The United States is betting big on nuclear power to meet surging electricity demand from data centers, electric vehicles, and industrial growth. But a widening gap between the fuel some new reactors would need and what domestic producers can currently supply could slow that effort. With Russian uranium imports now banned by federal law and the Department of Energy saying HALEU is not currently available from domestic suppliers, the country’s nuclear ambitions are running into a fuel supply chain that is still being built out at scale.
Russian Uranium Ban Creates an Immediate Squeeze
The legal foundation of the current fuel crunch is H.R.1042, public law 118-62, which established a prohibition on importing unirradiated low-enriched uranium produced in the Russian Federation. The law took effect on August 11, 2024, according to a Department of Energy implementation release that explicitly warned about near-term disruption risk. Russia had been a major supplier of enriched uranium to American utilities for decades, and cutting off that pipeline without a ready domestic alternative left the industry exposed.
The ban does include a waiver framework, but those waivers are subject to annual aggregate limits and expire on or before January 1, 2028. That means utilities and reactor developers have a narrow, shrinking window to secure fuel from other sources. The real problem is not conventional low-enriched uranium, which allied producers in Europe and Canada can partially offset. It is high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, the specialized fuel enriched between 5% and 20% that advanced reactor designs from companies like TerraPower and X-energy depend on. Russia was the world’s primary commercial supplier of HALEU, and no American company has yet filled that role.
Government Stockpiles as a Stopgap, Not a Solution
Facing that gap, the federal government has turned to its own inventories. A May 2025 executive order directed the Department of Energy to identify useful uranium and plutonium across DOE inventories and to release not less than 20 metric tons of HALEU into a readily available fuel bank for qualifying private-sector projects at DOE-controlled sites. Separately, DOE announced conditional commitments to provide HALEU from its own holdings to additional recipients for near-term fuel needs. In that same announcement, DOE stated plainly that HALEU is not currently available from domestic suppliers, underscoring that government stockpiles are being used as an emergency bridge rather than a replacement for commercial production.
One concrete step to generate supply involves blending down existing weapons-grade material. In April 2025, DOE issued an amended record of decision authorizing the conversion of approximately 2.2 metric tons of highly enriched uranium into approximately 3.1 metric tons of HALEU at Savannah River Site, with the resulting liquid to be transported to an offsite commercial vendor for fabrication into usable fuel. That is a meaningful quantity for a handful of demonstration projects, but it is a fraction of what a growing fleet of advanced reactors would consume over time. The 20-metric-ton fuel bank target itself amounts to a bridge supply, not a permanent production base, and it depends on finite legacy materials that cannot be endlessly repurposed.
Private Sector Scrambles to Build Capacity
The private sector is moving, but timelines remain uncertain. Urenco plans to increase production capacity at its Eunice, New Mexico facility by 700,000 separative work units, a measure of enrichment capability, with support from federal grants aimed at jump-starting a domestic fuel chain. Uranium Energy Corp reported a breakthrough year in fiscal 2025, transitioning to production in Wyoming while its Burke Hollow project nears start-up in Texas, signaling a broader revival of U.S. uranium mining. These are steps toward rebuilding a domestic front end of the fuel cycle that largely atrophied after the Cold War, but enrichment to HALEU levels requires additional cascades, licensing, and security measures that standard facilities do not yet provide.
New reactors will need significantly more fuel if they eventually get built, as Bloomberg has noted, pointing out that even a single large conventional plant such as Diablo Canyon in California consumes substantial volumes of enriched uranium over its operating life. The gap between what the current supply chain can deliver and what a wave of advanced reactors would require is not just a procurement headache. It is a structural bottleneck that could influence which reactor projects move forward and which face delays. Smaller developers and communities hoping for distributed nuclear power from small modular reactors may find themselves at the back of a long line if limited government-sourced HALEU is prioritized for large demonstration projects.
Federal Spending Targets Long-Term Fixes
Washington is also investing in technologies that could eventually ease the supply constraint. According to a Department of Energy fact sheet on nuclear deployment, DOE is backing new enrichment, fuel fabrication, and recycling capabilities as part of a broader strategy to expand carbon-free electricity. The same overview highlights efforts to support uprates and life extensions of the existing reactor fleet, which will also require reliable low-enriched uranium supplies even before advanced reactors scale. By tying fuel-cycle investment to both current and future plants, federal planners are trying to avoid a scenario where legacy reactors compete directly with first-of-a-kind designs for the same limited fuel.
Another priority is building out capacity tailored to next-generation designs. DOE describes work on the next generation of small modular reactors and advanced systems, many of which require HALEU or other specialized fuels. Federal cost-sharing for demonstration plants, fuel qualification, and licensing is meant to de-risk private investment in enrichment and fabrication facilities that can serve multiple reactor vendors. Still, these programs operate on timelines measured in years, and they must navigate complex regulatory reviews, making them unlikely to solve the immediate shortfall created by the Russian import ban.
A Race Between Demand, Infrastructure, and Policy
The tension between rapid demand growth and slow-moving infrastructure is shaping every aspect of the U.S. nuclear fuel debate. Data center operators, utilities, and industrial customers are looking at multi-decade power needs, while enrichment projects, fuel banks, and demonstration reactors are all converging on the same limited HALEU pool in the late 2020s. DOE’s recently launched GENESIS initiative frames nuclear deployment as part of a broader clean energy buildout, emphasizing the need for resilient supply chains that can withstand geopolitical shocks. Yet the program’s long-term vision underscores how far current capabilities lag behind policy ambitions, particularly when it comes to producing advanced fuels at commercial scale.
Unless domestic enrichment and fabrication capacity ramps up faster than current projects suggest, the United States risks a mismatch between its nuclear plans and the fuel needed to run them. Government stockpiles and blended-down weapons material can keep a small set of flagship reactors supplied, but they cannot underwrite a nationwide shift toward advanced designs. Private-sector investments, backed by targeted federal spending, offer a plausible path to a self-sustaining HALEU market, but only if regulators, utilities, and developers align around predictable demand and clear timelines. For now, the country’s nuclear future hinges as much on centrifuges, conversion plants, and fuel banks as it does on reactor blueprints, turning the back-end details of uranium supply into a central test of America’s energy strategy.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
