US Adds 13 Nuclear Fuel Projects to DOE Launch Pad, Targeting Uranium Enrichment and Reactor Fuel

What happened

The US Department of Energy's National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) added 13 new projects across 12 companies to its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad program on Monday, August 24, spanning the full nuclear fuel cycle from reactor design through uranium enrichment, conversion and fuel fabrication. The Launch Pad, unveiled in March 2026 to replace NRIC's earlier Reactor Pilot Program and Fuel Line Pilot Program, gives developers a faster path to federal authorization, access to national laboratory infrastructure and siting support -- the DOE itself provides no direct funding, cost-share or other financial backing, leaving developers to finance their own projects.

Seven of the new entrants are reactor developers already at or near first criticality. Antares Nuclear's factory-built microreactor and Valar Atomics' Ward 250 high-temperature gas reactor both reached initial criticality in June 2026, with Antares becoming the first privately developed advanced reactor in the US to do so and Valar's unit the first DOE-authorized reactor built and operated outside the national laboratory system. Deployable Energy's roughly 1-megawatt Unity reactor achieved criticality the same month, and Oklo's sodium-cooled Aurora powerhouse is under construction at DOE's Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

The remaining companies target the less visible but arguably more consequential fuel-cycle infrastructure the US has let atrophy for decades. Nusano Inc. is building enrichment capacity that avoids both gas centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride, targeting more than 50 metric tons of enriched uranium a year by the end of 2026 and 350 metric tons by 2029. Raven-Flint Nuclear is developing a uranium oxide-to-hexafluoride conversion process that avoids elemental fluorine, with a pilot plant targeting 500 metric tons a year. Lightbridge Corporation is fabricating helically twisted, uranium-zirconium alloy fuel rods enriched between 15% and 19.75%.

"A resilient nuclear fuel supply chain is essential to America's energy future," said DOE Deputy Assistant Secretary Josh Jarrell, tying the announcement to a broader federal push. Roughly 27% of the enriched uranium the US currently uses comes from Russia, which controls close to 44% of global enrichment capacity, and a US law set to take full effect on January 1, 2028 will ban Russian enriched-uranium imports outright.

The details

The headline number here is 13, but the more informative split is beneath it: seven reactor developers chasing demonstration milestones, and the rest working on enrichment, conversion and fabrication -- the unglamorous middle of the nuclear fuel cycle that draws far less attention than a new reactor design, and that the US has spent three decades letting a handful of foreign suppliers dominate.

That imbalance is the real subject of this announcement. The US currently draws about 27% of its enriched uranium from Russia, a country that controls something close to 44% of the world's enrichment capacity -- a dependency built up over the post-Cold War decades when it was cheaper to buy enrichment services abroad than rebuild domestic capacity. A US law now closes that door: enriched-uranium imports from Russia are banned outright starting January 1, 2028, after a waiver window meant to give utilities time to line up alternative supply. Every fuel-cycle company added to the Launch Pad this week is, in effect, racing that deadline.

The specific processes matter more than they might first appear. Nusano's enrichment approach avoids both gas centrifuges (the technology Russia's enrichment industry is built on) and uranium hexafluoride, the volatile intermediate compound most enrichment plants have to handle -- a technology choice that, if it scales to the company's stated 350-metric-ton 2029 target, represents a genuinely different route to producing enriched uranium domestically rather than just replicating existing capacity. Raven-Flint's conversion process, which avoids elemental fluorine, addresses a similarly overlooked chokepoint: uranium has to be converted to hexafluoride before it can be enriched at all, and the US currently operates only a single commercial conversion facility.

What the Launch Pad itself doesn't do is write checks. DOE's role is authorization, national laboratory access and a faster regulatory pathway -- genuinely valuable for a capital-intensive industry with long permitting timelines, but distinct from the roughly $2.7 billion in enrichment contracts the department has separately awarded to four companies under its dedicated enrichment-funding program. That distinction matters for judging how quickly any of these 13 projects reach commercial-scale output: a faster authorization pathway removes one bottleneck, but building hundreds of metric tons of annual enrichment and conversion capacity before 2028 still depends on each company raising and deploying its own capital on schedule.

Why it matters

For a market that has spent the past two years pricing in a structural uranium supply deficit, the fuel-cycle side of this story matters as much as the mining side. Enrichment and conversion capacity, not just mined uranium, has been a binding constraint on how much nuclear fuel the West can actually produce -- and a credible buildout of domestic enrichment, conversion and fuel-fabrication capacity changes the calculus for how dependent US utilities remain on Russian and other foreign fuel-cycle services as the 2028 import ban approaches. It's also a reminder that uranium's price story runs through several distinct bottlenecks -- mining, conversion, enrichment, fabrication -- that don't always move together, and a shortage or buildout at any one stage can matter as much as the headline uranium price itself.