Greetings Contrarian,

This is The Next Big Rush, your daily drop of mining/energy investing news. Where we come together and know we should be in a different, more profitable business.

Here's where the grass in greener :

🌴 3 Football Fields of Lithium

🌴 $500m Nickel Scam

🌴 Cameco + Ukraine Explosive Deal

👍🏻 Lithium Beefing Up Frontier

You know it, I know it, Lithium is hotter than Arizona on a summer day - and Frontier Lithium (TSXV: FL) (FRA: HL2) (OTCQX: LITOF) is working on proving up its project by moving their known resource from inferred to indicated.

This is no tiny unknown junior, sitting at approx. C$670m after a nice 12+% from the highlight below:

DDH PL-098-22 hole, which was designed to follow up on the results from PL-094-22 and confirmed that the NW zone is in fact connected to the main Spark ore body at depth, intersecting 398.25m of pegmatite averaging 1.88% Li2O.

That's 6.6 hockey rinks lengths for you Canadian readers and 3.6 football fields lengths for our American friends.

Follow the link for the breakdown, the grades hold well and the market seems to like it enough.

The campaign happened May-October 2022, which is a clear sign we're all in the wrong business unless the results were sitting on someone's desk for a bit with the intention of aging like fine wine.

🙈 $500M Nickel Scam

Imagine this:

You're a commodities trading house, one of the largest in the world.

You buy nickel by the container - at $500,000 a pop.

A few containers here and there get checked, so you assume all of them are good.

Except it is later found out that the nickel isn't there. At least not all of it. Fake documents support the illusion that everything is alright.

This is what has just happened with Trafigura.

$577m is the alledged size of the loss, if they can't claim any of that back in court.

Trafigura has initiated a lawsuit against Indian entrepreneur Prateek Gupta and several firms associated with him, including TMT Metals and UD Trading Group. The companies have engaged in trade with each other since 2015 at the least, however, they started evaluating the relationship in the preceding year.

The company says: "The Group’s net profits in the first half of its 2023 financial year are expected to exceed first half 2022 net profits, notwithstanding this impairment."

Half a billy goes missing and it's no big deal.

My friend, we're definitely in the wrong business.

🚨 Cameco Signing Big Deal

SE NNEGC Energoatom, Ukraine's state-owned nuclear energy company, and Cameco (TSX: CCO) (NYSE: CCJ), the only major Canadian producer of uranium (and other nuclear products/services), have agreed on the commercial terms for a major supply deal.

Under the agreement, Cameco will provide a sufficient amount of UF6 (the stuff whose input is yellow cake mined by, well, itself) and conversion services to meet Ukraine's nuclear fuel needs through 2035.

The key commercial terms, including pricing, volume, and duration, have been agreed upon, but the contract is yet to be finalized, which is expected to occur in the first quarter of 2023 (and they're not going to tell us the details anyway).

The 12-year agreement, which will run from 2024 to 2035, will see Cameco supply all of Energoatom's UF6 requirements for its nine reactors at the Rivne, Khmelnytskyy, and South Ukraine nuclear power plants.

There is also an option for Cameco to provide up to 100% of fuel for the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant if it returns to Energoatom's operation.

Utilities, coming to the table with big, long contracts. Coming to a future near you.

Meme of The Day

It's almost Friday, might as well give up.

The Editor

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.