Illustration: Rebecca Zisser / Axios
The Trump administration is scrambling to fortify nuclear fuel supply chains to match the rising interest in nuclear to feed soaring electricity demand.
Why it matters: U.S. nuclear power plants source about one-quarter of their enrichment services from Russia, the world's largest supplier of enriched uranium.
- The nuclear industry — facing a hard ban on importing Russian uranium at the end of 2027 — has been pressing for more than a year for the Energy Department to pay out $3.4 billion for uranium enrichment.
Driving the news: The DOE said this week that it's seeking U.S. companies to build and operate nuclear fuel production lines that the agency will authorize as part of a new pilot program.
- The program was set in motion by White House nuclear executive orders in May that set a goal of deploying reactors on military sites by 2028.
- Those orders established a DOE-DOD partnership that will tap existing DOE uranium stockpiles to supply the first batch of reactors.
Zoom in: The DOD-hosted reactors will rely on processing some DOE-owned highly enriched uranium into a lower-enriched fuel that civilian reactors use, said Jeff Waksman, acting assistant Army secretary for installations, energy and environment.
- "We need to partner with [DOE] not only in order to get uranium but also to dispose of the uranium," Waksman told Axios.
The big picture: The harder challenge is what happens beyond 2030.
- To seed a self-sustaining fuel enrichment industry, Congress approved $2.7 billion last year for uranium enrichment for the current nuclear fleet and for advanced reactors.
- That came on top of the IRA's $700 million for fuel enrichment. Lawmakers initially authorized the DOE's advanced nuclear fuel program in 2020.
Friction point: Since getting those funds from Congress last year, the agency has faced calls to quickly disburse the awards to scale up enrichment.
- "We're still waiting to see some more concrete action there," said John Kotek, a senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
- The executive orders show "a recognition within the federal system that they need to get on with it, and so I do think that that is going to light a fire under the system that maybe didn't exist previously."
- DOE officials "have not moved fast enough on this," X-energy CEO Clay Sell, who's developing a DOE-backed advanced reactor demonstration project, told Axios last December. "I think everybody knows that."
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Congress last month the agency is working with "a bunch of great, innovative companies with a lot of private capital behind them."
- The DOE announced in April that it would distribute a first round of advanced nuclear fuel — from the agency's stockpiles — to five developers as early as this fall.
- The agency also extended a contract with Centrus Energy to continue production of enriched fuel at its Ohio plant.
And House appropriators are weighing a fiscal 2026 bill that would increase DOE funding for fuel availability.
