Unlocking the Holy Grail: Scaling Uranium Enrichment for a Sustainable Grid

As concerns about climate change, national security, and the sustainability of the power grid loom, the United States has turned to nuclear energy with a renewed focus. But before it can achieve its full potential, it needs to reach a critical milestone: the ability to produce enriched uranium on an industrial scale. LIS Technologies is ready to make that happen.

The U.S. is home to 94 civil nuclear power plants, with many smaller, state-of-the-art small modular reactors (SMRs) and modular microreactors (MMRs) still under development. However, to produce nuclear energy, all these types of reactors need fuel, which comes in the form of enriched uranium.

Enriching uranium involves increasing the concentration of U-235, the specific isotope needed to power nuclear reactors. Natural uranium is roughly 0.7% U-235. How much you need to enrich it depends on the specific application.

Light-water reactor (LWR) nuclear power plants rely on low-enriched uranium (LEU), which contains up to 5% U-235. SMRs and MMRs need high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is between 5% and 20% U-235.

Laser Enrichment: A Long-Awaited Breakthrough

There are several methods of uranium enrichment, but most experts recognize that laser enrichment is potentially superior. “Lasers have always been seen as the holy grail of enrichment,” explains LIS Technologies co-founder and CEO Christo Liebenberg. “Laser can be more selective, more elegant, more precise. It’s much cheaper. It’s a much smaller footprint. There are many benefits!”

Despite laser enrichment’s many merits, the technology is still relatively uncommon, and few companies can do it at all — much less do it well. Laser enrichment has been around for over 50 years, but to date, no one has been able to successfully scale the components required in the laser enrichment process or to successfully demonstrate a fully integrated, commercially viable system.The company leadership believes that the CRISLA process overcomes almost all of these scaling challenges.

“We have literally the only U.S.-origin technology for laser enrichment,” says the company’s president, Jay Yu. “Once we demonstrate practical quantities of enriched uranium, it is going to get classified because this can potentially pose a national security risk. It can enrich uranium to weapons-grade fuel levels, but we’re not looking to do that. We’re looking to create fuel for all the 94 current U.S. civil nuclear power plants.”

LIS Technologies was co-founded by Jeff Eerkens, the inventor of the Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation (CRISLA) process, Christo Liebenberg, a lifelong laser enrichment scientist, and Jay Yu, a capital markets expert. Many regard Eerkens as the father of laser enrichment.

Scaling Challenges

While the technology itself isn’t new, Liebenberg and Eerkens are looking to collaboratively conquer what has proven to be an enduring hurdle: scaling.

“Laser enrichment has been around for over 50 years, and to date, no one has been able to successfully scale it. It’s been tried by more than 26 different countries, and a successful demonstration of a fully integrated, commercially viable system just has not happened yet,” says Liebenberg.

“Our type of lasers is very different to what has been used in the past. We’re using a laser at a different wavelength, which completely changes the laser architecture. This new type of laser is indeed scalable, and we believe it will enable  us to potentially build the world’s very first commercial laser enrichment facility.”

From Demonstration to Commercial Deployment

The ability to enrich uranium at scale would be revolutionary for nuclear energy in the United States. The process of enriching uranium is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, and it’s more of a limiting factor than the number of reactors and nuclear power plants.

The company was recently selected as an awardee of the Department of Energy’s low-enriched uranium (LEU) acquisition program. It will still be several years before the domestic nuclear supply chain is up and running.

Liebenberg explains that the technology will go through a multi-phase process. “The Phase 1 demonstration is probably the most important phase. It’s about repeating the 1990s results and getting back to baseline, but it’s also about optimizing the overall enrichment process, and then demonstrating that we can do LEU in a single stage, and HALEU in a double stage.” This test demonstration phase is estimated to last about two years.

“Phase 2 will take an additional two years, where all hardware has been fully scaled and industrialized, and used to demonstrate again single-stage LEU and double-stage HALEU, he reports. “Phase 3 is where we design a commercial facility, perform a safety analysis and environmental report, and submit a license application to the NRC. In total, starting in 2025, the full scope for Phase 3 is about six or seven years, which means we will be in full production by the early 2030s.”

Power, Security, and Sustainability

Assuming all goes well, LIS Technologies and some of the other awardees in the DOE’s  LEU acquisition program will begin building a network of nuclear plants to meet the vast (and increasing) demand for nuclear fuel both at home and abroad.

The way Liebenberg sees it, domestic nuclear power has the potential to benefit the country in a number of ways. “We don’t have to depend on Russia or China for our nuclear fuel imports,” he says. “That’s a security issue. And besides a world that is increasingly energy hungry, there’s also climate change — we want to produce new energy that’s clean.”

Feature Image: Provided by LIS Technologies

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