Urenco’s New Mexico plant made the Western world’s first commercial LEU+ nuclear fuel

Urenco USA announced on November 3, 2026 that its National Enrichment Facility in New Mexico has produced a first cylinder of LEU+, which the company describes as the first commercial production of that fuel grade in the Western world. LEU+ is uranium enriched to between 5 and 10 percent uranium-235, a band that sits above the standard fuel burned in today’s reactors and below the high-assay material that many advanced designs are waiting for. The milestone lands a little over a year after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cleared the plant to enrich up to 10 percent.

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Jody Blackshear, managing director of Urenco USA, said a tremendous amount of work went into preparing the plant and its staff to reach the achievement. The company frames the cylinder as the start of a new era of fuel options for reactor operators.

Enrichment bands from natural uranium to HALEU

World Nuclear News, which carried the announcement, laid out the ladder of enrichment levels that makes the milestone legible. Natural uranium contains less than 1 percent of the fissile isotope uranium-235. Standard low-enriched uranium sits at 3 to 5 percent. LEU+ covers 5 to 10 percent, and high-assay low-enriched uranium, known as HALEU, runs from 10 to 20 percent. The new cylinder falls in the third rung of that ladder, a grade that no Western commercial enricher had sold before.

The appeal is practical rather than exotic. Urenco and the trade press say LEU+ lets existing light water reactors run longer cycles between refuelling outages, which trims operations and maintenance costs. Nucnet’s coverage of the original approval put the achievable cycle at 18 to 24 months and noted that the higher assay also produces less spent fuel per unit of energy delivered. Some advanced reactors will burn LEU+ directly, and it can serve as the feedstock from which HALEU is later produced, which gives the product two separate markets.

The NRC authorization behind the first cylinder

The regulatory step came first. The NRC authorized Urenco USA on September 30, 2025 to enrich uranium up to 10 percent, and the company announced the approval on October 2. It followed license amendments issued in December 2024 and August 2025, changes to plant systems and procedures, and an operational readiness review. World Nuclear News reported that the preparation consumed more than 100,000 hours of work, more than 30 new safety-related items and over 250 document changes.

John Kirkpatrick, who was Urenco USA’s managing director at the time, said the approval gave advanced reactor developers a reliable option to fuel their new designs. The authorization also covers every existing and future cascade at the plant, so any centrifuge hall Urenco adds can switch between conventional LEU and LEU+ without a further licensing round. The 10 percent ceiling stops short of HALEU, which needs a separate facility and a separate NRC license, a limit that the American Nuclear Society’s report also describes as an authorization of up to 10 percent U-235.

The word commercial in the new announcement carries weight, because LEU+ had already emerged from the plant once. A January 2026 report from IIR News said the Eunice site produced LEU+ in December 2025 at an enrichment of 8.5 percent, calling it the first such output from a U.S. commercial enrichment facility, and described commercial production as a mid-2026 target. The cylinder announced this week is therefore the product intended for sale rather than the first proof that the cascades could hit the band.

700,000 SWU of new centrifuges and a 2.1 million SWU plant

Capacity is the second half of the story. Urenco USA is installing 700,000 separative work units of new centrifuge capacity at the New Mexico site, according to the IIR News report, a roughly 15 percent expansion that is due to finish in 2027, with three new cascades already online by mid-December 2025 and ahead of schedule. A separative work unit is the standard measure of enrichment effort, so the figure describes how much uranium the plant can push up the ladder each year.

The longer-range plan is larger. Urenco says it wants more than 7 million SWU of enrichment capacity in the United States over the next decade. A planned new plant would add 2.1 million SWU, with construction starting in 2029, the first cascades running in 2032 and more cascades installed through 2036. The company says that capacity could also produce LEU+, which would make the grade a standing part of the American fuel supply rather than a one-off cylinder.

The policy backdrop explains the urgency. The IIR report notes that Washington banned Russian LEU imports in a law signed on May 13, 2024, effective August 11, 2024, at a time when Russia held about 44 percent of world enrichment capacity and supplied about 35 percent of U.S. imports. Urenco has enriched uranium in the United States since 2010 and puts its total investment at the plant above $5 billion, with more than 500 employees and contractors.

Several answers are still missing from the announcement. The company did not say what enrichment level the first commercial cylinder carries inside the 5 to 10 percent band, which fuel fabricator will receive it, or how quickly output will ramp. The 2025 approval notice said first deliveries to a fabricator were planned for 2026, and IIR reported that the plant could supply about one-third of U.S. LEU+ demand once the expansion is complete. Whether utilities place firm orders at that scale will decide how quickly the cylinder turns into a product line.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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