Investing in the US nuclear industry, especially when the investor is from beyond America’s borders, offers real opportunities — but only for those who understand where the true constraints, and therefore the most promising openings, actually lie.
Most foreign investors approaching the American nuclear industry begin with an interest in reactors and reactor developers. That is understandable. Reactor designs are visible, legible, and easy to narrate — including new technologies, new markets, and bold claims about cost, safety, and speed. In public discourse, advanced reactors have become the symbol of nuclear renewal. But in the modern U.S. nuclear industry, that focus is incomplete.
Without Fuel, There Will Be No Revival
The primary constraint on the deployment of advanced reactors in the United States is not, in fact, nuclear reactor design and development. Rather, it is nuclear fuel production. More precisely, it is the absence of a robust domestic supply chain for enriched nuclear fuel, and especially high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel. For many of the advanced reactors now under development, HALEU is not a nice-to-have input. It is a prerequisite for operation. Without it, reactor licensing progress, site preparation, and engineering maturity mean very little.
This article is the first in a three-part series examining what foreign companies and sovereign investors need to know before investing in the US nuclear sector. Part I focuses exclusively on the front end of the fuel cycle — i.e., uranium recovery, conversion, enrichment, advanced fuel fabrication, and transport — because this is where US policy has moved fastest, and where investment opportunities are both real and underexplored. Part II will turn to reactor deployment and the increasingly novel role the Department of Energy is playing in commercialization. Part III will examine the back end of the fuel cycle, including interim storage and emerging waste-management models.
The central argument of this first installment is simple: in the United States today, reactors without fuel are just blueprints. Foreign investors who recognize that fact early on and align capital with fuel-cycle realities, rather than just reactor marketing, will find opportunities that are both strategically significant and well supported by US government policy.
Nuclear Fuel Becomes Strategy
Two developments have transformed the US nuclear fuel landscape. The first is geopolitical. For decades, the United States and its allies tolerated a quiet dependence on Russian uranium fuel services, and particularly enrichment. That tolerance ended abruptly with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. What had long been treated as a commercial inconvenience was suddenly recognized as a strategic vulnerability. In 2024, the United States codified that recognition by banning imports of certain Russian uranium products, subject only to narrow waiver authority. The message was unmistakable: rebuilding domestic fuel capacity was no longer optional; it was a strategic policy priority.
The second development is institutional. The Department of Energy has shifted from being a background supporter of nuclear innovation in the fuel sector to being an active market-shaping actor. Through direct procurement, controlled material allocations, and cost-shared industrial development, the DOE is now doing something it had largely avoided for much of the post-Cold War period: it is deliberately implementing an industrial policy to reconstruct a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain.
This shift is visible not only in regulation but also in contracting behavior. The DOE has issued solicitations explicitly aimed at purchasing domestically enriched uranium over multi-year periods, announced funding pools measured in the billions of dollars, and used flexible contracting mechanisms to pull private suppliers forward. In effect, the DOE is acting as an anchor customer for a market that does not yet exist at scale.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the DOE’s approach to HALEU. Rather than waiting for private markets to solve the problem of production capacity, the DOE created the HALEU Availability Program to bridge the gap between today’s nonexistent commercial supply and tomorrow’s anticipated demand. The premise is explicit: the federal government will provide limited quantities of HALEU and guaranteed purchases in the near term in order to catalyze long-term private investment and bring multiple domestic suppliers online.
For foreign investors, this shift matters because it changes the risk profile of the fuel cycle. The US domestic fuel supply is no longer just a market option. It is bipartisan policy-aligned essential infrastructure, and that alignment carries real weight and real opportunities.
The HALEU Bottleneck
HALEU refers to a uranium fuel enriched above five percent and below twenty percent U-235. That range is technically significant. It allows reactor designers to achieve longer refueling intervals, smaller cores, and different neutron behaviors than are possible with conventional light-water reactor fuel. As a result, many advanced reactor concepts, and particularly fast reactors and several non-light-water designs, are either dependent on HALEU or are substantially advantaged by using it.
Yet the United States entered this decade with no commercial HALEU production capability. Until very recently, the only meaningful source of HALEU was Russia. That reality inverted the usual nuclear innovation story: reactor developers could make real progress on licensing and engineering, yet still find themselves blocked by fuel availability.
The DOE’s response has been to treat HALEU as a scarce, administratively governed resource during the transition period. The Department has announced plans to make twenty-one metric tons of HALEU available by the middle of 2026, allocating it in stages to projects it deems strategically urgent. Those allocations are not symbolic. They are, in practice, a deployment gate. This has already reshaped industry behavior. Reactor developers now structure project timelines around DOE fuel-allocation decisions. Fuel suppliers, in turn, pursue licensing and capital investment strategies explicitly keyed to DOE contracting milestones. In this sense, HALEU has become not merely a fuel specification but a coordination and signaling mechanism for the entire advanced-reactor ecosystem.
Where the US Fuel Cycle Is Actually Moving
The US fuel cycle supply chain is not being rebuilt all at once. It is reemerging unevenly, segment by segment, with different regulatory and investment characteristics at each stage.
Uranium Recovery
At the front end of the supply chain sits uranium recovery, primarily through in situ recovery (ISR) operations. US producers such as Uranium Energy Corp., Energy Fuels, and Cameco (through its US footprint) have restarted or expanded domestic production in response to higher prices and policy signals favoring US and allied supplies.
An underappreciated feature of the US system is that uranium recovery is regulated not only by the federal government but also by individual states that have entered Agreement State arrangements with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Wyoming, Texas, and other uranium-producing states thereby exercise primary regulatory authority over ISR operations, even as federal environmental statutes continue to apply. In practice, this means that permitting timelines, enforcement culture, and stakeholder engagement can vary meaningfully from one state to another.
For investors, uranium recovery is therefore as much a regulatory and contracting story as it is a geological one. The most viable projects are those tied to long-term offtake arrangements with U.S. or allied utilities, which provide the demand certainty needed to justify downstream conversion and enrichment investments.
Nuclear Fuel Conversion: The Quiet Chokepoint
If enrichment attracts headlines, conversion is the quieter but no less critical link in the supply chain. For decades, the United States has relied on a single domestic uranium conversion facility — Metropolis Works in Illinois, operated by ConverDyn. This is a joint venture between Honeywell and General Atomics.
That concentration has become increasingly uncomfortable in a world where fuel security is treated as a strategic concern. Enrichment expansion is meaningless without sufficient conversion throughput, and DOE officials have begun to speak openly about conversion as a potential bottleneck.
Several US firms have now publicly explored new conversion capacity or refurbishment strategies, recognizing that conversion may be one of the most acute pressure points as domestic enrichment ramps up. For foreign investors, conversion represents a particularly attractive opening: it is capital-intensive, industrial rather than technological, and less politically sensitive than enrichment ownership itself. It is infrastructure in the classic sense — unglamorous, indispensable, and capable of supporting long-term returns.
Enrichment: From Demonstration to Scale
Enrichment is where policy and technology most visibly intersect. This is because it is traditionally thought of as among the most proliferation-sensitive stages of the fuel cycle.
The clearest recent milestone in the US revival of domestic enrichment capacity has been the HALEU production by Centrus Energy under contract with the DOE at its Ohio facility. While the quantities produced so far are modest, the importance of the achievement lies in the precedent. For the first time, the United States has demonstrated that domestic HALEU capability can be supported by federal purchasing and oversight. The DOE has been explicit that this demonstration is intended to be expanded and replicated, not frozen in place.
At the same time, Urenco USA has pursued an incremental but commercially significant strategy by moving toward LEU+ production — fuel enriched above five percent but below HALEU levels — at its New Mexico facility. That move required NRC authorization and reflects the strategic judgment that intermediate enrichment levels will support near-term advanced-reactor deployments and generate revenues that can help finance further expansion.
The DOE has reinforced these developments through contracts and solicitations aimed at seeding a multi-supplier HALEU market. Companies such as Orano USA and newer entrants like General Matter have been drawn into this process, not because the DOE expects immediate returns to scale, but because it is deliberately trying to avoid recreating a single-supplier dependency.
For investors, enrichment opportunities come with heightened sensitivity. Enrichment facilities are licensed under the NRC’s Part 70 framework and are subject to stringent material control, accounting, and security requirements. They are also the segment of the fuel supply chain most likely to trigger national security review when foreign ownership is involved. As a result, successful foreign participation often takes the form of minority investments, capacity contracts, or equipment-and-services partnerships, rather than outright control.
Fuel Fabrication and Transport
The fuel supply chain does not stop at enrichment. Advanced reactors require specialized fuel fabrication capabilities, including engineered fuel forms that differ significantly from traditional light water reactor fuel. One prominent example is TRISO fuel (short for “tristructural isotropic”), which consists of tiny uranium fuel kernels individually encapsulated within multiple ceramic coating layers, which function as a miniature containment system.
This material architecture allows TRISO fuel to tolerate very high temperatures and retain fission products under extreme conditions. This makes it particularly well suited to advanced reactor designs that emphasize inherent or passive safety. In practice, however, most reactor concepts designed around TRISO fuel require enrichment levels above the five percent ceiling used for conventional light-water reactors. As a result, this ties TRISO deployment directly to the availability of HALEU. X-energy, for example, has made domestic TRISO fuel fabrication a central part of its US commercialization strategy in close coordination with the DOE and the national laboratories.
The DOE’s HALEU allocation decisions make clear that the Department is not merely trying to supply reactors with fuel. It is trying to activate a domestic fuel-fabrication ecosystem that can eventually operate independently of federal support.
Equally important — and often overlooked — is transport. Higher-assay fuel requires certified packages, licensed logistics pathways, and operational experience in moving material safely and legally. DOE has supported work on HALEU transport package design and certification because without it, fuel remains stranded at the point of production.
For foreign investors, these “in-between” layers — fabrication services, packaging, certified transport — may offer some of the most accessible and least crowded opportunities in the fuel cycle.
Regulation and Inbound Investment: The Overlay Foreign Investors Must Factor In
The regulatory environment governing the front end of the fuel cycle is more fragmented than outsiders often realize. Uranium recovery may be regulated by the NRC or by agreement states, depending on location. Conversion, enrichment, and fuel-fabrication facilities are licensed under the NRC’s Part 70 regime, which governs the possession and use of special nuclear material. Transportation overlays all of these activities through separate NRC packaging and transport regulations. Expert strategic regulatory advice is therefore essential in order to successfully negotiate this complex regulatory landscape.
Layered on top of this technical regulation framework is a national security and inbound investment review regime that foreign investors must take seriously. Fuel cycle assets, and particularly enrichment and advanced fuel fabrication facilities, are treated as sensitive from a nonproliferation and national security perspective. Transactions involving foreign ownership, control, or access to sensitive technology may be reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), even where NRC licensing is otherwise available.
In parallel, the NRC itself applies foreign ownership, control, or influence (FOCI) considerations as part of its licensing process for fuel cycle facilities. In practice, this means that foreign investment is not assessed solely on the basis of equity percentage but on questions of effective control, access to classified or sensitive information, decision-making authority, and the ability to influence operations. Where foreign participation is significant, the NRC may require mitigation measures as a condition of licensing, such as US-controlled operating entities, proxy or special security arrangements, limitations on board composition, or other governance restrictions designed to insulate licensed activities from foreign influence.
This does not mean foreign investment is unwelcome. On the contrary, US policymakers regularly acknowledge that rebuilding the fuel cycle will require allied capital and industrial participation. But it does mean that deal structure matters. Minority equity stakes, carefully bounded governance rights, US-based management and control, and robust compliance and information-control programs are often essential to regulatory and political acceptability.
Foreign investors who approach fuel cycle investments as purely commercial transactions often underestimate this overlay. Those who engage early with FOCI mitigation, licensing strategy, and national security review tend to move faster, not slower, through the process because they design transactions that are licensable from the outset, rather than retrofitted under regulatory pressure.
Where Foreign Capital Fits Best
Taken together, these dynamics point to several areas where foreign investors are particularly well positioned. Conversion and midstream infrastructure stand out as essential assets that align well with long-term, infrastructure-oriented capital. Enrichment expansion tied to LEU+ demand offers nearer-term commercial exposure without the full political sensitivity of HALEU ownership. HALEU-related investments, especially those structured around DOE contracts and staged milestones, offer strategic upside for investors willing to accept phased deployment risk. And the logistics layer —transport packages, certified handling, and quality-assurance-driven services —remains underappreciated despite its importance.
What unites these opportunities is not technological novelty but constraint relevance. These are the assets and the infrastructure that determine whether advanced reactors can move from paper to reality.
Fuel First
The American nuclear revival is often narrated as a competition among reactor designs. That framing is incomplete. In practice, the near-term success of nuclear deployment in the United States will turn first on fuel — i.e., on whether the country can rebuild enrichment, conversion, fabrication, and transport capabilities at scale and on schedule.
For foreign investors, that reality creates a counterintuitive but powerful insight. The most consequential investments in US nuclear energy today may not be downstream at all. They may be upstream, where policy support is strongest, competition is thinner, and the alignment between national strategy and industrial execution is clearest.
In Part II of this series, I will examine how reactor deployment in the United States is being reshaped by DOE’s increasingly direct role in commercialization and what that means for foreign capital considering advanced reactor investments.
About the Author: Daniel Joyner
Daniel Joyner is the Elton B. Stephens Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law and the founder and principal at Prometheus Nuclear LLC. Prior to joining the Alabama Law faculty in 2007, Dr. Joyner taught for four years on the faculty of the University of Warwick School of Law. He is the author of International Law and the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (Oxford University Press, 2009); Interpreting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016).
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