This uranium company wants to break the grip that foreign state corporations have on U.S. nuclear fuel

CNBC

16 hours ago

President Donald Trump's push to dramatically increase nuclear power in the U.S. will require a tremendous amount of fuel, but the country remains heavily dependent on foreign state-owned companies for its supplies, the CEO of the only publicly traded uranium enricher in the world told CNBC.
"There's barely enough Western enrichment, if at all, to satisfy existing operating plants," Centrus Energy CEO Amir Vexler said in an interview. "If the nuclear industry is to add all this generation capacity, there will have to be a tremendous amount of enrichment capacity that's added."
Trump issued a series of executive orders on nuclear power last month that set a target for the U.S. to quadruple the sector's capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. Nuclear energy is one of the few issues in deeply polarized Washington these days that enjoys some level of bipartisan support. Trump's push expands on former President Joe Biden's goal to triple nuclear power by midcentury.
Most nuclear plants worldwide use low-enriched uranium, or LEU. The U.S. relied on foreign countries for around 70% of the fuel for its reactors in 2023, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.
About 27% of U.S. fuel purchases came from Russia that year, one of the principle geopolitical foes of the U.S. But Russian uranium will be forced out of the U.S. supply chain by 2028 at the latest, after Biden signed legislation in 2024 to ban imports over Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. faces a looming nuclear fuel supply gap due to the loss of Russian uranium.
Western enrichment capacity, meanwhile, is dominated by two players that are not American owned. They are France's Orano and a British-Dutch-German consortium called Urenco, according to the World Nuclear Association.
The European enrichers are reliable partners and have done a good job supporting the market, Vexler told CNBC. But trade tensions threaten to disrupt global supply chains, he said on the Centrus first-quarter earnings call.
"We don't have any domestic fuel cycle capacity, almost at all," Vexler told CNBC, referring to American-owned companies. "We don't mine anything, we don't convert anything. We don't enrich anything. We rely on others. And others are all state-owned enterprises, maybe with a few minor exceptions."
The only commercial enrichment facility operating in the U.S. is owned by Urenco, the European consortium. It is located in Eunice, New Mexico. Centrus wants to break the stranglehold that state-owned corporations have over the U.S. nuclear fuel supply chain.
"The circumstances in the market are such that we believe and we're staking everything we have on the fact that the market needs another enricher," Vexler said. "It needs competition."
Trump directed federal agencies on May 23 to develop a plan to expand uranium enrichment capabilities in the U.S. to meet the needs of the civilian and defense sectors.
The president's order is sparse on concrete details about how domestic enrichment will be stood up in the U.S. But Centrus' stock has gained 46% as of Thursday's close since Trump's announcement as Wall Street sees the company playing a key role in the effort.
The company's shares have risen more than 7% this week as Meta's deal to buy nuclear power from Constellation Energy has reinforced the view that demand is increasing as the tech sector hunts for electricity for its data centers.
Centrus is one of just two companies that are licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to produce low-enriched uranium in the U.S., the other being Urenco.
Bethesda, Maryland-based Centrus is also the only company in the U.S. that has a license to produce a type of fuel that some next-generation nuclear plant designs, such as small modular reactors, are planning to use.
The U.S. wasn't always dependent on foreign countries. It was the first country to enrich uranium for the commercial market and was a dominant player in the market through the 1980s. The federal government owned and operated the nation's enrichment facilities during that period.
The U.S. sold its enrichment business through a company called the United States Enrichment Corp. in a public offering in 1998. USEC went bankrupt in 2014 as nuclear plants struggled to compete against cheap natural gas and support for the industry declined in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. Centrus emerged from the reorganization of USEC later that year and is now profitable.
"We were just not able to compete with other government, state-owned competitors," said Vexler, who took over the helm at Centrus in 2024. When times got tough for the industry, national governments in Europe and Russia would not allow their state-owned enrichers to fail, he said.
Centrus operates an enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, about 95 miles east of Cincinnati that could one day supply a major portion of U.S. nuclear fuel needs.
The Ohio facility has a footprint the size of the Pentagon and could produce enriched uranium equivalent to about 25% of the total purchased by U.S. power plants in 2023, according to Centrus. This is nearly equivalent to the amount of enriched uranium imported from Russia that year.
"If that is not sufficient, if domestic requirements, national security requirements, export requirements exceed that, then obviously we have the capability to expand as well," Vexler said.
The Ohio plant has not launched commercial operations yet. It is currently producing a small amount of the fuel that the developers of advanced reactor designs are banking on, called high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The Department of Energy buys the fuel that Centrus produces.
Centrus' main business right now is importing LEU for U.S. nuclear plants with contracts that run through 2040. It has a waiver to import Russian LEU through 2025 and has applied for waivers through 2027. Under U.S. law, exceptions that allow Russian imports will cease by 2028.
Centrus plans to transition away from its trading business as it stands up its domestic enrichment capacity. The vast majority of the enriched uranium produced in Ohio will be sold on the commercial market and potentially for export, Vexler said.
"I would certainly aim for us to not only backfill sort of the vacancy that the Russians are creating, but I also hope that we're going to gain market share, both in the LEU and in the HALEU market," Vexler said.
But this will require some level of government support given the state-owned competition, he said. Congress has passed $3.4 billion to support domestic enrichment and reduce U.S. dependence particularly on Russia. Centrus is one of several companies competing for the funding.
"We've always said that it has to be a public-private partnership," Vexler said. "We've been raising our own funds. We've been raising our own financing. We will contribute significantly to this, but we have to have government support."
"There is a path here where we could have a prosperous, commercially competitive American industry," he said.