By unanimous vote, TerraPower, a Nuclear Power company founded and chaired by Bill Gates, just reached a major milestone by receiving the most important federal permit: clearance to build a commercial nuclear reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, scheduled to start operating in 2031. This places TerraPower at the front of the pack when it comes to small, cutting-edge nuclear reactors for generating power in the U.S.
Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to fuel this reactor.
The plant has already been under-construction since 2024, and a spokesman for TerraPower named Andy Hallmark confirmed to me that only the “nonnuclear sections of the plant” were being built at the time.
But while TerraPower’s Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor can now at least be constructed, it won’t put power into the Wyoming energy grid without high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is only made in commercial quantities by a company called Techsnabexport, which is a subsidiary of another company called Rosatom, which is owned by the Russian state.
This has been presenting a problem ever since 2022 when Russia invaded mainland Ukraine. At that point, “it became very clear, for a whole set of reasons — moral reasons as well as commercial reasons — that using Russian fuel is no longer an option for us,” TerraPower spokesman Jeff Navin told WyoFile.
But Hallmark told me in 2024 that alternative suppliers “are expected to develop similar capacity as demand grows,” and that Terrapower believes a solution will materialize in time for the project to stay on track.
The US government has been prioritizing and cheerleading this project (along with similar projects), and has an alternative plan, which the Department of Energy calls the HALEU Availability Program.
“HALEU is not currently available from domestic suppliers, and gaps in supply could delay the deployment of advanced reactors,” the HALEU Availability Program website says. Filling the gap will involve “downblending”—or converting highly concentrated weapons-grade uranium into relatively low-concentration HALEU. This literally means dismantling warheads, melting the uranium, and rejiggering the concentration of the crucial fissile isotope.
It is, of course, unsustainable for commercial power plants to be fueled by the guts of the aging U.S. nuclear stockpile, and a real supply chain for HALEU has to exist if TerraPower’s plant is actually going to operate.
In the short term, TerraPower needs enough fuel from early sources like downblending to load its reactor for the first time, and then it can focus on staying online. One report says it needs about 150 metric tons of the fuel to run from 2028 through 2037—roughly 15 metric tons per year on average.
But according to Reuters, there’s only one U.S. company actually attempting to make HALEU by enriching uranium rather than downblending: Ohio’s Centrus Energy. But Centrus was projecting 900 kilograms per year in 2024—by my rough math that’s about 6% of what Terrapower’s Kemmerer plant will need per year. To stay Centrus needs to ramp-up quickly is an understatement.
Needless to say, Terrapower is racing to find alternatives, which include companies like South Africa’s ASP Isotopes, Inc. with whom it launched a “strategic agreement” in 2024. As of last month, ASP was hoping to build a HALEU plant soon.
At any rate, TerraPower’s Kemmerer plant can be built now, and that construction can now include its reactor. There’s not enough fuel for that reactor—unless of course the war in Ukraine ends, and Russia-U.S. relations get patched up in a hurry—but there are still five years between now and then, and a whole lot is riding on this. Generating nuclear fuel has always forced people to move mountains. Why should this plant be any different?
Gizmodo reached out to TerraPower for a statement, or additional information about any as-yet unreported sources of HALEU. We will update if we hear back.
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