Lightbridge Corporation (LTBR)

[boominator]

U.S. Inches Closer To Breaking Russia’s Monopoly On HALEU Fuel

The Putin government's control over a special nuclear fuel has rattled the West's atomic industry.
New deals show the U.S. is finally trying to catch up.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/centrus-oklo-nuclear_n_64ebc564e4b0d17252144d32

U.S. is inching closer to breaking the Kremlin’s monopoly.

On Monday, the Ohio-based Centrus Energy announced a deal to supply the California-based reactor startup Oklo Inc. with a fuel known as high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU.

Pronounced HAY-loo, the fuel compares to traditional reactor fuel the way a heady Belgian ale might stack up to a Miller Lite. The old-school, large-scale reactors that comprise the entire U.S. fleet can’t stomach HALEU, which is enriched to the point where as much as 20% of the uranium atoms can be split, as opposed to the typical stuff that maxes out at 5%. But the sleek new reactor technologies companies like Oklo, Bill Gates-backed TerraPower and the Maryland-based X-energy hope to bring to market in the coming years run on that stronger stuff.

As it is, the U.S. produces just 5% of its own traditional reactor fuel from a New Mexico facility owned by Urenco, a consortium jointly owned by the British, German and Dutch governments. It’s been difficult enough to get more domestic production up and running for that fuel, much less convince private investors to spend billions of dollars on facilities to manufacture fuel for reactors that don’t even exist yet.

This has created a “chicken-and-egg problem,” said Dan Leistikow, the vice president of communications at Centrus.

“It’s very difficult to sell reactors without a domestic fuel supply,” he said in an interview Sunday. “But it’s very difficult to put the investment together to build the fuel supply until there’s a base of customers.”

Making matters tougher, the energy-intensive “gaseous diffusion” technology once used to enrich uranium went out of fashion. Countries like France and Russia built what are called centrifuges, cylindrical machines that spin gasified uranium at extremely high speeds to turn the metal from its natural form into the unstable radioactive isotope that can be easily split in a fission reaction. But the U.S. simply lets its old enrichment industry shut down without investing in anything new.

Centrus ? which was born out of the Manhattan Project and split from the federal government to become a private company in 1992 ? has been slowly working to change that, building a pilot facility in Piketon, Ohio, that in June got the first stamp of approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the company has yet to receive enough investment to expand to full capacity.

Once that demand lines up, things could move quickly, Leistikow said. It would take 3 1/2 years to get enough centrifuges up and running to produce 6 metric tons of HALEU per year. But the company said it could roughly double its capacity every six months after that with the right amount of money flowing to it.

Democrats earmarked roughly $700 million in President Joe Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act climate law for producing HALEU at home. But Leistikow said that amounts to a down payment.