Inside the U.S. HALEU Supply Chain: A Step-by-Step Look at Dependencies and Gaps

Published: July 2026

The United States is rebuilding a domestic supply of high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, from the ground up. But unlike the mature light-water reactor fuel cycle, which moves seamlessly from mine to reactor core, the HALEU supply chain is a chain in name only — a sequence of specialized industrial steps in which nearly every link is either underbuilt, unbuilt or still being licensed.

Understanding where those gaps sit matters because HALEU — uranium enriched between 5% and 19.75% U-235 — is the fuel that nine of 10 U.S. advanced reactor designs will require within the decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (source: Porritt Inc.). Below is a step-by-step walk through the process, the dependencies at each stage and where the supply chain breaks down.

Sources:

• World Nuclear Association
• DOE
• Nuclear Engineering International

The chain begins at the mine, where uranium ore is extracted and milled into U3O8 — a stable yellow-orange powder known as “yellowcake.”

Dependencies: Adequate domestic uranium production, transport logistics from mine to conversion facility, and a functioning uranium spot and long-term market.

Gap: U.S. domestic uranium mining collapsed after 2014 and has only recently begun to restart. U.S. utilities remain heavily reliant on imports from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia and — until the 2024 ban — Russia (source: Mining.com).

Yellowcake must be chemically converted into uranium hexafluoride, or UF₆, a compound that becomes gaseous at low temperatures and can therefore be enriched in a centrifuge (read more: World Nuclear Association).

Dependencies: Domestic conversion capacity sized to match downstream enrichment demand.

Gap: The United States has only one operating conversion facility — the Metropolis Works plant in Illinois, which reopened in 2023 after a six-year shutdown. It is projected to produce roughly 10,000 metric tons of UF₆ in 2026, well short of U.S. reactor demand of about 18,000 metric tons per year (source: World Nuclear News). The site’s operator has begun engineering studies on a possible “Metropolis 2.0” second facility (source: World Nuclear News).

UF₆ gas is fed into cascades of high-speed centrifuges that separate the fissile U-235 isotope from U-238. Standard commercial cascades are configured and licensed to enrich only up to 5% — the LEU range. Producing HALEU requires either purpose-built cascades or re-licensed facilities capable of operating at higher assays (source: DOE).

Dependencies: NRC licenses for higher-assay operation, centrifuge manufacturing capacity, Category II physical security, and long-term offtake contracts to justify capital.

Gap: The nation has produced roughly 1,900 kilograms of HALEU cumulatively since late 2023 from a single demonstration cascade in Piketon, Ohio — against a congressionally mandated 21 metric tons that DOE was directed to make available by June 30, 2026 (sources: Porritt Inc.; ANS). New commercial HALEU capacity is not expected online until roughly 2029 (source: ANS). One 2026 industry analysis estimated that Western enrichment capacity must expand roughly seven-fold by 2050 to meet advanced-reactor scenarios, at a cost exceeding $54 billion — far above the $2.7 billion DOE has committed (source: Energy Solutions Intelligence).

Interim workaround: Down-blending high-enriched uranium recovered from legacy defense stockpiles has produced small research quantities but is not scalable (source: DOE). An “LEU+” bridge — uranium enriched between 5% and 10% — recently received NRC approval and can serve some advanced designs while HALEU capacity grows (source: The Relay Magazine).

Enriched UF₆ gas cannot be loaded directly into a reactor. It must be “deconverted” into a solid chemical form suitable for fuel fabrication — typically uranium dioxide (UO₂) for ceramic pellets, uranium tetrafluoride (UF₄) for molten-salt reactors, uranium metal for sodium fast reactors, or U₃O₈ kernels for TRISO fuel (sources: Nuclear Engineering International; POWER Magazine).

Dependencies: NRC-licensed Category II facilities (higher security than LEU plants), criticality-safe process equipment, and multiple parallel process lines to serve the four dominant advanced-reactor fuel forms.

Gap: No commercial-scale HALEU deconversion facility currently operates in the United States. DOE has awarded contracts to six companies to bid on deconversion services under a 10-year, $800 million umbrella, but production facilities remain in the design or pilot phase (sources: DOE; XEnergex). A first metallization pilot line is being built in Richland, Washington (source: POWER Magazine).

Deconverted HALEU is fabricated into finished fuel forms: sintered ceramic pellets loaded into cladded fuel rods, TRISO particles coated in silicon carbide and pressed into pebbles or compacts, metallic alloys for fast reactors, or dissolved into fluoride salts for molten-salt cores (soource: Nuclear Engineering International).

Dependencies: Design-specific fabrication lines — TRISO, metal and salt fuels all require different equipment. Each facility requires an NRC Category II license.

Gap: Commercial-scale advanced fuel fabrication capacity is still being licensed and built. TRISO fabrication is furthest along, but no U.S. facility yet produces advanced-reactor fuel at the tonnage levels required for fleet deployment.

Sources:

• Nuclear Engineering International
• POWER Magazine

HALEU and finished fuel must move between mines, converters, enrichers, deconverters and fabricators — often across state lines — and be stored at each stage. HALEU requires purpose-designed transport packages that hold roughly 45% less material than standard LEU cylinders because of criticality-safety limits (source: Energy Solutions Intelligence).

Dependencies: NRC-certified transport casks, trained carriers, and route-approval frameworks.

Gap: In December 2025, DOE awarded $11 million to five companies to develop or modify HALEU transport packages — an acknowledgement that certified cask capacity is currently insufficient to support commercial-scale movement of the fuel (source: ANS).

Layered on top of these process-level gaps is a policy deadline. The Russian enriched uranium import ban that took effect Aug. 11, 2024, permits case-by-case waivers on declining annual ceilings — but that waiver authority ends Jan. 1, 2028 (source: The Relay Magazine). DOE planning targets more than 40 metric tons of HALEU available by 2030 and roughly 50 metric tons of annual U.S. demand by 2035 (sources: DOE; The Relay Magazine).

Sources:

• World Nuclear News
• NRC
• ANS

Sources:

• Porritt Inc.
• ANS
• DOE
• XEnergex