Here's a number that should stop every energy-abundance advocate cold: just 7% of the uranium delivered to U.S. civilian reactors in 2025 was mined on American soil, according to EIA data cited in a recent commentary on the reactor fuel pipeline. Canada supplied 32%, Kazakhstan 28%, Australia 15%. That's the raw ore. Enrichment — turning yellowcake into usable reactor fuel — is an even tighter chokepoint, and it's the one that actually determines whether America's nuclear ambitions clear the runway or taxi forever.
The scale of the problem is historical, not incidental. In 1985 the U.S. held a 64% share of global uranium enrichment capacity. By 2024, that share had collapsed to less than 1%, while Russia's grew to 43%, according to Centrus Energy's Dan Leistikow, speaking at the American Nuclear Society's Global 2026 conference reported by Nuclear Newswire. "The United States has really fallen dramatically behind the rest of the world," Leistikow said — and he's not wrong. We built the atomic age and then let someone else inherit the enrichment plants.
The Buildout Is Real. It's Also Not Finished.
This is where I have to be the annoying guy with the spreadsheet instead of the guy waving the flag. Urenco broke ground on an expansion of its Eunice, New Mexico facility with DOE Secretary Chris Wright on hand, adding 2.1 million separative work units of new gas centrifuge capacity, per the same Nuclear Newswire account. That's an announced, under-construction expansion — not operational capacity today. Urenco's own executive said the site won't hit more than 7 million SWU until 2036, a full decade out, even though the facility's NRC license permits up to 10 million SWU. Globally, Urenco already produces 17.2 million SWU a year — meaning the New Mexico expansion, once complete, still won't match what the company already runs elsewhere in the world. That gap is the whole story in miniature: America isn't short on nuclear ambition, it's short on finished concrete and spinning centrifuges.
Westinghouse's move tells the same story from the fabrication side. The company announced nearly $1 billion for a new LEU+ fuel facility in South Carolina, aiming to be "up and running by 2030," according to ExchangeMonitor. Note the tense: aiming, not operating. The higher-enrichment fuel it will produce — enriched to 5-8%, above the conventional low-enriched uranium band — was only first loaded commercially in April 2025 at Plant Vogtle, and Urenco USA only completed its first production run of uranium enriched up to 10% in December 2025. This is a supply chain being rebuilt in real time, piece by piece, with multi-year lags between "announced" and "delivering fuel."
Demand Is Already Outrunning the Timeline
Here's the part that should make every reader of this newsletter lean forward. The federal policy goal is to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity, from roughly 100 GW in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050, set by a May 2025 executive order cited in the FinancialContent commentary. Meanwhile the NRC just approved TVA's construction permit for a BWRX-300 small modular reactor at Clinch River — the nation's first commercial SMR permit, cleared in a 14-month review — and Constellation signed a 20-year, 890-megawatt power purchase agreement with Google tied to new nuclear capacity on the PJM grid. Demand-side momentum is undeniable and it's compounding.
The World Nuclear Association's own outlook frames the tension precisely: global nuclear construction starts hit eleven reactors in 2025, but tripling global capacity by 2050 — the stated ambition behind most of these announcements — would require build rates around six times current levels, per the World Nuclear Outlook Report 2026. Enrichment capacity, fuel fabrication, and reactor construction all have to scale together. Right now only one leg of that stool — reactor approvals — is moving at anything like the pace the moment demands.
What This Means If You Believe in the Climb
I want every one of these facilities built yesterday, and I don't think caution about enrichment economics should slow permitting or financing. But electricity maximalism only works if the fuel actually shows up. A grid full of approved reactors sitting on a 7%-domestic-origin fuel chain isn't abundance — it's a dependency dressed up as a renaissance. The gigawatts TVA, Constellation, and Google are chasing are real. Whether the enriched uranium to run them is American-made by the time anyone needs it is still an open question, and the answer runs through New Mexico and South Carolina construction schedules, not press releases. Watch Urenco's cascade additions at Eunice and Westinghouse's 2030 target in Columbia — those dates are the actual scoreboard.
