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 principal 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.”
Rebuilding U.S. supply chain
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…
Read More: Centrus wants to challenge foreign state control of uranium
