Experts laud $2.7 billion outlay to rebuild nation’s capacity to enrich uranium, but warn it may take a decade for domestic production to meet burgeoning need.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/...2B5mdvGoYxHNcymGc%3D

SEATTLE—The Department of Energy has invested billions of dollars to encourage U.S. companies to make enriched uranium—essential for advanced nuclear reactors. Last month, $2.7 billion went to three companies for centrifuges and processing plants to produce fuel for reactor cores.

Yet, a fuel crunch that could cobble President Donald Trump’s “nuclear renaissance” initiatives looms as soon as 2028, several experts warned during the two-day U.S. Nuclear Industry Council’s 13th annual Advanced Reactors Summit in Seattle that concluded Feb. 12.
“If America wants to lead in advanced reactors, we have to do the nuclear fuel here. Make no mistake about that,” Centrus Energy Senior Vice President Patrick Brown told more than 400 nuclear industry professionals on Feb.12. “Unfortunately, we’re really building from zero.”

Right now, he said, less than 1 percent of the nuclear fuel that the nation’s 94 commercial reactors annually consume is produced domestically, and that is exclusively dedicated to the Pentagon. The nation’s commercial nuclear energy industry is “completely reliant on foreign imports” of enriched uranium, he said, primarily from Kazakhstan and Canada.

Those imports include up to 5 percent from Russia that won’t be available soon. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Congress in 2023 banned U.S. companies from importing Russian uranium. That ban goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2028.

Brown said with the global nuclear fuel market already constrained, domestic industry’s scramble to revive enrichment—a process American companies invented and once dominated—is now a race to have supply available to meet demand as new reactors come online.

Because that demand—spurred by the president’s May 2025 executive orders to license 10 new reactors by 2030 and quadruple commercial nuclear energy output by 2050—is likely to outpace domestic fuel production until the early 2030s, he said a timing shortage will emerge in 2028.
“That’s when we'll see that the problem is there’s not enough non-Russian supply” of enriched uranium to replace even the relatively small amount it now produces in a tight market where restrictions on one supplier impacts the entire market.

“Fortunately,” Brown said, the industry and the Trump administration recognize there is an approaching gap between burgeoning demand and static supply, and has deemed restoring domestic capacity to enrich uranium a national security priority akin to “a second Manhattan Project.”

Industry Must Respond

The nation’s domestic nuclear fuel supply chain got a $2.7 billion boost when the Department of Energy on Jan. 5 issued awards to three domestic companies to enrich low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium.
Securing $900 million awards each to build uranium enrichment plants are California-based General Matter in the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant in western Kentucky, North Carolina-headquartered Orano Group’s Federal Services operation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Maryland-based Centrus Energy’s uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio.

Brown said unlike the array of demonstration projects the Department of Energy is sponsoring, such as the Energy Reactor Pilot Program that has 10 companies vying for federal funding if they can demonstrate functionality of their designs by July 4, 2026, enriching uranium is not a new process.

“We’re not here to do science experiments, right?” he said. “We’re here to go big or go home. We’re not going home. The era of demonstration is over. We are moving onto large-scale commercial production.”

Centrus is already licensed to produce low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium in its Ohio plant, he said. Its Technology and Manufacturing Center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is the only domestic manufacturer of centrifuges needed for the enrichment process. It’s ready to gradually scale-up production.

“We have the site. We have the facility,” Brown said. “We have the room to expand” at the Piketon plant, which is demonstrating with 18 centrifuges what could be replicated by thousands. “Our technologies are proven and are actively producing [high-assay low-enriched uranium] today,” he said.

The Department of Energy award is designed to induce a long-term “demand signal” for investors and utilities, he said, by assuring them there will be ample domestic supply of enriched uranium available should they incorporate nuclear power into their grid expansion plans.

However, Brown said, the Piketon plant and other projects nationwide are not expected to reach peak production until the early 2030s, meaning there could be more demand than supply until production can catch up.

While the Department of Energy funding is critical in seeding domestic capacity to be self-sufficient in producing nuclear fuels, how swiftly that can be achieved is now up to the industry itself, he said, encouraging operators to begin negotiating “off take” agreements with Centrus and others engaged in uranium enrichment so they can secure their fuel supply and processors can commit to ramping up with confirmed orders.

“This is the chicken-and-the-egg problem that [the Department of Energy] was trying to solve. They said, ‘Build the capacity and the advanced reactor development will come while we’re building it,’” Brown said. “That’s the message. So we need firm contracts to proceed to build further. So let us know. We’re ready.”

Government regulation and corruption are the cause.
Years ago we made an agreement with the Russian to downsize our nuclear arsenals. That means we had a lot of highly enriched nuclear material. That material would have to be stored somewhere forever and not used.
A reasonable answer was to reprocess to or downgrade it to the level required for reactors for power generation.
They spent over $8 billion dollars and then cancelled the project due to massive overruns, delays and corruption. This was at the Savannah River site and Lindsey Graham had been pushing it hard since it was in his district.
Then they sold off some of the overpriced goods they bought for less than pennies on the dollar.
Apparently they bought some of the Russians reprocessed fuel until Congress passed restrictions that ended that as a source.
I bought some very expensive stuff at an auction for almost nothing and had one of the strangest experiences of my life collecting it (a whole other story).

Here's a small part.
https://nukewatch.org/new-and-...ction-and-equipment/

Seems like an obvious way to "bridge the gap" is to build a few breeder reactors. I believe these were banned as part of the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty that will soon expire. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in this area could comment.

While "making a deal" with Iran, the US could take possession of the stockpiles Iran has, rather than letting Russia acquire them.

This way we know how much is received, and what Iran would retain, gives us a fast track to processing it down to low-enriched levels and would provide a very significant amount of fuel.

If a deal is made, the transfer could begin very soon.

^^^ That could very well be what President Trump is thinking.

Diminishing supply of mined uranium is how I have made a lot of money since covid. The increasing demand has driven up the stock prices for uranium miners. I still have some and am still making money off of it so this situation will continue to benefit me financially.

If only Hillary hadn't given our uranium to Russia...

^^^