Nuclear power companies and the U.S. government are approaching a cliff — a gradually emerging shortage of enriched uranium to fuel new reactors and the backbone of America’s military deterrence.
Companies, with help from the Department of Energy, are racing to build factories and enrichment capabilities in an effort to stand up an industry that the United States abandoned at the end of the Cold War.
If it fails, according to DOE reports and interviews, developers of next-generation reactors that hope to deploy power plants this decade might not have what they need. And naval ships and warheads could see shortages of highly enriched uranium and tritium in the 2040s and 2050s.
“When I got to Congress, I was stunned by the fact that America had lost its ability to enrich uranium,” said Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), who chairs the House Appropriations Energy-Water Subcommittee. “To power our submarines and aircraft carriers, we were using a downblend of basically nuclear weapons to get fuel. That was a finite amount.”
Power producers have relied on Russian uranium imports. As those imports are phased out at the direction of Congress, U.S. uranium supply needs are spurring billions of dollars in investment. Companies are building infrastructure for a domestic market — fuel enriched to various grades and with different legal restrictions — that experts say advanced reactors will need to power data centers and that will be critical for sustaining America’s nuclear arsenal.
Now, Virginia-based BWX Technologies (also called BWXT) and Centrus Energy, a company spun out of the U.S. government enrichment program, are building in Tennessee and Ohio, respectively.
Uranium for military use must come from wholly-owned domestic sources. For years, that solution was the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, or USEC, which was privatized in 1998. Its finances deteriorated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Support for nuclear power fell and prices for enriched uranium weakened, leading to a 2014 bankruptcy.
Amid those difficulties, DOE turned to a new program. The department reached an agreement with BWXT, a longtime nuclear engineering company. The company worked closely with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop a new centrifuge that could be built with an entirely domestic supply chain. Last September, BWXT signed a $1.5 billion contract with DOE to produce highly enriched uranium for naval reactors.
“Two decades away is when this naval reactor stockpile must be replenished, but there are a lot of things that are going to change in the next 20 years,” said Joe Miller, president of BWXT’s government operations. “It’s going to take some time to go through the development activities — mass-produce centrifuges, prepare the facilities, commission, operate, produce enriched uranium. That’s a long process.”
Miller said the company intends to mass-produce centrifuges in Oak Ridge before deploying them to Erwin, Tennessee, where BWXT would ultimately enrich uranium to above 90 percent. Miller cast the effort as a defense-first project, not a commercial enrichment venture.
“What we’re planning on doing is staying very true to what’s in our NNSA contract,” Miller said, referring to DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. “Focus on the government market.”
If the commercial market for enriched uranium presents itself, Miller said, “we’d be interested in pursuing those opportunities.”
DOE isn’t putting all of its eggs in one basket. USEC changed its name to Centrus after the 2014 bankruptcy. In January 2026, it secured a $900 million Trump administration award to bolster production of fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors at its thus-far pilot-scale Ohio facility.
The company’s patriotic marketing tells investors that their centrifuge “is available for national security deployment.” But experts and competitors say its centrifuges use parts obligated to foreign suppliers and for producing electricity — peaceful purposes only.
A former DOE official, granted anonymity to speak about sensitive technology, said that Americanizing Centrus’ parts wouldn’t be especially difficult.
“Now that we’re building a much larger plant designed to meet both commercial and national security requirements, the machines we’re building will be unobligated,” Dan Leistikow, corporate communications vice president for Centrus. “We are proud to be restoring America’s ability to enrich uranium at scale — with proven American technology, built by American workers.”
Meeting two needs
Chasing national security uranium might be a rising tide that lifts all boats. Some in the nuclear power world see such demand as key for propping up enrichment infrastructure that could also serve commercial reactors.
Fleischmann and John Kotek, senior vice president of policy and public affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, say that the government has supported enrichment for years under the hope that it would serve security and commercial purposes.
“During my time leading DOE’s office of nuclear energy, it was always my expectation that federal investments in new enrichment capacity would help meet both domestic and federal needs,” said Kotek, who left the department at the end of the Obama administration.
Grant Isaac, president of Cameco, a Canada-based uranium producer, sees that potential. “Defense needs may drive some of the demand for HALEU,” he said, referring to high-assay low-enriched uranium. “But this market is relatively limited.”
Nuclear startup companies developing small modular reactors (SMRs) are looking at HALEU as a powerful fuel choice. California’s General Matter and France’s Orano are both exploring production. Urenco is actively building HALEU capacity at its U.K. plant, which it says will produce 27 metric tons annually. Just this month, DOE imported 1.7 metric tons from Japan.
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor, under construction in Wyoming, will require 15-20 tonnes of HALEU for its initial fueling and just under four tonnes annually thereafter. The company plans to build up to eight reactors under an agreement with Facebook parent company Meta, and it is eyeing additional builds in the U.S. and U.K.
“I think competition is really healthy right now,” BWXT’s Miller said. “You have an existing design that’s operational under Centrus’ control. You have our design, which has been very purpose-built for mass production. Allow those two technologies to compete.”
A poorly enriched market
Enriched uranium broadly comes in three categories: HALEU, low-enriched uranium (LEU) and high-enriched uranium (HEU). Each grade is the product of further enriching lower tiers to a higher purity through the same general process.
The Pentagon needs both low-enriched and high-enriched uranium. The Watts Bar nuclear plant in Tennessee turns low-enriched uranium into tritium, which is needed for hydrogen bombs. Meanwhile, high-enriched uranium feeds reactors and powers submarines and aircraft carriers.
Large conventional nuclear power plants run on low-enriched fuel produced out of Urenco’s New Mexico plant and several European facilities, but the European-owned company can’t provide LEU for tritium production at Watts Bar.
Neither can the Canadian Cameco, but it has a lot of confidence in the commercial market.
“Commercial demand for uranium, conversion and enrichment is projected to increase with planned uprates at current reactors, restarts of previously closed reactors, and the work on deploying new reactors, such as AP1000s and SMRs, both in the U.S. and globally,” Isaac said.
Advanced reactors require higher operating temperatures and energy-dense fuel such as HALEU. Yet there’s a chicken-or-egg issue: enrichment companies need reactors that use HALEU to dedicate the resources to manufacturing it. Some worry the startup companies pursuing such designs will fizzle out.
“The HALEU market is one of uncertainty,” Isaac said. “And as Cameco, we would need to see much more in terms of real demand before we made significant investments in this space.”
