Saskatoon-based Cameco is a 21st-century global nuclear energy leader as North America’s largest supplier of nuclear fuel for fission reactors. In its latest supply-and-demand market update, Cameco’s president Grant Isaac said that uranium markets remain structurally undersupplied and that major utilities negotiating long-term contracts are modeling uranium oxide prices near $120 per pound.
Traditionally, centrifuges have been used to separate the heavier uranium-238 from fissile uranium-235 atoms for low-enriched uranium (LEU) reactor fuel. As recently as 2018, LEU fuels were selling as low as $40 per separative work unit (SWU), the standard measure of effort required to separate uranium isotopes during enrichment. Today, that price is skyrocketing toward $200 per SWU.
The massive price jumps are due to a confluence of a ban on future purchases of Russian uranium enacted by Congress after Russia invaded Ukraine, the explosion of artificial intelligence, robotics, data centers, and other technologies that require massive amounts of electricity (along with the switch to electric vehicles), and the Trump administration’s commitment to quadrupling U.S. electricity production.
One potential hedge against higher prices for both uranium and uranium fuels is the evolution of an alternate method of enrichment – one that was fully developed decades ago but abandoned once cheap Russian uranium flooded the market. LIS Technologies relies on a laser process, developed by physicist Jeff Eerkens, that can provide LEU fuel at just $30 per SWU.
Just not yet.
Dr. Eerkens, now 93 years young, was rescued from a Japanese internment camp in the south Pacific after the U.S. ended World War II with nuclear bombs. Inspired by the technology that saved his life, Eerkens became a nuclear engineer and invented (and patented) the Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation (CRISLA) and the Chemically Harvested and Extracted Molecular Laser Isotope Separation (CHEMLIS) isotope-harvesting techniques that he has now brought to LIS.
Liebenberg early on took his knowledge of MLIS to Australia and then to Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) and ASML, where he helped develop advanced laser systems to produce EUV, the light source used to produce the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips. He and Eerkens shared a view that the U.S. would soon need to shift to nuclear power and that CRISLA was the pathway for providing the nuclear fuel for America’s nuclear renaissance.
The two men convinced NANO Nuclear founding CEO Jay Wu to come on board as a financial partner, forming CRISLA Inc. in 2020 and LIS Technologies in 2023. In January LIS announced it had the K-25 site at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the headquarters for World War II’s Manhattan Project and the birthplace of American nuclear innovation (that led to saving Eerkens’ life).
Liebenberg plans to take the company public this summer as it also works to complete the licensing process (while obtaining necessary security clearances) and build out a facility with a capacity of 5 million SWU per year – larger than the 4.3 million SWU/year Orenco facility in New Mexico. The hope is to begin selling LEU and LEU+ fuels in the early 2030s and to build additional facilities as U.S. demand soars to 12 times the uranium fuel America now produces.
Eerkens, whose rescue from a Japanese internment camp at the age of 12 as a byproduct of the U.S. bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima spurred him toward a career in nuclear engineering, is known as the father of laser enrichment. He had already demonstrated the effectiveness of laser enrichment while working for the Canadian firm Cameco – but the availability of cheap Russian LEU ended Cameco’s interest in laser enrichment for decades.
Eerkens had to store his equipment, papers, and materials, but a visit from Liebenberg in 2013 planted the seeds of what is fast becoming a major hope for affordable, ample domestic uranium fuel for the future. As Liebenberg tells it, in 2019 the pair began looking for a financial partner to revive the CRISLA process. And they found Jay Wu, who had already begun building NANO Nuclear as a future provider of microreactors that would also need affordable fuel.
How did the U.S. go from the world’s leading producer of uranium – from the 1940s through the 1980s – to a beggar on the uranium fuel market? U.S. production – mainly from deposits in New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Texas – peaked in 1980 at 43.7 million pounds of uranium oxide, but in 2024 production was only 677,000 pounds.
A major reason was the 1993 Megatons to Megawatts agreement between the U.S. and the Russian Federation under which Russia agreed to convert 500 metric tons of weapons-grade uranium into 15,000 metric tons of LEU fuel for use in American reactors – at a discounted price. Though that agreement expired in 2013, the U.S. continued to rely heavily on Russia (along with Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan) for its nuclear fuel.
The Biden administration’s wakeup call came in early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine – a move that eventually led to the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act of 2024. Waivers under that act expire at the end of 2027, but even earlier Congress allocated $2.72 billion to the Department of Energy to foster domestic enrichment of uranium.
Even earlier, the DOE announced a $700 million program to expedite HALEU (high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel for advanced reactors) production. Some of that money went to the American Centrifuge Project’s Piketon, Ohio, plant operated by Centrus Energy Corp. – which just this spring delivered its first 900 kilograms of HALEU to the DOE.
Liebenberg says that LIS will be able to create LEU in a single step, LEU+ in two steps, and HALEU in multiple steps – and that the company should be ready to demonstrate the technology to SMR and microreactor companies, data centers, and other interested parties by this summer. Then it is systems engineering integration and testing of the lasers, the geometry, and the gases, using mass spectrometers that provide near-instant results.
If all goes well, LIS will have fuel ready by the time new reactors are cleared to operate.
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
