Actinide, a Dallas startup barely two years old, announced Tuesday that it had enriched natural uranium to 15.38% U-235 on a laboratory scale, becoming the first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium using modern electromagnetic separation. The achievement positions the young company alongside established players in a race to break U.S. dependence on Russian nuclear fuel, though commercial production remains years away.
The milestone carries an asterisk. Actinide operated under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's laboratory-scale exclusion, which exempts facilities "designed or used for experimental or analytical purposes only" from the stringent licensing required for uranium enrichment facilities, according to federal regulations. Scaling beyond research-grade quantities would require navigating the full NRC licensing process, a journey that has tested far larger companies.
Right now, the United States has no commercial-scale HALEU production to speak of. Centrus Energy remains the only NRC-licensed producer of HALEU uranium hexafluoride in the country, according to NRC facility records as of August 2026. The company produced 20 kilograms of HALEU in November 2023 and had reached 900 kilograms by June 2025 under a Department of Energy demonstration contract. For context, that's barely a fraction of what the industry will need.
Russia and China hold the infrastructure to produce HALEU at industrial scale, as documented in sources available through August 2026. HALEU, uranium enriched between 5% and 20% U-235, fuels most advanced reactor designs coming to market. In 2025, U.S. reactor operators purchased 77% of enrichment services from foreign suppliers, with Russia supplying 26% of those separative work units, the Energy Information Administration reported in August 2026. On May 13, 2024, President Biden signed legislation banning Russian low-enriched uranium imports. Limited waivers expire January 1, 2028, a deadline that looms over the entire industry.
Federal money is reshaping the competitive landscape, perhaps faster than anyone anticipated. Congress allocated $700 million through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act for the HALEU Availability Program and $2.72 billion in fiscal 2024 to implement the Nuclear Fuel Security Act, DOE announced in March 2024. On January 5, 2026, DOE awarded Centrus a $900 million task order to expand to commercial-scale HALEU production, the kind of commitment that signals the government's urgency.
DOE projects demand exceeding 40 metric tons of HALEU by 2030, approximately 50 metric tons per year by 2035, and more than 500 metric tons annually by 2050, according to the department's October 2024 environmental impact statement. A Government Accountability Office report published in August 2026 noted wide variation in those demand estimates and called for improved cost reporting on federal uranium supply efforts. Translation: nobody knows exactly how much fuel the market will need, but everyone agrees the current supply falls woefully short.
Since April 2025, DOE has allocated HALEU to twelve companies across three rounds, including TRISO-X, Kairos Power, TerraPower, NASA, and Radiant Industries, according to the department's allocation page updated July 23, 2026. The recipients read like a who's who of next-generation nuclear ambitions.
Centrus signed a HALEU enrichment agreement with X-energy on August 6, 2026, including prepayments and plans for production from its Piketon, Ohio facility. "This is another significant agreement that validates Centrus as the go-to, de-risked supplier of HALEU to the global market," Amir Vexler, Centrus president and CEO, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The confidence in that statement reflects Centrus's current monopoly position in domestic production.
Overseas, Urenco, the British-Dutch-German enrichment consortium, began trial production of LEU+ (5% to 10% U-235) with first deliveries in 2026. The company is building a commercial HALEU plant at Capenhurst in the United Kingdom, targeting operations in 2031 with initial output up to 27 metric tons per year. Urenco signed a multi-year HALEU supply contract with Antares Nuclear on May 22, 2026, World Nuclear News reported.
Back in the United States, Global Laser Enrichment received a $28.4 million DOE cooperative agreement in June 2026 to advance its laser isotope separation technology. GLE achieved Technology Readiness Level 6 in October 2025 and has a license application under NRC review for its Paducah facility. General Matter received a $900 million DOE task order in January 2026, the same award cohort as Centrus.
Actinide took a different path entirely. The company uses electromagnetic isotope separation, essentially modern calutrons, to enrich uranium directly to solid form. That approach bypasses the uranium hexafluoride deconversion bottleneck that slows centrifuge-based enrichment, the company said. Actinide closed an oversubscribed seed round in March 2026 led by Onto Ventures, with participation from Neo Ventures, Mana Ventures, Discipulus Ventures, and Shor Capital. The company declined to disclose the amount, a common enough practice among early-stage startups.
Before the HALEU demonstration, Actinide claimed to have delivered enriched ytterbium-176 (more than 95% Yb-176) to Oklo Isotopes, according to the company's press release. No independent confirmation of that delivery has surfaced, though the claim remains unchallenged.
"America should not have to ask another country for the materials that determine whether a reactor runs or a cancer treatment gets made," Eric Olszewski, Actinide co-founder and CEO, said in the August 26 announcement. Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO, called the HALEU demonstration "a testament to the power and flexibility of our technology." The rhetoric echoes a broader energy independence argument gaining traction in Washington.
Actinide is building a second-generation separator called Fortitude, which the company estimates will represent roughly half of current U.S. federal electromagnetic-separation capacity in a single machine. That's an ambitious claim for a startup founded in September 2025.
Enrichment, however, is just one piece of a supply chain riddled with bottlenecks. DOE awarded six deconversion contracts in October 2024 to BWXT, Centrus, Framatome, GE Vernova, Orano, and Westinghouse, but commercial-scale deconversion capacity to convert uranium hexafluoride to oxide or metal remains immature, a March 2026 Nuclear Scaling Institute report found. The report identified transport packaging certification and fuel fabrication as additional choke points beyond enrichment.
For transport, Orano's DN30-X package is currently the only certified container for HALEU uranium hexafluoride, according to a mid-2026 Federal Register notice. DOE awarded $11 million in late 2025 and early 2026 to develop new HALEU transport packages. The industry can't move fuel if it can't ship it safely.
On the fabrication side, TRISO-X received an NRC Category II special nuclear material license in February 2026 to manufacture HALEU-based TRISO fuel in Texas. Framatome's Richland, Washington facility received a license amendment in June 2026 authorizing uranium handling up to 10% enrichment and TRISO fuel fabrication. BWXT manufactured TRISO fuel using HALEU feed recovered from National Nuclear Security Administration scrap for the first new reactor criticality under a DOE program, the company said June 4, 2026.
Startups entering the HALEU market face a fundamental trade-off between scale and speed. Centrifuge-based enrichment requires massive capital expenditures and years of buildout but offers industrial throughput once operational. Electromagnetic separation can start smaller and produce solid fuel directly, but scaling to meet hundreds of metric tons of annual demand is unproven at commercial levels. The jury is still out on which approach wins.
DOE's programmatic procurement of up to 290 metric tons of HALEU over ten years, outlined in the October 2024 environmental impact statement, aims to stimulate private investment by guaranteeing near-term offtake. The first commercial contracts are emerging, slowly. Whether domestic supply can meet 2035 demand projections depends on licensing timelines, deconversion capacity, and whether multiple enrichment technologies can reach commercial scale before waivers for Russian imports expire in 2028.
That deadline is closer than it appears. For Actinide and its competitors, the laboratory demonstrations make for good headlines. The hard part starts now.
