Fuel Supply Gap Could Hold Back U.S. Nuclear Energy Renaissance

Tsvetana Paraskova

Thu, February 26, 2026 at 3:00 AM GMT+9 5 min read

Soaring demand for power generation, the U.S. goal of quadrupling nuclear electricity generation by 2050, and a looming ban on Russian nuclear fuel imports could create a bottleneck in the nuclear fuel supply chain, according to U.S. enrichment company Centrus Energy.

The American supplier of the key nuclear fuel is expanding domestic enrichment capacities, and so are other major Western firms. But until the new plants come online early next decade, the U.S. could face a supply gap in the fuel, Amir Vexler, chief executive at Centrus Energy, says.

Supply Crunch?

“It is my strong belief that there is a gap between supply and demand for the existing market — just the operating reactors that we have now,” Vexler told the Financial Times.

“I feel the market is strained and will continue to be strained until large amounts of new capacity are going to come online and that will be in the next decade,” the executive added.

If a shortage of enriched uranium fuel materializes, it could stymie the Trump Administration’s ambitious plan to “unleash America’s next nuclear renaissance” by quadrupling U.S. nuclear energy capacity from about 100 gigawatts (GW) now to as much as 400 GW by 2050.

Not that Centrus Energy and other major Western nuclear fuel suppliers aren’t trying. They are expanding their enrichment capacities, especially in the U.S., to take advantage of the American bet on nuclear energy to provide reliable power supply amid surging demand led by AI computing centers.

New U.S. Enrichment Capacity Coming…

Centrus Energy has approved a multi-billion-dollar expansion of its uranium enrichment capacity in Piketon, Ohio. The project includes large-scale production of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) to address its substantial commercial LEU enrichment contingent backlog of $2.3 billion and growing demand from existing reactors. Centrus Energy has also recently announced a plan to build 12 metric tons of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) annual capacity for next-generation reactors.

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In December 2025, Centrus launched centrifuge manufacturing to support this expansion, and in early January 2026, the Department of Energy selected Centrus for a $900 million HALEU task order.

The DOE nuclear fuel HALEU awards also included $900 million each to American Centrifuge Operating and Orano Federal Services, the U.S. unit of French firm Orano, one of the biggest Western suppliers of nuclear fuel.

Story Continues  

Orano plans to deploy an enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The project “will allow the needs of operators of nuclear reactors in the USA to be secured in accordance with US regulations prohibiting the import of Russian uranium as of 2028,” Orano said last month.

“The new plant will also meet the growing needs of US energy utilities in the context of demand driven by artificial intelligence and data centers, which require a stable, low-cost and low-carbon source of electricity,” the company added.

Following the $900-million DOE funding, Orano will move to the next steps of the project, estimated to cost a total of $5 billion, including the filing of a license application with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the first half of 2026.

Currently, only Centrus and Urenco—a consortium created in 1970 by the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK—are licensed to enrich uranium on U.S. soil.

Last year, Urenco USA started producing low enriched uranium with its second new cascade of gas centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facility in New Mexico.

At the facility, Urenco USA will add 700,000 separative work units (SWU) of new capacity at the site by 2027, which will increase the plant’s capacity by 15%.

The company says that it currently has the capacity to meet about one-third of the enrichment needs of U.S. commercial nuclear power plants and noted that its expanded capacity would “support a transition away from reliance on Russian supply.”

…But How Fast?

Despite all these plans and the strong support from the U.S. Administration, a supply gap could occur later this decade until new domestic enrichment capacity comes online in the early 2030s, analysts and executives at key suppliers say.

The U.S. goal of quadrupling nuclear electricity generation capacity to 400 GW by 2050 would imply hiking uranium enrichment twelvefold if all the fuel is sourced domestically, Jean-Luc Palayer, chief executive of Orano USA, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.

“There’s no time to lose. The U.S. needs more domestic and more diversified enrichment capacity,” the executive noted.

Fuel enrichment capacity needs to scale up tremendously if nuclear energy is to meet the soaring U.S. power demand in the medium to long term.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects U.S. electricity use to grow by 1% this year and 3% in 2027. This increase would mark the first time since 2007 that power demand has risen for four years in a row and the strongest four-year growth period since 2000, driven by soaring demand from large computing centers.

Nuclear could play a larger role in meeting power demand if nuclear fuel supply soars in lockstep with the growing electricity needs.

Canadian uranium miner NexGen Energy expects Big Tech to increasingly consider supporting new uranium mining projects as companies need additional reliable power capacity for their huge data center expansion.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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