Thursday, 10 April 2025
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HALEU – uranium enriched to contain between 5% and 20% uranium-235 – will be used by many advanced reactors which are seen as essential to the USA’s clean energy future and meeting its clean energy and climate goals. But the country currently lacks commercial HALEU enrichment capabilities to support the deployment of advanced reactors. These contracts are part of efforts by the US Administration to build a secure domestic HALEU supply chain, and follow the recent announcement of contracts to support HALEU deconversion services.
The HALEU Availability Program was established in 2020 to secure a domestic supply of HALEU for civilian domestic research, development, demonstration, and commercial use. The HALEU allocation process enables nuclear developers to request HALEU material from DOE sources, including material from the National Nuclear Security Administration.
DOE said it received HALEU requests from 15 companies. For this first round, the department identified five of those companies that met “prioritisation criteria”, with three of them requiring fuel delivery in 2025. The selected companies are: Kairos Power, Radiant Industries, TerraPower, TRISO-X and Westinghouse.
“The allocated HALEU supports both Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) Pathway 1 award recipients, companies planning to demonstrate in the DOME test bed, along with some ARDP risk reduction awardees – reinforcing DOE’s commitment to our industry partnerships,” DOE said.
The department said it will now initiate the contracting process to allocate the material to the five companies, “some of which could receive their HALEU as early as this fall”. It noted the allocation process is ongoing, and it plans to continue HALEU allocations to additional companies in the future.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said: “The Trump Administration is unleashing all sources of affordable, reliable and secure American energy – and this includes accelerating the deployment of advanced nuclear reactors. Allocating this HALEU material will help US nuclear developers deploy their advanced reactors with materials sourced from secure supply chains, marking an important step forward in President Trump’s programme to revitalise America’s nuclear sector.”
X-energy subsidiary TRISO-X, one of the first recipients, said it will receive the material for fuel fabrication at its future Oak Ridge, Tennessee, fuel fabrication plant. The company recently amended its special nuclear material licence application to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reflect the required installation of additional equipment to receive the allocation.
“This first allocation is a critical step forward to bridge the HALEU availability gap in the nuclear supply chain with existing material,” said TRISO-X President Joel Duling. “Coupled with the HALEU Availability Program and other efforts, we expect the commercial sector to further bridge the availability gap to support the delivery and scalability of the advanced reactor fleet. We are grateful for the administration’s strong support for commercialising these next-generation technologies and the reliable, secure energy future we hope to build.”
Kairos Power said it will use material provided by DOE to produce HALEU TRISO (tri-structural isotropic) fuel pebbles for the Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in partnership with the Los Alamos National Laboratory using manufacturing processes developed and optimised in Kairos Power laboratories.
