AINEWS
HALEU is the enriched uranium between reactor fuel and weapons grade, and what most small modular reactor designs run on. US production is under 1 metric ton against a 50 ton demand forecast by 2035.
The Department of Energy named four companies on Tuesday to scale up domestic production of HALEU, the enriched uranium that most small modular reactor and advanced reactor designs need, as AI datacenter power demand outpaces what the existing fuel supply can support. The selection runs through the agency's Nuclear Energy Launch Pad program and draws on $2.7 billion already allocated for enrichment infrastructure (DOE).
US HALEU demand is forecast to reach 50 metric tons of uranium, measured in MTU, by 2035. Current domestic production sits below 1 MTU per year (DOE HALEU Availability Program). That 50-fold gap is the supply story. Whether someone can weld together a small reactor in a warehouse runs downstream of it.
Standard commercial reactor fuel runs at 3 to 5 percent of the fissile isotope U-235. Anything above 20 percent crosses into weapons-grade territory. HALEU, short for high-assay low-enriched uranium, covers the 5 to 19.75 percent range, just below the 20 percent line, and gives reactor designers more neutrons per fuel atom without the proliferation baggage of higher enrichments (Nusano via PR Newswire).
One of the four vendors is Nusano, a West Valley, Utah–based company whose HALEU line uses a different chemical route than the established industry standard. Conventional enrichment starts with uranium hexafluoride gas, a corrosive and heavily regulated feedstock. Nusano's process feeds metallic uranium directly into the enrichment stage, a method called direct metallization, and is designed to go from natural uranium to 19.75 percent U-235 in a single pass rather than the multiple cascades typical of centrifuge plants (Interesting Engineering).
Each Nusano HALEU module is sized at roughly 1,200 square feet and is designed to produce 5.9 metric tons of HALEU per year, with the first unit targeted for operation in 2031 (Nusano via PR Newswire). Standing up enough modules to hit the 50-metric-ton forecast by 2035 would require commissioning in the high single digits per year through the early 2030s, on a brand-new chemical process and a supply chain that currently feeds the gas-centrifuge industry.
The driver behind the program is AI datacenter power demand, the GPU racks that train and run large models, and the expectation among utilities and grid planners that those loads will arrive faster than transmission can be built. The Register argues the trend is data centers driving DOE enthusiasm for higher-enriched uranium and advanced reactors (The Register). That direction matches the load-growth assumptions already in utility integrated resource plans. The vendor selection is a HALEU enrichment award, not a confirmed hyperscaler offtake for a small modular reactor.
Direct metallization, single-pass enrichment, and a 1,200-square-foot modular footprint are engineering claims that have not been demonstrated at production cadence. The 50-metric-ton demand figure originated with industry projections and is now echoed in Department of Energy program language, so the fact checker should verify it against a primary DOE forecast before it ships in any policy discussion as a hard number. The four-vendor cohort, of which Nusano is the most recently named member, is what the Department of Energy is betting on to convert program language into actual fuel.
The watch items are specific. The first Nusano module targets 2031. The demand projection runs to 2035. Any of the four vendors slipping past 2031, or any pilot-scale demonstration getting stuck in qualification testing, pushes the supply math into the red. Local readers will see this play out at utility commission dockets, where integrated resource plans now assume some share of nuclear capacity to meet datacenter load growth, and at state siting boards where small modular reactor proposals will be weighed against the fuel supply actually available to run them. The bottleneck is fuel, and the fuel is currently a West Valley warehouse's worth of annual production.