TX-1 Facility Construction Milestone
Triso-X has reached a significant construction milestone for its advanced nuclear fuel facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The construction of the massive 214,000-square-foot building for the TX-1 facility has been successfully completed. The project will now transition into the interior buildout and equipment installation phases. Once fully operational, the TX-1 facility is designed to produce approximately 700,000 TRISO-X fuel pebbles annually, which equates to about 5 tonnes of uranium. This output is sufficient to fuel up to 11 of X-energy's Xe-100 advanced reactors.
Regulatory Approvals and State Support
A critical enabler for this progress was the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granting TRISO-X a 40-year Special Nuclear Material License earlier in 2026. This landmark approval enables the commercial manufacture of fuel using high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) at both the TX-1 and future TX-2 facilities. Additionally, in July 2026, TRISO-X secured an $11 million grant from the State of Tennessee to support the broader development of its fuel fabrication campus, which includes plans for a dedicated R&D center known as TX-L.
Qualification and Deployment
In 2025, TRISO-X fuel made history by becoming the first advanced nuclear fuel form fabricated for commercial use to undergo irradiation testing at Idaho National Laboratory's Advanced Test Reactor, a crucial step to qualify it for the Xe-100.
The TX-1 facility is initially expected to support X-energy's proposed deployment of the Xe-100 advanced small modular reactor at Dow Inc.’s UCC Seadrift Operations manufacturing site in Texas. This integrated approach to fuel fabrication and reactor deployment underscores the rapid maturation of the HALEU supply chain in the United States.
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