NUCLEAR ENERGY · FUEL SUPPLY
Laser enrichment could recover usable uranium from old material and support a changing reactor market. The technology is advancing, but its commercial economics remain unproven.
Near Paducah, Kentucky, thousands of cylinders hold material left by a uranium-enrichment facility that has since closed. The contents are treated as waste, yet they still contain uranium that a new generation of technology may be able to recover.
Global Laser Enrichment, or GLE, wants to process that inventory with precisely tuned lasers. The company says its system could upgrade the material until it resembles newly mined uranium feedstock and, over time, produce enriched fuel for both existing and advanced reactors.
The opportunity is arriving as nuclear energy regains political and commercial attention. Reactors currently generate about 9% of the world’s electricity. The United States, China and other countries are planning new plants, making a reliable and affordable fuel supply increasingly important.
Building enrichment capacity is slower than placing a fuel order. Plants must pass regulatory review, secure components and prove operation, so decisions made now will shape which reactors can obtain fuel this decade.
Why Enrichment Matters
Uranium as mined is more than 99% uranium-238, while the fissile isotope uranium-235 accounts for only about 0.7%. U-235 can sustain the chain reaction that releases heat for electricity generation, so most power reactors need fuel with a greater share of it than natural ore provides.
Conventional reactors generally use low-enriched uranium containing roughly 5% U-235. Some next-generation designs are being developed around material approaching 20%. Reaching either range requires separating nearly identical isotopes, an industrial task that consumes specialized equipment, energy and time.
Gas centrifuges dominate the market today. They spin uranium-bearing gas at very high speed so the slightly heavier molecules associated with U-238 tend toward the outside while lighter U-235-bearing molecules remain closer to the center. Repeating the separation across large cascades gradually increases the desired isotope’s concentration.
Centrifuge technology is mature, but a commercial facility may contain many thousands of individual machines. That scale creates a sizable construction project and a supply chain of its own. Laser developers argue that greater selectivity could achieve comparable output with fewer processing units.
What Lasers Could Change
Laser methods approach the separation differently. Molecules rotate and vibrate in patterns shaped by their composition, and even uranium isotopes have subtly different signatures. A carefully selected beam can interact more strongly with molecules containing the target isotope.
That interaction adds energy to a chosen population and changes its behavior enough for a later physical or chemical step to separate it from the rest. Researchers have explored several broad strategies, including altering electrical charge so fields can move selected particles or changing how targeted material participates in a reaction.
Researchers have pursued the principle for decades. Charles Forsberg, an MIT specialist in nuclear science and engineering, says early laser systems were temperamental, maintenance-heavy and difficult to operate continuously in a demanding commercial plant. Those limitations made an industrial plant less appealing than an established centrifuge complex.
Laser hardware has improved substantially since that first wave of research. Greater stability, precision and reliability have revived the commercial case. GLE’s exact process remains classified, and company representatives have declined to describe the proprietary separation step publicly.
The company says each of its modules will cost more and be more complicated than one centrifuge, but a plant would need far fewer of them. Chief executive Stephen Long estimates that a full-scale GLE facility would use fewer than 1,000 units rather than many thousands of centrifuges. He expects lower initial investment and operating costs, partly because the process should require less energy.
Why the Market Shifted
But improved equipment is only part of the renewed interest. Russia operates the world’s largest uranium-enrichment ecosystem and historically supplied much of the international market. While abundant Russian material remained available, Western companies had little incentive to finance competing plants.
The war in Ukraine altered that calculation. The United States, the United Kingdom and other countries have moved to restrict or prohibit Russian uranium imports. Utilities and governments are now seeking alternative suppliers, opening space for new enrichment projects and for technologies that previously struggled to find customers.
Christo Liebenberg, president of LIS Technologies, argues that the widening supply gap has placed laser enrichment in a timely position. His company, founded in 2023, recently acquired a 200-acre property in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and has entered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s pre-application process.
LIS plans initially to accept natural-grade uranium and produce material containing about 5% U-235. Its longer-term ambition is to make more concentrated fuel for advanced reactors. Moving from that plan to production will still require technical demonstrations, licensing, financing and customers prepared to sign supply agreements.
Recovering an Aboveground Resource
GLE is starting from a different feedstock. Rather than first enriching newly mined uranium to reactor grade, it intends to rehabilitate material left by earlier enrichment. A Department of Energy contract gives the company a route to process waste stored at the former Paducah site.
The inventory could total as much as 200,000 metric tons. GLE plans to take material containing at least 0.25% U-235 and raise it to around the natural level of 0.7%. Another enrichment plant could then process that output in place of uranium freshly extracted from the ground.
Nima Ashkeboussi handles government relations and communications as a GLE vice president. He describes the stockpile as an aboveground mine. The comparison captures the project’s appeal: recovering value from cylinders in storage could supplement mining without asking the first plant to manufacture reactor fuel.
GLE operates a test center in Wilmington, North Carolina. In the fall of 2025, it completed a pilot that processed several hundred kilograms of uranium. That system has been decommissioned, and the company is assembling a new demonstration intended to show how its equipment performs at commercial scale.
The company has also applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a proposed Paducah facility. Long says the final safety evaluation is expected in November, with a final licensing decision anticipated in 2027. If development stays on schedule, processing could begin by 2030.
Promising Economics, Still Untested
The planet holds enough uranium to operate reactors for decades, so the immediate issue is not permanent geological scarcity. The pressure comes from nearer-term supply gaps, shifting trade relationships, new reactor construction and the possibility of fuel-price spikes.
Recovering overlooked material could soften those disruptions, while a smaller or more efficient plant might make new domestic capacity easier to finance. Those benefits remain projections until developers complete licensed facilities, operate them reliably and demonstrate their costs over time.
At the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, senior fellow Stephen Greene sees a credible possibility that laser plants will undercut existing approaches on total cost. His caution is equally important: with a new industrial technology, real economics emerge only after someone builds and runs the first commercial plant.
Laser enrichment therefore sits between revival and proof. Decades of research, better lasers and a transformed fuel market have created an opening. Paducah may show whether that opening becomes a practical new source of nuclear fuel—or remains an elegant idea waiting for industrial confirmation.
