everyone should know about. First is our Lost Creek Mine. It's been up and running for over eight years. We've produced about 2.7 million pounds of U308 in that time period. It's been a prolific producer, fantastic recoveries in a very low cost. Our recovery rates are about 90%, which is setting records for the industry. Our second property is our Shirley Basin property. And we have all the permits in place for that. It's a brownfield project. So a lot of the infrastructure is there, but we still need to build out the plant when the market signal allows. So we're really excited about that. A lot going on in the nuclear industry, as you've indicated. And we're ready to ramp up both of those facilities and get them back into production. So with that, I'll turn it back to you, Byron. Okay, thanks. To listeners and viewers out there, Or Energy has an excellent website. They have a great presentation. It's nice and fresh. And they have a really nice video on how their process works. But real real quickly, I want to distinguish here that you're doing what's called insight to recovery, which is not strip mining, it's not underground mining, and it's not fracking like, you know, we're going to pump it down and pressure it up. You literally dissolve the uranium out of the rock. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, you know, the environmental side of it went ahead. Yeah, absolutely. It's a Latin term called in situ, which means in the place. So yeah, Byron, as you said, we don't strip off the ground or overburden. All we do is we install wells, standard water wells, four and a half inch ID PVC casing. And in those wells, some of the wells we will inject a fairly benign solution of baking soda, a CO2 and oxygen, and it's an alkaline, a near neutral pH solution that dissolves the uranium minerals in the ground. And then we have an adjacent well about 100 feet away that has a pump in it. And it will create a negative pressure with that pump pull that's uranium latent solution up that well and send it to a processing plant. We remove the uranium and then pump the same solution right back out, recycle it right back out to the well field to continue to remove that uranium from the ore body. You know, if I sent you a picture of it right now, we've got deer and elk and antelope out playing out there. There's grass. You wouldn't even know that it's a mine. It just looks like little beehives about every 100 feet. And so the impact is absolutely minimal. And when we're done, the area is released. It can be used for a school, a hospital, free release. It can be used for anything. You can't even tell we've been there. So fantastic technology. So the ESG side is very positive and no toxic chemicals, no emissions of water, CO2, baking soda, which people brush their teeth with, stuff like that. And you're not going to create a superfund site, are you? No, absolutely not. Very benign process. Very good. Mr. Jack Lifton, you have been following metals and mines for a long time. I want to embarrass you and say how long, but I'm sure you have a question for Mr. Johnny Cash here. First, I want to make a point about perspective here. The world produces a couple of billion tons a year of ores and metals. That's true. Less than 1% of them comprise almost everything in our age of technology. And some of them have unique descriptions. Gold, silver, platinum, et cetera. Those are reported in troy ounces. Uranium is reported in pounds, not tons. It sounds very impressive, a million pounds, 500 tons, right? 500 tons is probably the daily production of copper to small copper mine. But the importance of uranium is outstanding. And what I'd like to ask you is, is the U.S. dependent on imports for our uranium needs? Because we do operate about 25% of the world's civilian power reactors. Yeah, unfortunately, the U.S. is nearly 100% reliant on imports of uranium. The reason for that, and we have a lot of resources here, we have over a billion pounds of known resources in the U.S., and we have mills we have in situ mines that are sitting by idly. The challenge is here in the U.S., we have trouble competing with state-owned enterprises, specifically in two countries, Kazakhstan and Russia. And those countries, they have relatively lax environmental standards. The government supports the mines. And we take those things into consideration. You know, also taking into consideration the currency devaluation that they have. For example, in Kazakhstan, they pay their employees in their currency of a tanga, and then they turn around and they sell the uranium and U.S. dollars to U.S. companies. It is very difficult to compete with companies like that. So that's put the U.S. and other Western allies, including Canada, at a distinct disadvantage when we're trying to compete with those entities. So is there any hope that the U.S. could ever become self-sufficient in uranium? Self-sufficient? Probably not. But could we dramatically increase our production in the U.S. and maybe get up to 30, 40, maybe even 50 percent of our needs here in the U.S.? Yeah, we could. Within a few years, we could do that because there is a lot of capacity out there. The resources are there and they're built out. A lot of that is ready to go into production within two or three, four years. So yeah, we could get there. We could take a big bite of it, but we would need to continue to rely on our Western allies, Australia and Canada in particular, to help us round out that demand. Isn't your increase in supply really price-driven at this point? Yeah, it really is. If I could, Jack, I'm going to go back to the cost competitiveness of U.S. versus state-owned enterprises. A few years ago, we submitted a section 232 petition to the Department of Commerce and asked them to investigate the impact of uranium imports on national security, and they did that and they came out with a positive report for us. But part of that report that we put together, we asked our lead engineer to assess the cost of production of our Lost Creek Mine if we uprooted it from the U.S. and we plunked it down in Kazakhstan with their environmental standards. He did that, and the analysis showed that our production cost would be reduced by $9.28 a pound, but simply by doing that. To put it into context, at that time, the price of uranium was only about $33 a pound. So you can see a major component of the cost in the U.S. is driven by EHS, Environmental Health and Safety. We're proud of that. We're not suggesting we should change that. But the challenge is our competitors don't live in that world. So that makes it almost impossible for us to compete. Along those lines of price, when we talk about uranium, most people, like virtually everybody, never buys uranium. I mean, you don't go to the store. And in fact, even as I'm a mineral collector, it's very hard to get uranium minerals. I mean, they were tough to do. But the people who do buy it, there's really two prices. There's sort of that spot price that you mentioned. And then there's what these utilities pay. I mean, if you're an electric utility company, you're thinking 10 and 15 years out. And so there are two different prices. Can you explain that to the viewers out there? Why that's important? Why that matters? Right, absolutely. So the U.S. utilities that have nuclear power plants, those are massive capital expenditures. And they really need, from a business perspective, got to keep that energy flowing from those power plants. So security of supply to them is of paramount importance. The fuel only represents probably about six, seven, eight percent of their operating costs. It's a very small percentage. So they really need that fuel. And because of that, they're going to sign long term contracts to give them reliability of that supply. So they don't run out of material. And those long term contracts typically will be anywhere from three, maybe even up to as high as 10 years in length, because they want that security of supply. Most of the market trades in the long term. A small percentage trades on the spot where you do contracts for just, and you'll sell it within days or weeks or months to the buyer. And typically it's the traders that play in that field, just moving mobile inventories around in that respect. But yeah, the utilities and most of the market is in that long term basket. And that's what we as a company, we like to play in that basket. So can you expand on that a little bit in terms just more energy specifically? What are you trying to focus on? Or what are you focusing on now to really sort of generate some cash to turn this into a long term business? What's your strategy for selling the product here? Yeah, absolutely. So number one, we need to de-risk it for the utility customers. We want them to have confidence in us. And I think we've got a fantastic record shows that we can produce, but we want to continue to bolster that reputation. So we're out there now drilling, constructing, being ready, trying to de-risk the projects as much as we possibly can. And one of the things we're doing also to de-risk is we're not going to just sit here and wait for the price to come to us. We've got active research and development projects ongoing. We refer to those in our reports. We don't give much detail. We're keeping some things secret. But we're working on those projects to try to drive down our cost of production. We don't expect we're ever going to compete with Kazakhstan. But can we make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and get down to a price where the utilities feel that they can contract with us? Yeah, absolutely. We're working hard there. We're not going to sit on our laurels. We're going to try to get down to that price. But yeah, try to de-risk it. We want to sign long-term contracts. We don't want to put our capital at risk by selling into the spot market, which is very volatile. It's great one day and poor the next. So we don't want to risk the capital selling into that. We want those long-term contracts, four, five, six, seven, eight year contracts to be able to justify the expenditure of the capital. What's the cash position of the company right now in terms of your ability to move ahead and wait for your pitch, so to speak? Yeah, absolutely. Beginning of last month, we had over $44 million in cash. So we've got a good war chest there. In addition to that, we've got some inventory that we can sell, 284,000 pounds of drummed yellow cake sitting at the conversion facility. We would be tempted to sell that on the spot market if it got attractive enough. Otherwise, we're going to wait for the U.S. government. They're setting up a program to purchase uranium from domestic producers. And we feel we could probably get a little better price there than on the spot market. So that's our cash position. We do have an ATM in place. In the past, we've drawn down some on. In the future, we might continue to draw down on that a little bit. But our needs, our burn rate is small. So our needs are small going forward. What is the current uranium price versus what it was in the past? Yeah, you bet. So yesterday on trade tech, it closed at $61.25 on the spot. But do keep in mind that that's a very small percentage of the market, but it's kind of a leading indicator of where the long-term price is going to go. The long-term price is slow in keeping up with that. So the long-term price, we're still in the low to mid-40s on the long-term price. And we'll see if that eventually catches up with spot. So, John, would you, your end product is steel drums full of a yellow stuff that they call yellow cake. You know, U308, and it's in a certain form. Just to sort of enlighten the viewers out there in the listings. What happens to that stuff? How does that barrel of yellow stuff turn into electricity down at the nuclear power plant? I mean, we're not going to get into a whole engineering subject. What does your product get turned into? Yeah, so there are a few more steps after the mining process. So yeah, we ship it in drums. It's filled with this yellow powder called yellow cake. It's called yellow cake because it looks exactly like a yellow cake mix. And we'll send that to a conversion facility. Typically, our company, we've sent it to Converdyne in Metropolis, Illinois. So they take our product, yellow cake. The chemical form is U308, and they convert it to uranium hexafluoride, UF6. And then from there, they will send it on to Enrichment, typically down in New Mexico. Urenco has a plant down there. And at that point, we move transition from chemical processing to physical processing because at Enrichment, they are enhancing the ratio of uranium 235, that isotope, with respect to uranium 238. And once they've got that enriched between 4 and 5%, they'll send that on to fuel fabrication, which is where they make the pellets. And then from there, it'll go to a nuclear power plant to be burned to produce electricity. Well, Jack, did you have a last question? Yes. The supply chain you're talking about doesn't include the U.S. government. So what you're talking about, the capacity we have the United States to convert yellow cake to useful fuel for civilian reactors. Where are they getting, this is where, what are we buying from Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada? Are we buying yellow cake? So it comes in every form to the U.S. Every utility buys it in a different form. It can come in as yellow cake. It can come in as uranium hexafluoride in the converted stage. Or in the case of Russia, it generally comes in in the form of enriched product. So it comes across into the country in every form you can imagine for either to be used in the power plant fairly directly after fuel path or to jump into that chain of processing anywhere along the way. And that's my question. Is the processing supply chain in the United States have sufficient capacity to handle our needs or must we buy, for example, downstream product from Russia? Yeah, absolutely not. We don't have the supply chain here in the U.S. From the mining perspective, we talked about that a little bit earlier. We could probably get up to maybe 50% supply that to the U.S. Fill 50% of demand. The conversion facility, though, in Metropolis, Illinois, it's been shut down for years. They are working on restarting that. They hope to restart it next year. But today, as we sit here right now, we have zero capacity for conversion in the U.S. Then you move on to the next stage, enrichment. Right now, there is only one enrichment plant in the U.S., down in New Mexico, and it's owned by Urenco. Urenco is not a U.S. company. It is a conglomerate of three countries, the Netherlands, Germany, and the U.K. that own Urenco. So they can produce uranium products for civilian use, but they are polluted from the Non-Proliferation Treaty from producing enriched material for defense needs. So we have limited capacity in the U.S. to fill our civilian needs. We have virtually no capacity in the U.S. today for defense needs. We have no conversion, and we have no enrichment, because all of that has to be U.S.-based, U.S.-owned, and today, we have none. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. We can talk about this all day, and maybe we will some other time, but for now, this was an investment discussion for readers and viewers out there. It's OR Energy, URG on the New York, URE on the Toronto. They're doing primary, uranium development in Wyoming in an environmentally benign way. Mr. John Cash was kind enough to give us some of his time, and certainly some of his knowledge, which obviously is quite deep and extensive to help us become better investors. And with that, thank you, Jack, and certainly thank you, John. We wish you well. All of your UR team and everyone with whom you work out in Wyoming. So roll on. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks.