Advanced reactor activity is growing across small modular reactors (SMRs), microreactors, and other designs that depend on HALEU for smaller cores, longer fuel cycles, and improved efficiency. But U.S. HALEU supply has not yet scaled to match those needs.

This creates a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Reactor developers need HALEU to complete testing, demonstrations, and customer commitments. Fuel producers need clear, bankable demand before investing in enrichment, deconversion, and fabrication capacity. Without fuel, reactor projects slow down; without reactor orders, fuel suppliers hesitate to scale.

The risk is that fuel availability becomes the gating factor for the entire advanced nuclear market. Even promising reactor designs may struggle to secure financing, regulatory confidence, and project timelines if they cannot show a reliable path to qualified fuel.

Breaking the cycle requires building domestic HALEU capacity ahead of full commercial demand while giving reactor developers enough confidence to move forward. A resilient U.S. supply chain can reduce reliance on limited suppliers, improve schedule certainty, and help turn advanced nuclear designs into deployable energy projects.

A New Path to HALEU Production

Nusano is developing a fuel platform that uses advanced separation technologies to enrich uranium and produce metallic HALEU in a streamlined production process.

Nusano’s proprietary techniques and processes separate atoms by mass, allowing for the enrichment of the selected isotope(s). For HALEU, the Nusano platform takes in uranium metal input, enriches and separates the uranium-235 and uranium-238, and outputs HALEU in metallic product form.

Nusano’s HALEU platform is modular and scalable – allowing for fuel supply to increase in parallel with market needs. Each Nusano HALEU unit requires only 1,200 square-feet, and will produce 5.9 MT of HALEU at an anticipated cost below that of current, gaseous centrifuge-based processes.

Conventional enrichment pathways begin by converting uranium into uranium hexafluoride gas so it can be processed in centrifuge cascades. After enrichment, that material typically must be deconverted into a chemical form suitable for fuel fabrication and, for metallic fuel applications, further processed into uranium metal or alloy feedstock.

Known as gas centrifuge enrichment, this method spins hexaflouride gas at very high speeds inside a series of connected centrifuge cylinders known as a cascade.

Because uranium-238 is slightly heavier than uranium-235, the spinning motion pushes more of the heavier isotope toward the outside of each cylinder while the lighter uranium-235 becomes slightly more concentrated closer to the center.

Repeating this separation across many centrifuges gradually raises the uranium-235 concentration from natural levels to the HALEU range of greater than 5% and less than 20%, after which the enriched material can be chemically processed into a solid fuel form for advanced reactors.

At the end of this process, “deconversion” is the step that turns enriched HALEU UF₆ back into a usable solid fuel-manufacturing input. The enriched UF₆ is not itself reactor fuel. It must be chemically processed into the form required by the next fuel-fabrication step, such as uranium dioxide for oxide pellets, uranium tetrafluoride for some salt-fuel pathways, uranium metal for metallic fuel, or another reactor-specific feedstock.

At a high level, deconversion involves controlled chemical reactions that remove fluorine from the enriched UF₆ and convert the uranium into a more stable and fabrication-ready material. The exact process depends on the intended fuel form, but the basic purpose is the same: move HALEU out of a volatile gaseous chemical form and into a solid material that can be stored, qualified, transported, and fabricated under nuclear quality standards.

This makes deconversion a critical link in centrifuge-based HALEU production. Even if enrichment capacity exists, advanced reactor developers still need deconversion capacity matched to their specific fuel form. A supply chain that can enrich HALEU but cannot reliably deconvert it into metal, oxide, salt-compatible feedstock, or TRISO-related material may still be unable to deliver usable reactor fuel.

Metallic HALEU refers to HALEU produced or prepared in a uranium metal form rather than as uranium oxide, uranium hexafluoride, or another intermediate chemical form.

A pathway that produces metallic HALEU more directly can reduce processing complexity by avoiding some of the intermediate chemical transformations required in traditional fuel-cycle approaches.

Fewer conversion steps can also simplify the handoff between enrichment and fabrication. Instead of moving enriched material through multiple chemical forms before it becomes usable fuel feedstock, metallic HALEU can support a more streamlined pathway from enrichment output to alloying, casting, machining, or other fabrication processes required by a specific reactor design. For example, converting metallic HALEU to an oxide form required by many modern reactors is a simple one-step, non-toxic reaction.

Contact us to learn more about Nusano’s direct metallization HALEU fuel process