| ISSUE 018 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Reactors are the number in every energy story this year: restarts, small modular designs, and a 2025 federal goal to quadruple American nuclear generation by 2050. Almost nobody counts the separative work unit, the measure of centrifuge effort every reactor has to buy before it can load fuel. | |
| Both sides of the ledger run on the same unit. It fuels the commercial fleet, and it fuels the two Tennessee Valley Authority reactors that make tritium for the nuclear deterrent. The GAO reported on 20 August 2026 that national security work will need about 1.7 million separative work units a year by the 2050s: 500,000 for tritium and 1.2 million for naval propulsion. | |
| In 2025 American reactor operators bought 13 million separative work units, and 26 percent came from Russia, according to the Energy Information Administration’s 2025 Uranium Marketing Annual Report. Public Law 118-62 ends every waiver for Russian low-enriched uranium no later than 1 January 2028. The 23 percent counted as US origin comes from a New Mexico plant running European technology, and the GAO found that as of February 2026 no operating centrifuge in the United States was built entirely from American components. | |
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| PLATE · GASEOUS DIFFUSION ENRICHMENT, UNITED STATES, 1970s |
| After the Arab oil embargo of 1973 to 1974, Washington’s energy independence plans leaned on nuclear power, and nuclear power ran through three government enrichment plants at Oak Ridge, Paducah and Portsmouth. Records at the Ford Presidential Library state that from mid-1974 their entire capacity was committed under long-term contracts. Utilities that came late received conditional contracts. |
| President Ford’s draft message to Congress on enrichment, dated 24 June 1975, set out the arithmetic. A $1 billion improvement programme would raise the three plants’ capacity by 60 percent, and that capacity was already sold. Each new plant would need seven or eight years to become fully operational. |
| A single supplier held the capacity, sold years ahead, against several hundred reactors scheduled to start by the early 1980s. The Arms Control Association’s history of the period holds that the American closure validated Europe’s decisions to build Urenco and Eurodif. Eurodif’s gaseous diffusion plant at Tricastin, France, rated at 10.8 million separative work units a year, started production in 1979. |
| PLATE · AMERICAN CENTRIFUGE PLANT, PIKETON, OHIO | |||
| At Piketon, Pike County, Ohio, the American Centrifuge Plant occupies a Department of Energy building put up for large centrifuges and later abandoned, according to the GAO; Centrus Energy now leases it. Sixteen AC100M machines, each about 40 feet tall, run there, and on 1 July 2026 Centrus reported more than 1,900 kilograms of high-assay low-enriched uranium hexafluoride produced under its federal contract. | |||
| Centrus told the GAO that those machines contain carbon fibre carrying peaceful-use restrictions, which bars their output from national security use. NNSA plans 24 new centrifuges there by 2028 and a first 120-machine cascade two years later, rated at about 50,000 separative work units a year. | |||
| Centrifuge building began at the company’s Oak Ridge, Tennessee, plant in December 2025, with the first new machines due online in Ohio in 2029, according to its filing for the quarter to 30 June 2026. National laboratory staff told the GAO that a single US-owned company makes the carbon fibre for the rotors of both American centrifuge designs. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
