Fuel

An article in the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s July news bulletin noted that a first test has been completed for the High Burnup Experiments in Reactivity Initiated Accident (HERA) project. The project aim is to understand the performance of light water reactor fuel at high burnup under reactivity-initiated accidents (RIA).

Shine Technologies has been developing fusion-adjacent technologies in Janesville, Wis., including nuclear fuel recycling, since its founding in 2005. Standard Nuclear of Oak Ridge, Tenn., was formed just last year but holds a TRISO fuel production technology backed by years of research and development since it acquired Ultra Safe Nuclear’s fuel manufacturing assets after that company’s bankruptcy in October 2024. Now, Shine and Standard Nuclear have announced plans to work together on a “strategic partnership to advance nuclear fuel recycling and U.S. fuel security.”

Uranium provider Cameco has calculated an end-of-June spot price of $78.50 for uranium—a substantial jump from $71.55 the previous month. Cameco continues to list a long-term price of $80.00, a price that has remained unchanged since February.

Global Laser Enrichment announced that it has submitted its safety analysis report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the planned Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility (PLEF). This follows GLE’s December 2024 submission of the plant’s environmental report, now completing GLE’s full license application for NRC review.

Centrus Energy has secured a contract extension from the Department of Energy to continue—for one year—its ongoing high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, at an annual rate of 900 kilograms of HALEU UF₆. That's the same amount of HALEU—900 kg—that the company today announced it has delivered to the DOE, completing Phase II of its contract. According to Centrus, the contract extension, which allows the company to begin Phase III, is valued at about $110 million through June 30, 2026.

In the fall of 2023, a small Zeno Power team accomplished a major feat: they demonstrated the first strontium-90 heat source in decades—and the first-ever by a commercial company.

Zeno Power worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to fabricate and validate this Z1 heat source design at the lab’s Radiochemical Processing Laboratory. The Z1 demonstration heralded renewed interest in developing radioisotope power system (RPS) technology. In early 2025, the heat source was disassembled, and the Sr-90 was returned to the U.S. Department of Energy for continued use.

Uranium futures rose to $71.90 per pound on June 2, according to online analysis firm Trading Economics. That price was near its highest level since early February—in contrast to an 18-month low in prices reached in mid-March.

Ensuring energy resilience for our nation is on the minds of leaders and citizens alike. Advances in nuclear power technologies are increasing needs within the nuclear industry supply chain. Savannah River National Laboratory’s decades of experience in nuclear materials processing makes the lab uniquely qualified to meet the current and future challenges of the nuclear fuel cycle.

At the Idaho National Laboratory Hot Fuel Examination Facility, containment box operator Jake Maupin moves a manipulator arm into position around a pencil-thin nuclear fuel rod. He is preparing for a procedure that he and his colleagues have practiced repeatedly in anticipation of this moment in the hot cell.

ASP Isotopes Inc. announced on May 19 that it now has conditional commitments from TerraPower for a loan that could partially finance a new uranium enrichment facility in South Africa. The companies have also reached a supply agreement for high-assay low-enriched uranium from the proposed facility that, according to ASP, “supports the supply of HALEU for the first fuel core for TerraPower’s Natrium Plant in Wyoming and contemplates the supply of HALEU over a 10-year period.”

Urenco USA has initiated production of enriched uranium in its newest gas centrifuge enrichment cascade—the first in a planned expansion of its Eunice, N.M., facility announced in July 2023. When the expansion is complete, early in 2027, the site will have increased its capacity by about 15 percent, adding about 700,000 separative work units (SWU) per year, the company said May 19.

Ur-Energy Inc. has secured approval from the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s Land Quality Division to construct and operate up to six additional mine units at its Lost Creek in situ uranium mine in south-central Wyoming. With that late April approval in hand, “we await only final concurrence and approval of the related aquifer exemption from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” the company said. That approval was granted just three days later, on May 1, but Ur-Energy doesn’t plan to expand Lost Creek for “several years.”

Global Laser Enrichment has commenced uranium enrichment demonstration testing at its test loop pilot facility at the company’s headquarters in Wilmington, N.C. The technology readiness level-6 testing program is expected to be a pivotal validation of large-scale enrichment performance under operationally relevant conditions, according to the company.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Nuclear Plasma and Radiation Engineering (NPRE) Department announced yesterday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a fuel qualification methodology topical report for the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor the university wants to construct. The topical report was prepared by Ultra Safe Nuclear and submitted by UIUC to the NRC in March 2024. It describes the fuel that would be used in the microreactor that UIUC plans to host—initially containing uranium enriched to 9.9 percent U-235—and how it would be tested. The NRC issued its approval and a final safety evaluation on April 1.

Los Alamos National Laboratory recently performed a series of customized criticality experiments to obtain data that will support the transportation of HALEU TRISO fuel, the Department of Energy announced April 21.

BWX Technologies Inc. has purchased about 97 acres of land in an Oak Ridge, Tenn., industrial park where the company expects to build a uranium enrichment facility using a technology called DUECE, or, Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment. DUECE was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide enriched uranium for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, and BWXT is several months into a yearlong engineering study to evaluate options for deploying a centrifuge pilot plant using DUECE.

Southern Nuclear recently loaded nuclear fuel with uranium-235 enriched up to 6 percent—higher than the usual 3–5 percent enrichment—into Vogtle-2 to test it through irradiation.

The latest edition of Uranium 2024: Resources, Production and Demand, commonly known as the Red Book, reports that current uranium resources are sufficient to meet low- and high-growth nuclear capacity needs through 2050 and beyond, but that further development of resources is still required. Even if nuclear capacity remains stable at 2050 levels through the end of the century, the report noted that cumulative demand “could exceed the current identified uranium resource base of nearly 8 million tonnes by the 2080s under the low-growth demand scenario and by the 2110s under the high-growth demand scenario outlined in this edition.”

The Department of Energy has announced its first round of conditional commitments to provide high-assay low-enriched uranium to five U.S. nuclear developers. According to the DOE, the delivery of HALEU will support the commercialization of advanced nuclear technologies, aiming to deliver secure, affordable, and reliable energy to Americans.

Servis

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are investigating a used nuclear fuel recycling technology that could lead to a scaled-down and more efficient approach to metal recovery, according to a recent news article from the lab. The research, led by Argonne radiochemist Anna Servis with funding from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), could have an impact beyond the nuclear fuel cycle and improve other high-value metal processing, such as rare earth recovery, according to Argonne.

The research: Servis’s work is being carried out under ARPA-E’s CURIE (Converting UNF Radioisotopes Into Energy) program. The specific project—Radioisotope Capture Intensification Using Rotating Packed Bed Contactors—started in 2023 and is scheduled to end in January 2026.