To the list of critical raw materials that American high-tech manufacturers must source from foreign suppliers, add uranium.
Tech giants are increasingly looking to nuclear energy to power the huge data centers that are going up across the country, to support the next wave of artificial intelligence. And that means ensuring a steady supply of uranium.
Christo Liebenberg, co-founder and president of LIS Technologies Inc., a U.S.-based uranium enrichment company, envisions “a collision course between America’s AI boom and its uranium supply chain.” The problem: Foreign suppliers are responsible for 99% of the uranium concentrate needed for nuclear fuel.
Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia currently account for the vast majority of American uranium imports. (Russia, another major producer, was banned from shipping low-enriched uranium to the U.S. under a law signed by President Biden in August of 2024, although waivers are permitted under certain circumstances.)
Liebenberg says the uranium supply chain “is indeed the bottleneck” in efforts to generate sufficient nuclear energy to support AI development. The U.S. currently produces about 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, a level that President Trump has pledged to quadruple by 2050.
The uranium supply chain actually consists of five distinct components: mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. The final step produces pellets that feed light water reactors.
The U.S. used to be the world leader in production of nuclear fuel, Liebenberg notes. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, however, Russia stepped up as a “huge” enricher of uranium, flooding global markets and “tanking” prices.
In the process, he says, the U.S. uranium industry was “decimated,” bringing domestic conversion and enrichment to a virtual halt, as American producers turned to Russia for cheap nuclear fuel.
Now, Liebenberg says, there’s almost no mining activity remaining in the U.S., and just one aging conversion facility, owned by Honeywell. Enrichment on American soil is limited to a single plant in New Mexico, operated by the European consortium Urenco, which produces about a third of U.S. requirements. Liebenberg believes American entities “have to step up our game by 10x to 12x across the nuclear [fuel] supply chain.”
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Increased domestic production must be accompanied by “total and complete” reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he says. Currently it takes between three and four years for the NRF to review applications for nuclear plants. An executive order by President Trump requires the commission to limit the license-review period to no more than 18 months, along with cutting its hourly review rate from $300 to $150.
Ninety-four nuclear reactors are now operating in the U.S.; Liebenberg says another 294 are needed within the next 25 years, if the U.S. is to meet its future nuclear energy needs. One way to speed things up, he says, is to build large light water reactors in combination with thousands of small and “micro” facilities.
Further delays exist at the mining stage. Liebenberg says it takes 10 years to get a shuttered uranium mine reopened in the U.S. In the meantime, the country must rely on Kazakhstan, Namibia, Canada and Australia, the four biggest producers of uranium ore — “until we can stand on our own legs.”
Liebenberg views his own company’s laser isotope separation technology (LIST) as key to kick-starting the enrichment phase. LIST been around for more than 50 years, but the complexity of the technique has prevented numerous countries from moving it from the lab to commercial application over that time.
LIST has long been seen as “the holy grail of enrichment,” Liebenberg says, citing its greater efficiency, reduced need for capital expenditure and lighter environment impact.
Under the Biden Administration, LIS Technologies became one of six companies selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to participate in a low-enriched uranium (LEU) acquisition program, to incentivize the build-out of new domestic uranium production capacity. “We are in a very good position — right in the middle of this nuclear renaissance,” Liebenberg says. LIS is preparing to open a new commercial enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project during World War II.
Much more has to happen, however, if the U.S. is to regain its dominance in uranium production and phase out foreign suppliers. “We are buying time,” Liebenberg says, “so that companies can come on line and get their technologies settled.”