‘We’ve already gone nuclear if we’ve agreed to subs at Garden Island’, says WA’s biggest uranium investor

WA’s biggest investor in uranium believes Australia has already validated nuclear power by agreeing to base AUKUS submarines in the country by the end of the decade. Fund manager Willy Packer, whose near $2 billion investment fund has now beefed up its bet on uranium to more than $200 million, suggested it was a contradiction for Labor governments to block nuclear power while home-basing nuclear submarines at Garden Island and in eastern Australia before the end of the decade. “If we have (nuclear-powered) submarines here, Australia has already crossed the Rubicon,” he said. “We will have reactors (at Garden Island and east coast naval bases), we just don’t have one for base-load power. “It’s a very funny world.” Mr Packer is playing the waiting game on uranium, betting that WA and Australia will eventually need nuclear energy to meet decarbonisation targets and generate baseload power as the use of coal and gas in electricity generation diminishes. Drawing on funds from mainly well-heeled investors in Perth’s western suburbs, Mr Packer’s Cottesloe-based Investigator fund is now about 11 per cent invested in physical uranium and equities after recently adding a $30m holding in Canadian developer NexGen Energy. The uranium portfolio includes a 9.3 per cent stake in Energy Resources of Australia, which owns the world’s biggest undeveloped uranium deposit at Jabiluka, stakes in the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust and the listed Yellow Cake, and a piece of Australian-listed Berkeley Energia, the owner of an undeveloped deposit in Spain. Mr Packer said he had been encouraged by the renewed debate about nuclear energy amid concerns in some quarters about the seasonal reliability of wind and solar power. “We are still in the long-term excited by uranium,” he said. “We think it is the only way of solving the energy problems of the world. Nuclear is needed in the net zero equation.” The nuclear push has been led by the Federal Coalition, with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the State Liberal Party recently calling on the WA Government to reassess its uranium ban. Australia did not join a pledge by 22 countries, including the US and Japan, at December’s COP28 summit to triple nuclear energy production by 2050. While it boasts about one-third of the world’s uranium resources, the nuclear fuel is only produced by three South Australian mines — BHP’s Olympic Dam project, the privately-owned Beverley mine and new producer Boss Energy’s Honeymoon development. WA’s uranium resources remain undeveloped, despite four projects being conditionally excluded from the 2017 ban applied by the then new State Labor government. Mr Packer conceded Investigator was playing “a long game” with its typically contrarian view on uranium, noting that if Australian uranium and nuclear restrictions were eased, it could be decades before individual projects entered production or governments backed nuclear into the country’s energy mix. He said Investigator’s spread of investments gave it “big optionality” in uranium, but that there were no immediate plans to add to the portfolio. “We have got enough, but the problem is finding good uranium stocks,” Mr Packer said.