Uranium enrichment spot price hits record as NRC clears security plan for Oak Ridge laser facility, LIS Technologies spent 246 days winning permission to guard its classified CRISLA process, the West's newest enrichment hopeful has yet to earn a dollar

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The spot price of separative work — the enrichment service that turns uranium into reactor fuel — has hit a record. In the same stretch of days, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a security plan for LIS Technologies, a private laser-enrichment developer in which NANO Nuclear is a shareholder and strategic partner, clearing it to hold classified material at its test facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The facility had taken delivery of its first uranium hexafluoride days earlier.

The plan took 246 days to review. Submitted on February 11, it governs the "closed area" where the company keeps classified matter tied to its proprietary CRISLA-4G laser process, and the regulator found it satisfies the rules on access authorisation, facility security clearance and the Pentagon's industrial security requirements — giving, in the NRC's words, "reasonable assurance" that classified material will be protected. Christo Liebenberg, the company's president and co-founder, called the clearance "a necessary step" toward moving the technology "from demonstration to commercial nuclear fuel production". Enrichment know-how is treated as a national security secret; every Western technology in the field sits behind locked doors and clearances, and a company must prove it can keep secrets before it is allowed to work on them.

The company is pre-revenue. In January it unveiled a $1.4 billion laser-enrichment project on a 206-acre site at the footprint of the Manhattan Project's K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, and bought a $6.2 million building next door for its isotope and deconversion pilots. Several steps remain before commercial fuel: the security plan takes full effect only after a successful operational readiness review, and licensing a full-capacity facility comes after that.

The record price explains why anyone waits. Enrichment is the narrowest link in the nuclear fuel chain, and Western utilities have spent the sanctions era paying to replace Russian supply. The premium lands in fuel contracts, then in power bills, while electricity costs soar across the United States and the fuel chain sets the pace of any nuclear revival.

LIS Technologies now has uranium hexafluoride, a security plan and a billion-dollar site on the old K-25 footprint. What it does not have yet is revenue.