Fuel shortage threatens US nuclear resurgence, warns top supplier – Financial Times

One of the largest suppliers of enriched uranium fuel to US nuclear power plants has warned of a looming supply crunch because of fast-rising demand and a ban on Russian imports.

Centrus Energy chief executive Amir Vexler told the FT the company is racing to build enrichment capacity at its Ohio plant to meet a $2.3bn backlog in sales of enriched uranium to customers. But the restart of several US nuclear plants and upgrading of the reactor fleet to boost electricity output would put pressure on the handful of western suppliers of enriched uranium — a critical component in nuclear fuel, he said.

“It is my strong belief that there is a gap between supply and demand for the existing market — just the operating reactors that we have now,” said Vexler, adding that plans to build new fleets of large and small reactors in the US would pose longer-term challenges.

“I feel the market is strained and will continue to be strained until large amounts of new capacity are going to come online and that will be in the next decade,” he said.

Enriched uranium is produced by refining mined uranium, converting it into a gas and processing it to increase the concentration of a specific isotope used for nuclear fuel.

Experts warn shortages of enrichment services threaten to derail President Donald Trump’s strategy to “unleash America’s next nuclear renaissance”. Prices have soared 167 per cent since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 to a record $173 per separative work unit or SWU — a measurement of enrichment services — according to UxC, a nuclear industry data provider.

The global enrichment industry has four major producers today: Russia’s Rosatom, China National Nuclear Corporation, France’s Orano and Urenco, a private company jointly owned by the British and Dutch governments, as well as German utilities RWE and Eon.

Centrus and Urenco are the only companies licensed to enrich uranium in the US.

For the moment, Centrus sources most of the enriched uranium it sells to US utilities from Russia — a trade that will be prohibited from January 1 2028 because of sanctions legislated by Congress in 2024. The company is building new uranium enrichment capacity that is due to come online in 2029.

“Enrichment is a key bottleneck for the nuclear renaissance,” said Nick Lawson, executive chair of Ocean Wall, an investment group.

“While both Urenco and Orano are investing in additional enrichment cascades, these projects take years to deliver and do not immediately replace the large share of global capacity historically supplied by Russia, which western utilities are now moving away from.”

The US is heavily reliant on foreign suppliers for enrichment services with only 4.3mn SWU of domestic enrichment capacity, while its requirements stand at 15.6mn SWU, according to World Nuclear Association data. There are currently no US-based commercial suppliers of the highly enriched fuel required to power the new generation of smaller nuclear reactors which are under development.

Russia provided about a fifth of the enriched uranium the US nuclear reactor fleet used in 2024, despite the ban legislated in August that year. The Department of Energy is allowed to issue import waivers until January 1 2028, but only if no alternative sources are available.

Last month, the Trump administration awarded Centrus, Orano and new entrant General Matter each $900mn in funding to strengthen domestic enrichment services. It is also offering energy companies access to weapons-grade plutonium to convert into fuel in an attempt to break Russia’s stranglehold over nuclear fuel supply chains.

Urenco, which is expanding a plant in New Mexico that supplies about a third of the US market, said concerns about a looming supply gap were misplaced.

“We do not see a supply gap later this decade,” Jeremy Derryberry, director of communications at Urenco USA. “Plentiful supply from US and other western sources is available to meet demand.”

Centrus’s Vexler said western nations are relying on Urenco and Orano being able to deliver on expansion plans, which had “not really materialised yet”. Both companies shared the same technology provider that designs and engineers the complex gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

“The entire western world relies on a single technology,” Vexler said.

“Obviously, I wish success, and I hope it will materialise as planned. But if anything happens to that, that puts us in a bigger hole.”