Front-end nuclear fuel supply cooperation: Turning allied interdependence into strategic advantage
This distribution—often described as a vulnerability—is in fact the foundation of a strategic advantage for the United States and its closest partners. Allied interdependence, when deliberately orchestrated, creates a resilient, commercially competitive fuel cycle capable of matching and beating Russian and Chinese state-controlled offerings. State-controlled vendors bring integrated financing packages that disparate allied vendors find difficult to match, so narrowing that financing gap is itself part of the cooperation agenda.
The best path forward is a deliberate, multilateral architecture in which each Sapporo Five member or ally contributes its strongest offerings, with multiple qualified vendors in each category to preserve competitive discipline, supported by long-term offtake, shared infrastructure, and complementary public investment.
Strategic context
As of the second Nuclear Energy Summit, held in Paris in March, 38 countries have endorsed the Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy globally by 2050. The build-out of hyperscale data centers has created firm, baseload electricity demand on a scale not seen in at least a generation, with major technology firms entering long-term power purchase agreements with utility and developer partners. National security considerations, sharpened by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, have made fuel supply resilience a first-order strategic question rather than a procurement footnote.
Yet the front end of the fuel cycle—on which this all depends—remains structurally vulnerable. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom and its subsidiary Tenex hold roughly 40–46 percent of global enrichment capacity and, until recent restart efforts, supplied a meaningful share of the world’s conversion services.
For decades, Western reactor operators have been able to source enriched uranium product at world prices precisely because Russian capacity remained competitive. That arrangement is no longer politically or morally tenable. The U.S. Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act of 2024, the creation of the Sapporo Five, and a wave of national programs across allied capitals reflect a shared recognition that the West must rebuild its fuel cycle at scale and not rely on Russia for enrichment.
This is the challenge. Conversion plants, enrichment cascades, and HALEU-capable deconversion lines do not become more economical when duplicated nationally; they become less competitive, slower to deploy in their sum, and more fragmented in their technical standards. The strategic opportunity lies in treating the economies of the Sapporo Five, together with their close partners, as a single market in which capability is allied-redundant rather than nationally redundant, governed by shared standards, and underwritten by long-term commercial contracts that give private investors the certainty they require.
A single allied market presumes reliable trade relationships across the Sapporo Five and their partners. Recent tariff measures among allied governments, however well motivated in their domestic context, complicate that presumption. To ensure cooperation, allied capitals will need to be predictable partners to one another in nuclear-related goods and services, even where they may retain tensions in other sectors. Long-term cooperation is not compatible with the volatility arising from shifting unilateral trade barriers between allies.
The argument for cooperation is as much commercial as it is political. The arithmetic of a tripling of global nuclear power—and of new advanced reactors that will be deployed as part of it—does not work without coordinated front-end investment. It is in each ally’s interest to cooperate, and it is in the collective interest of the West to do so deliberately.
(Image: Amosova and Grae)
Current front-end capabilities
The front end of the fuel cycle comprises five sequential stages, each with distinct capital, regulatory, and technological characteristics: mining and milling; conversion; enrichment; fuel fabrication; and the family of deconversion, metallization, and specialty fuel-form steps required by advanced fuel designs. Mapping allied capabilities across these stages reveals both a coherent footprint and a set of bottlenecks that no single country can resolve.
Mining and sourcing remain the most geographically diversified stage. Cameco’s Cigar Lake and McArthur River operations in Saskatchewan, Canada, Orano’s interests in Canada and Niger, and a growing portfolio of Australian and U.S. domestic projects provide a meaningful share of global primary supply. Kazakhstan, while not a Sapporo Five state, supplies more than 40 percent of the world’s mined uranium; routing that material westward without Russian transit is an active policy and logistics question rather than a settled one. Mining is not itself a binding constraint on allied supply over the medium term, provided spot and long-term contract markets continue to attract sufficient capital to Western and allied projects rather than to vertically integrated, state-controlled alternatives.
Conversion is materially tighter. The Western conversion footprint comprises Cameco’s Port Hope facility in Ontario, Canada; Orano’s Pierrelatte and Malvési operations in France; and the recently restarted ConverDyn plant at Metropolis, Ill. Combined nameplate capacity is sufficient for current Western reactor demand only if all of these operate at high availability. Russian-sourced uranium hexafluoride (UF₆) continues to leave the market in a managed—rather than abrupt—fashion, but a single unplanned outage would translate directly into market tightness, as observed during the pause in operations at Metropolis from 2017 to 2023.
Enrichment is the stage where the gap is most visible—and the most consequential. Urenco’s centrifuge plants in Almelo, the Netherlands; Gronau, Germany; Capenhurst, England; and Eunice, N.M.—along with Orano’s Georges Besse II at Tricastin, France—constitute the bulk of allied capacity. Centrus operates the American Centrifuge Plant at Piketon, Ohio, which produced the first commercial-scale HALEU in the United States in more than 70 years, approaching 900 kilograms per year of HALEU output.
Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited’s Rokkasho enrichment plant is the only allied commercial enrichment capacity in East Asia. JNFL is scaling the plant from approximately 112.5 metric ton separative work units per year today toward an approved capacity of 450 tSWU per year, with a long-run design ceiling of 1,500 tSWU per year. (tSWU, equivalent to 1,000 kg SWU, is the standard measure of enrichment effort.) Orano has committed approximately $1.8 billion to a 30 percent capacity expansion at Tricastin by 2028. The United Kingdom has committed £300 million to launch Europe’s first domestic HALEU program, anchored at Capenhurst.
These commitments, while real and material, cannot yet fully replace Russian SWU within the timeframe needed to support both the low-enriched uranium needs of existing Western reactors and the advanced reactors that will require HALEU during the late 2020s and 2030s. The Sapporo Five announced at COP28 a target of mobilizing at least $4.2 billion in combined government-led and private investment over three years. That target has been exceeded, with $5.6 billion reported to have been mobilized as of September 2024. Even at this pace, demand-side projections (particularly if orders for small modular and advanced reactors accelerate) argue for additional capacity beyond what is currently committed.
Fuel fabrication is in a better position, with Westinghouse, Framatome, Global Nuclear Fuel (a GE Vernova–Hitachi venture), Mitsubishi Nuclear Fuel, and KEPCO Nuclear Fuel covering the LEU uranium dioxide (UO₂) fabrication needs of the existing Western fleet across pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors, and Russian VVER-compatible product lines.
The structural question in fabrication is not capacity but qualification. When a reactor operator wishes to switch fabricators (for example, to substitute Westinghouse VVER-440 or VVER-1000 fuel for previously Russian-supplied assemblies), the qualification, licensing, and core management workstreams typically require multiyear lead times. Allied cooperation can compress this through mutual recognition of qualification data, harmonized acceptance criteria, and shared operating experience, particularly for Eastern European operators of Soviet-designed reactors.
Deconversion and metallization for advanced fuels is the stage that is least prepared for the future. The reactor designs now moving toward demonstration and commercial deployment collectively require fuel forms that include TRISO particles, metallic uranium–zirconium alloys, and uranium-oxide pellets at HALEU enrichment levels. These fuels require UF₆ to be deconverted to a usable feedstock of UO₂ powder, UF₄, or uranium metal and, in many cases, further processed into kernels, particles, or fuel slugs.
This is not just for advanced reactors. Lightbridge, for example, is developing a metallic uranium–zirconium fuel to increase power output and enhance the safety of existing and new PWRs and BWRs. The fuel will require HALEU enrichment, along with deconversion and metallization capacity. That is a clear illustration of how the front-end needs of the operating reactor base and those of the advanced reactor pipeline now overlap. This area is currently dominated by national laboratory–scale facilities at Idaho and Oak Ridge, a small number of pilot-scale industrial lines, and a handful of first-of-a-kind commercial projects. Without parallel investment in deconversion and metallization at an industrial scale, increased HALEU SWU output will not translate into deliverable advanced reactor fuel.
It is also at this stage that innovation has the greatest potential to reset the cost curve. The SILEX laser-based enrichment technology, being commercialized in the United States by Global Laser Enrichment (a joint venture of Silex Systems and Cameco), achieved technology readiness level-6 in October 2025—the first laser enrichment process to do so at an industrial scale. GLE submitted its full Nuclear Regulatory Commission license application for the Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility in July 2025, with operations targeted to begin no later than 2030.
Public assessments of the technology suggest 30–50 percent reductions in energy consumption per SWU, compared with centrifuge cascades, with a smaller physical footprint and inherent flexibility across enrichment levels, including HALEU. If laser enrichment delivers on these characteristics at commercial scale, it will offer the West a path to HALEU production that is structurally lower cost than centrifuge alternatives.