17-04-2025
US government to ship enriched uranium to Oak Ridge nuclear fuel plant planning 400 jobs
The U.S. Department of Energy will ship specialized uranium to a nuclear fuel plant under construction in Oak Ridge, bridging a gap in the domestic uranium supply chain for a company with plans to create hundreds of local jobs.
TRISO-X, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon-backed advanced reactor developer X-energy, is building a fuel fabrication plant at the Horizon Center Industrial Park to enter operations by the end of 2027.
Its near-term goal is to supply pebble fuel for X-energy's first small modular reactors at a Dow manufacturing facility in Seadrift, Texas. TRISO-X wants to supply fuel to other companies in the future.
TRISO-X is one of five companies selected by the U.S. government to receive shipments from the government's store of uranium while it helps a handful of uranium enrichment companies including Centrus Energy and Orano build out a domestic supply chain.
"We are clearly in the right position to be able to bring these advanced technologies on board and get them operating," Joel Duling, president of TRISO-X, told Knox News in an interview.
TRISO-X will not enrich uranium at its Oak Ridge plant, but will manufacture spherical nuclear fuel using enriched uranium. The process is critical to X-energy's push to build its own fuel supply chain.
The first TRISO-X facility in Oak Ridge will employ around 400 people once it is operational, Duling said. The company broke ground for the $300 million plant in 2022 and began site preparations in November.
It plans to begin construction on its first plant in July or August, having originally planned to open in 2025. A second plant slated for Oak Ridge will increase the local TRISO-X workforce to around 1,000 people.
The lack of a U.S. source of high-assay, low-enriched uranium is a major hurdle for advanced nuclear companies. The fuel, also called HALEU, is more concentrated than the uranium in commercial nuclear power plant reactors, but less powerful than bomb-grade uranium.
The Department of Energy could send enriched uranium to advanced nuclear companies as soon as this fall, and plans to select more companies for future shipments.
The fuel will come from the government's stores, including from the National Nuclear Security Administration, though the Department of Energy did not share the exact source of the uranium.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, a quasi-independent agency of the Department of Energy that shepherds the U.S. nuclear arsenal, stores bomb-grade uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge.
Kairos Power, a company building a series of demonstration reactors in Oak Ridge, also will receive an allocation of uranium. It is developing its own advanced nuclear fuel in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The special uranium fuel is necessary for many advanced nuclear reactor designs to run more efficiently and safely, and at varying sizes, compared to large traditional nuclear power plants.
X-energy and Dow submitted a construction permit application for the Xe-100 reactor design to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the companies announced March 31. The approval of the construction permit could take up to two and a half years.
Many tech companies are investing in small modular reactors as a potential source of 24/7 clean energy to power data centers that train AI platforms and process online transactions.
Most advanced nuclear companies use some form of TRISO fuel, which stands for "tri-structural isotropic." Each particle of TRISO fuel, around the size of a poppy seed, has its own containment through layers of carbon, oxygen and uranium.
Companies load the particles into different fabrications, like pebbles, pellets or rods. The fuel "cannot melt" in a reactor and is the "most robust nuclear fuel on earth," according to the Department of Energy.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S. government's largest multiprogram science and tech lab, established a dedicated lab space to develop TRISO fuel in 2002.
TRISO-X formed a partnership to pilot its own fuel at ORNL in 2016 and continues to operate a lab there. The partnership is set to expire at the end of this year, Duling said, though the company may renew it for further research.
Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Email: Signal: @danieldassow.24.
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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: US to ship enriched uranium to TRISO-X nuclear plant in Oak Ridge
