The company announced its plans to expand its US capacity by nearly 50% in June, making a strategic, multi-billion-dollar investment to fund the construction of a new enrichment plant at Urenco USA’s National Enrichment Facility in Eunice, New Mexico. The project will see the installation of 2.1 million separative work units (SWU) of new enrichment capacity using the company’s proven gas-centrifuge enrichment technology in 24 cascades of centrifuges, with the initial cascades starting production in 2032 and additional cascades installed through 2036. The expansion will support between 300-600 jobs during the peak construction period and 70 jobs in long-term operations.
“We’re making this substantial commitment to expand our US facility to serve our US customers’ needs. But this expansion also supports the US Department of Energy’s goals to accelerate the deployment of new domestic capacity, strengthen the US nuclear fuel supply chain, and reinvigorate the nuclear industrial base,” Urenco CEO Boris Schucht said, before thanking Wright, his team, “and the whole Administration for creating this momentum for the nuclear industry. This is really an exciting time in the US nuclear industry, and we are proud to be a part of it.”
Schucht also thanked Urenco’s customers for their confidence in the company: “We built this plant at our customers’ request, and they backed it with long-term contracts. It is a commercial, world-class facility developed without any public funding. To date, we have invested more than USD5 billion in the site. This will now increase to more than USD8 billion. We are delighted to retain our customers’ trust, which has made this expansion possible.”
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(Image: Urenco USA)
Unenriched, or natural, uranium contains about 0.7% of the fissile uranium-235 (U-235) isotope which is capable of undergoing the fission process by which energy is produced in a nuclear reactor – the rest is the non-fissile uranium-238 isotope. Most nuclear reactors in operation today need fuel containing between 3.5% and 5% U-235: this is also known as low-enriched uranium, or LEU.
The National Enrichment Facility began operations in 2010 and has the capacity to meet around one-third of the enrichment needs of US commercial nuclear power plants for LEU (the USA relies on enrichment capacity overseas for the rest). The facility has an existing annual capacity of 4.3 million SWU, to which 700,000 SWU of capacity is currently being added in an ongoing project due for completion in 2027. But demand for nuclear power is expected to grow in the coming years, while the USA has placed a total ban on imports of Russian-enriched uranium from January 2028.
Urenco USA currently employs more than 500 staff and long-term contractors at the facility. A report published late last year by Oxford Economics found that the operations of Urenco USA contributed more than USD360 million to the US economy in 2024-2025.
