Enrichment draws the attention, but HALEU becomes reactor fuel only after two further steps: deconversion and fabrication. The U.S. government has now put money behind the first of them.
Six deconversion providers
The United States has selected six companies as nuclear fuel deconversion service providers, allocating up to $800 million in contract value to the segment. The selected providers are BWXT, Centrus, Framatome, GE Vernova, Orano and Westinghouse.
Why deconversion sits in the middle
HALEU is generally produced as uranium hexafluoride (UF6). Most advanced reactor designs cannot use the material in that chemical form; it must be deconverted and then fabricated into the specific fuel required by each design. That places deconversion directly between enrichment output and fuel manufacturing, and makes it a potential bottleneck even when enrichment capacity exists.
The sequencing appears deliberate. The deconversion selections were made before the HALEU production contracts, indicating that the supply chain is being built end-to-end rather than enrichment-first.
Fabrication investment follows
Fabrication capacity is expanding in parallel. Westinghouse announced a $1 billion investment in the first new fleet-scale nuclear fuel factory built in the United States in more than 50 years, located at its Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in Hopkins, South Carolina. The plant is dedicated to LEU+ fuel, an enrichment band above conventional light-water reactor fuel.
The plant is the first new fleet-scale nuclear fuel factory built in the USA in more than 50 years.
Timing remains the test
The scale of the fuel gap is large. Centrus was expected to reach 1.8 MTU of HALEU by the end of June 2026, less than 10% of estimated demand tied to possible advanced reactor deployments, according to GAO-26-107385. Deconversion and fabrication lines must be qualified and licensed on their own schedules, and fuel qualification for a specific reactor design takes additional time on top of that.
For reactor developers, the practical conclusion is that a HALEU production contract is only one link in the chain. Deconversion throughput, fabrication qualification and facility licensing will determine when fuel actually arrives at a reactor site.
This article was assisted by AI analysis. Please refer to the original source for official information.