Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Fission 3.0 (TSX-V: FUU)(OTC: FISOF) CEO Dev Randhawa on Best Ever Uranium Fundamentals & Making Money by Positioning During Bull Market Consolidations

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Fission 3.0, Mr. Dev Randhawa. Dev, how are you? It's good chatting with you.

Dev Randhawa: Oh, very good. Great. Great finally chatting with you. It's been a long time. I looked forward to it.

Gerardo Del Real: It's been a bit. Listen, I was speaking with a very well known lobbyist in the uranium sector the other day, and he commented to me that the uranium fundamentals on all fronts are as good as he's ever seen them.

And so I thought, "Let me reach out to Dev who has seen boom and bust cycles in the uranium space." You've done incredibly well positioning yourself ahead of bull markets. And I thought, "Let me reach out and just get your take." How do you see the fundamentals in the uranium space right now?

Dev Randhawa: Well, as you said, I've been doing this since about mid '90s, when I first started and we were lucky to have support of guys like Rick Rule, Doug Casey and Bob Bishop, and we've seen that. I would say the biggest difference that I would say now that's different from then, we've always had a deficit, always, always had a deficit. Since the '70s, we have never produced as much as we needed, but when we had the bull market run and then we had Fukushima, they contracted, maybe over contracted, and then suddenly selling in the spot market, like Japan, we're selling uranium rather than buying it.

So we've been in a pretty brutal bear market for a long time. Now, what's fundamentally changed is that what you and I talked about for a long time, which was that, how can we possibly reach any kind of climate change goals or anything if you don't have clean energy like uranium? And for a long time, honestly, people didn't care. The politicians misled, in my view, the masses that somehow solar and wind power were going to save us.

Gerardo Del Real: They wouldn't do that, Dev.

Dev Randhawa: And the thing is, as you know, they do their own ... the data analysis, data mining to find out where the trigger words are. And so the left had catered to extreme left greed of these people that thought, "Oh, yeah, absolutely, we'll solve all the problems by cutting back on our fossil fuels, and we're going to live off sun and wind." Unfortunately, truth is a reality issue there, where you've got ... I believe that one, they're super, super expensive, both those forms of energy, and they're intermittent and you can't store it.

And so the only clean non-fossil fuel has base load power, because the fundamental flaw with all green energy, it’s not base load, meaning you can't store it. And so when you want to use a lot of it at once, well, you can't, right? You simply can't. The thing is, we use most of our energy as a society between four and nine o'clock. And unless we're all willing to start cooking at two o'clock in the morning and mix up our whole days, look, you just can't. So I would say that's what you and I have been talking about for a very long time, it's finally happened.

The world's woke up and now suddenly the United Nations to every environmental group is saying, "Yeah, we got to have nuclear power." The problem is the extreme ... unfortunately in my view, and this is the extreme left of different parties, have forced people to believe in fantasies and which is wind and power. So the two fundamental changes I've seen since 1995 is, one, first time we've had Democrats pro-nuclear. We've never had that before. That's always been a Republican thing.

Gerardo Del Real: Right.

Dev Randhawa: Now, Senator Granholm, she's so pro-pro-pro, and she's been saying it for two years. So that's important. So you got finally the Democrats coming online and then secondly, you've got left wing people, different groups saying, "Yeah, this has to be part of the solution."

Fundamentally it's like the world decided it was going to leave the house of fossil fuels, left it, and then going to move into this house, but it wasn't ready. And obviously the poster child for this is Germany. Germany wanted to connect all the networks, the 3,900 kilometers, they budget about a trillion dollars and they spent 860 billion of it. And they didn't do 3,900 kilometers. They didn't do 390. They did 39. 39 kilometers.

Gerardo Del Real: Can't make the stuff up, right?

Dev Randhawa: You can't even ... it's insane how ... That happened in any other world, if you gave me money to build 3,900 kilometers and I built 39, I wouldn't have a job. It's fraud. Obviously, I'm not naive to think, "Where did that $860 billion go?" The problem with all this, you know how it is, is that like Rick Rule says, "All these things are advanced theft." And every election's advanced theft on future generations, promises made. Because the public doesn't want truth. They still want to live in their fantasy world, like kid's books, and it just doesn't work. So when they say it's the best fundamentals of all, absolutely.

And now this energy crisis is insane. It's a hockey stick, as we say in Canada. It's gone straight up in Germany, the cost of fuel, the cost of everything. They're saying inflation. And just in UK, which has some nuclear power, it's up to 10. They go up to 18 to 22 simply based on fuel prices.

So in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs always talks about if your basic needs aren't met, you can't talk about self-actualization and all that sort of stuff. Well, I think they're seeing it, that unfortunately you hope that political leaders want to be wise but they don't. They want to get elected, and they'll do and say and cheat and lie, whatever they got to do to get there. They want power.

But unfortunately, it's costing the public so much money. People can't fill their gas. So that's what the real story is. It's the lies of the politicians for a long time. And we used to have a chart, going back to Fission Uranium and Strathmore, those days I used to have a chart up and going, "Does the world have any idea how majority of this uranium is not in North American hands?" I used to say 40% of uranium processed fuel is in Russia, 40%.

Gerardo Del Real: Right.

Dev Randhawa: And we just seemed to say, "Oh, somehow we believed ..." Whether you like Trump or not, he nailed it in 2018 when he said to Merkel, "What are you doing? You're going to be relying on Russia for your energy needs. What are you doing? Don't you read history books?"

So, that's what we've got. We've got an energy crisis, and I believe fundamentally the only way we get there is we got to have more nuclear plants. I think the poster child for States is obviously California. When Rick calls them the Germany of the States ... I mean on a Monday, Tuesday, Newsom makes another grandiose statement, "We will not produce cars by 2030 or '35 that are fossil fuel." Right? "We got to go electric." Two days later we ask everybody in the state not to charge their electric cars. They don't have enough energy, right?

Gerardo Del Real: Again, you can't make this stuff up, right?

Dev Randhawa: I don't get it. Why wasn't this guy skewered on every television station going, "How effing stupid are you? You just told us we're not going to have fossil fuel cars in 2030, and you're telling us not the ones we got." So how do we find power for all these EVs that are coming? So it's just insane. What bothers me is the mass media goes along with it and sells this garbage, fantasies, and then we all suffer for it.

I'm sorry if I sound pissed off because I think, "How do you miss this?" How does the media miss on a Monday saying, "Okay, we want electric cars only," and by the way, electric cars make up, and hybrid, make up maybe 8% of California's cars. So if you split that too randomly, you say, "Okay, 4% are electric cars." So in order for that to happen, someone estimated they have to build about 25 nuclear plants in California by that time to have enough electrical energy for EVs, 25 nuclear plants.

So Diablo now and Diablo Canyon the reactor. They're not shutting it down. Germany's extending them. Japan is not just turning them on. They want to build new ones. They're getting there, but unfortunately the public's going to really suffer for these lies and fantasies that politicians sold.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about how to position yourself to profit from the stupidity of the politicians on all sides, right? Let's talk Fission 3.0. You've done very, very well in past cycles, positioning yourself during consolidations. We're going through a small consolidation in the uranium sector after a very exciting first leg up. I think it's early innings. Tell me about Fission 3.0 and how you're positioning for this next leg up.

Dev Randhawa: Sure. Well, I think if people want to position themselves, you got to own a Cameco. I think you got to then own, if you like physical, there's the two obvious ones, a spot and yellow cake. And I would obviously buy one at the bigger discount to NAV. Then if you want buy a developer, sure. Obviously my favorite is Fission Uranium, because I think that deposit keeps growing and it's undervalued. It's not listed on the New York Stock Exchange. NextGen and Denison are. And I think because of that it trades in a discount. The US people can't buy it as easy.

And then you need to always have an exploration company in my view, because that's where the upside is. If you look at when you make a discovery, discovery doesn't go up. Every uranium stock will go up as spot price rises, okay? But if you make a discovery, you can get yourself a 10 bagger. If the stock runs and then it'll happen.

I believe the spot price will start to rise again. When? It will rise again when we have better markets. The problem is that people are more worried about inflation and recessions and depressions. And what really drove the spot price last summer was Peter Grosskopf's ingenious idea of setting up a fund to buy physical. And so people just jumped into that, and every time they were above NAV they would boom, sell some stock and turn around and buy physical. Now they hadn't been doing that, so spot price is a bit soft at $50.

But the hardest thing to do is to find people who want to be contrarian, and that's what investors have to be right now. You can buy stocks like Fission 3.0 that are eight, nine cents, that went to 30 cents last fall. And uranium prices are about the same. The difference is all these companies were well funded. We spent almost $13 million in the ground this year, including our fall program. And we'll have seven million in cash, and our burn rate's like a $100,000, $120,000. It's very small.

We saw this correction right away. We cut back on a lot of things. But yeah, you can buy Fission 3.0. When uranium was $30, our stock was eight cents. Well uranium's $50. Now we've got all this money. We've done some great drilling this year, moved projects along. So this is a great entry point for investors to grab uranium stocks at major discounts, because whether it's going to be the fall election, I don't know, but we get some sanity back. I don't know why politicians think throwing oil on fire, which is exactly what they do when they start handing out money after money during inflationary times. I don't know how they forgot to take a book on economics. You can either keep increasing the supply of money. So I don't know when that happens, but between now and then, it's a great investment high time that we've got for investors.

Like I said, our stock went from hardly anything all the way to 30 cents and which would be three to 400% from here. And yet we didn't have money in the bank. It was all because when there aren't many people ... when money comes into the uranium space, it's like an elephant jumping into a small pool, right? And boom, it can't handle it. And so that's why these stocks are so explosive. But this is your time. You can buy stocks. Like I said, last year we were trading around eight cents last August. We had a million dollars in the bank and as soon as the spot price, everything went boom, it went to 30 cents. So it's a great time to get people who are willing to be contrarian, to be patient, to make some easy money, like eight to 11 cents, Gosh, you're up 30% on your money,

Gerardo Del Real: You're cashed up. You have very, very, very good projects and a good technical team to develop and advance those projects.

Dev Randhawa: We do.

Gerardo Del Real: I am an absolute firm believer that the uranium spot price is going to overshoot past historical highs in this next leg up.

Dev Randhawa: Oh, absolutely.

Gerardo Del Real: And look, we know the downside in the uranium space can be absolutely brutal when it's going down. The upside can be violent. It can be quick, and it can be very, very profitable. I encourage everybody, everybody to take the time to do some due diligence on those names that you mentioned. And on Fission 3.0. Dev, anything to add to that before let you go?

Dev Randhawa: Yeah, I guess I talked about the fundamentals and I should have mentioned that look, there's a reason why you want to put the ball in the hand of a Michael Jordan, because they've done it before. And that's what you're doing when you invest with Ross McElroy, who's on our board. And our key guy now leading the charge is Ray Ashley.

These guys have made two major discoveries. One, we sold to Lukas. One is Fission Triple R today. So exploration business is tricky at best, because you can't see under the ground. So there are a lot of techniques you can use. But there's two types of deposits typically. One in the basin. One of the unconformity and the basin ones were actually unconformed, but nature took off the sandstone. These guys have done it before. We bought our properties. Every one of them is owned a 100% by us. 100%. We have not earned into anybody. People have earned into our properties. We're property rich, easily the best technical team in the history of uranium, and we're cashed up.

Gerardo Del Real: Well said. Dev, always insightful. I appreciate your time. Look forward to doing it again soon.

Dev Randhawa: You got it. Talk to you soon.

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