Higher-enriched uranium for datacenters has DoE all aglow

HALEU is still being produced at a snail's pace; Nusano says its federal backing could speed things up – eventually

The US Department of Energy has selected a new participant for a program aimed at expanding the domestic supply of fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors. However, we shouldn't expect that to mean the US' ever-growing fleet of datacenters will be powered by low-carbon nuclear energy any time soon.

Utah-based Nusano announced on Monday that the DoE had selected it for its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad Program designed to help companies commercialize their nuclear power concepts. In this case, Nusano is working on a new method of creating high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, fuel that’s required for most next-generation nuclear reactors, like small modular reactors (SMRs) and molten salt reactors. 

HALEU is defined as uranium enay, low-riched to between 5 and 20 weight percent of U-235, the primary fissile isotope that nuclear reactors use to generate power. Traditional nuclear reactors use low-enriched uranium of under five percent. The higher enrichment is needed for smaller, more efficient reactor designs that are currently under development. Several advanced reactor demonstrations in the US have reached zero-power criticality, but none is yet operating commercially.

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The US has been without a steady commercial-scale supply of HALEU for years, with Russia historically the main commercial supplier and China also possessing HALEU enrichment capability. As of 2026, there’s only a single company in the US actively producing HALEU, and it’s not Nusano. The DoE has signed agreements with several others to produce more HALEU and related fuel products, but those firms are still establishing their facilities, and production remains minuscule.

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Centrus, the only American company producing HALEU, has generated less than two metric tons since it signed a contract with the government in 2019. 

The competition heats up

Nusano expects to blow Centrus’ meager fuel generation out of the water with its HALEU enrichment design. That said, the company’s design hasn’t actually been realized yet. 

Nusano didn’t answer a question about whether it had built a functional demonstration HALEU enrichment unit, and when asked whether it had produced any HALEU, the company said that prototype development is still under way.

“Nusano expects each unit will produce 5.9 metric tons (MT) of HALEU per year, with the first unit scheduled to be operational in 2031,” Nusano comms boss Scott Larrivee told The Register in an email. “Nusano’s Launch Pad application includes a well-developed, practical plan to move from proof-of-concept to commercial implementation.”

As for what that’ll look like, Nusano describes a method that’s completely different from other forms of HALEU production. Whereas other HALEU refiners use gas centrifuges to produce HALEU, spinning uranium hexafluoride gas at high speeds to increase U-235 concentration, Nusano’s method ditches gas entirely. 

“The method is complex, costly, and potentially hazardous,” Larrivee explained. “If released, uranium hexafluoride reacts with moisture in air or human tissue to form highly toxic, corrosive hydrogen fluoride and uranyl fluoride.” 

Those gases, Larrivee said, can cause potentially fatal injuries like chemical burns and lung and kidney damage.

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Nusano is proposing a method that uses uranium feedstock that’s converted to metal prior to enrichment. Unspecified “proprietary separation techniques” are then used to enrich the metal and separate out U-235. The HALEU output of Nusano’s design is metal.

“The Nusano process is metal in, metal out. No deconversion. No gaseous fluorine chemistry anywhere,” Larrivee added. 

Nusano’s current design only requires 1,200 square feet per HALEU unit, and the company anticipates its production cost will be lower than those of gas-centrifuge enrichment.

That said, a lot of Nusano units will be needed to meet expected American demand. According to the DoE, HALEU demand could reach 50 metric tons per year by 2035, and Nusano is only expecting to get its first 5.9 MT/year unit up and running by 2031. 

It’s also not clear if Nusano’s current promises will still be the same if and when its HALEU units are up and running. In June 2025, the company said it had achieved a breakthrough that would allow a single HALEU unit to produce 50 metric tons annually and enable it to scale production to 350 metric tons per year by 2029. Search the company website for that announcement today, and it’s gone. 

We were only able to see it by pulling up an archived copy. Larrivee said that announcement was out of date, developed under prior company leadership, and that the numbers in the latest release were reflective of current development plans. 

A number of datacenter operators have promised to embrace SMRs and other next-gen nuclear when the technology is available. With HALEU output still low and commercial-scale production years away, it's unclear when those promises will be realized.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency has just scrapped Biden-era emissions regulations for coal and gas power plants, which it said means coal generation in the US could increase by more than ten times current levels. 

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In other words, next-gen nuclear is, as ever, still on the horizon while bit barns crank up the fossil fuel turbines, now with even less regard to environmental impacts. ®