Australian uranium miners rally after Google's power deal with Constellation Energy - Mining Weekly

Australian uranium miners rallied on news that Google has signed a power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy to supply nuclear-generated electricity for its data centres. Constellation will restart a shuttered reactor at its Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania and operate it to feed Google's computing load. The deal signals corporate appetite for firm, dispatchable power at scale, and validates the economics of nuclear as industrial-grade baseload generation.

Where this fits

This contract is a hard signal that large, power-hungry operators will pay for firm electricity when reliability matters. It cuts against the renewables-only narrative by showing that where downtime is costly, data centres, manufacturing, critical infrastructure, buyers choose nuclear over weather-dependent generation, even at higher per-megawatt-hour cost. For Australia's uranium miners, it proves demand exists beyond civilian power stations. For Australia's energy strategy, it exposes a sovereign blind spot: we are a world-leading uranium producer, yet our own grid is banned by law from using nuclear, forcing dependence on imported solar panels and batteries (75% of panels, 80% of cells made in China) to fill the firming gap that nuclear would solve.

What it means

Australia is exporting the material for firm, low-emission power while importing weather-dependent generation and the Chinese supply chains that come with it. As the world's data centres, industrial operations, and defence networks choose nuclear for resilience and cost-of-ownership, Australia's grid remains locked into gas firming and an exposed minerals supply chain. The uranium in the ground and the technical skill to mine it cannot substitute for policy. Without a change to the nuclear ban, Australia will remain a raw-material exporter to the firm-power transition, not a participant in it.