When TerraPower announced in December 2022 that its first sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming would slip by at least two years, the cause was neither funding, nor technology, nor regulation. It was fuel. The company could not obtain HALEU.

A supply chain that stopped at the border

TerraPower had planned to buy its first batch of HALEU from Russia. The invasion of Ukraine made that impossible, and at the time no producer outside Russia was making HALEU at industrial scale. The episode exposed how thin the non-Russian supply base for 5–20 percent enriched uranium had become.

Why the gap cannot be closed quickly

Building a uranium enrichment plant takes years, and the lag from deposit discovery to an operating mine currently runs 10–20 years. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, uranium prices stayed low for more than a decade and investment in new mines and enrichment plants became uneconomic — so today's new demand is landing on a market that had been shrinking rather than standing still.

Young reactor developers such as TerraPower and Oklo must build their nuclear fuel supply chains from scratch.

That means separate, multi-year contracting for uranium, conversion, enrichment and fuel assembly production. Public information does not indicate that any major technology company has directly procured nuclear fuel, despite data-center interest in nuclear power; operators and developers carry that procurement burden themselves.

The capacity now under construction

The response is visible but slow. In January 2026 the U.S. Department of Energy committed $2.7 billion to rebuild domestic enrichment across three companies, with Centrus locking in its HALEU tranche on June 30. Centrus expects the first new enrichment capacity to come online in 2029, when the first new cascade must deliver. Its initial build-out includes 12 metric tons per year of HALEU.

For developers, the arithmetic is unforgiving: a reactor that is ready to pour concrete in 2027 still has no domestic HALEU to burn. The fuel bottleneck, not reactor engineering, sets the pace of the first wave of advanced nuclear deployment.

This article was assisted by AI analysis. Please refer to the original source for official information.