Dallas, TX, August 26 — Actinide, an advanced materials company that designs, builds, and operates its own isotope separation machines, has become the first startup in history to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The enrichment was performed on the company's first-generation calutron, which, weeks earlier, was producing Actinide’s flagship commercial product: enriched ytterbium-176, delivered to Oklo Isotopes.

There is no end-to-end domestic supply chain for HALEU-based fuel: the Department of Energy says that most advanced reactor designs require HALEU, yet there is currently zero available from domestic suppliers. While conventional centrifuge enrichment is able to produce enriched uranium hexafluoride gas, this still must be converted into solid form before fuel fabrication - a process for which the United States has zero commercial capacity. The Department of Energy contracted six companies in 2024 to build out that deconversion capacity, but Actinide’s technology bypasses the bottleneck entirely by producing solid HALEU directly.

The HALEU was produced in research quantities under the laboratory-scale exclusion in NRC regulations, which carves out facilities used for experimental purposes only. U.S. law defines HALEU as uranium containing more than 5 percent but less than 20 percent uranium-235. An independent ISO/IEC 17025-accredited laboratory assayed the produced material at 15.38% enrichment. This material would still need to be fabricated into rods, pellets, or particles before a reactor could use it.

“This demonstration is a testament to the power and flexibility of our technology. A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed,” said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide. Actinide’s first-generation calutron is a modern electromagnetic isotope separator that sorts atoms by mass inside a magnetic field. It builds on the same core principle used in the Manhattan Project calutrons at Oak Ridge’s Y-12, but the resemblance ends there.