AI-driven electricity demand has reached newsworthy highs. As data centers continue to pop up across the country, they’re beginning to strain power grids. Tech companies are pouring billions into nuclear reactor design to support AI workloads, but a fuel bottleneck is on the horizon. LIS Technologies might just have the answer.
To understand why fuel production could become a limiting factor in next-generation nuclear deployment, it’s important to know a little about how nuclear reactors run. Older reactors and nuclear power plants typically require low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is uranium that contains up to 5% U-235, a specific uranium isotope.
However, newer, more efficient reactors depend on high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is up to 20% U-235. Natural uranium is about 0.7% U-235. Most commercial enrichment facilities use “cascades” of hundreds of gas centrifuges to create enriched uranium, and the process is time- and energy-intensive.
As the demand for enriched uranium (and HALEU in particular) increases, there’s a very real chance that current enrichment facilities may not be able to keep up.
“Right now, the U.S. is producing 100 gigawatts of electricity every year, and the projection is that by 2050, we need three times that amount of power. The demand for nuclear energy is just huge, especially with AI centers and data centers,” says LIS Technologies cofounder and president Christo Liebenberg. “But at the same time, the supply of enriched uranium is going down because the U.S. is gradually cutting out supply from Russia.”
“The U.S. banned Russian imports, which controlled the market. Very soon there will be a bottleneck, and the U.S. doesn’t know where to get fuel. We’re building all these billion-dollar reactors, yet we don’t even have the future fuel for them.”
LIS Technologies has developed an enrichment technology to meet the growing demand for nuclear fuel. By using a laser to selectively target specific uranium isotopes, the company can efficiently produce both LEU and HALEU.
Liebenberg explains that laser enrichment in itself isn’t a new technology. Dr. Jeff Eerkens, the company’s other cofounder, developed the landmark Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation (CRISLA) process in the 1970s and 1980s. LIS Technologies built upon that foundational knowledge to create a more precise laser enrichment system.
The new laser enrichment system can create nuclear fuel in one or two steps. “You irradiate the uranium only once, and it’s enriched all the way from natural uranium to the LEU level, 4.95%” he says. “If you irradiate it a second time, you can go all the way to HALEU, 19.75%.”
Efficiency is a major part of why this new technology could help solve the impending fuel crunch. But there’s another factor too.
“Laser enrichment has been around for 55 years, and no one has been able to successfully scale it, to take it to commercialization. Not one out of 26-plus countries,” Liebenberg says. “Now, we’re using a laser and a process that is very different from what we’ve been using in the past. It’s much more scalable, with significantly higher reliability. We can now scale the entire process.”
Is laser enrichment the key to powering the AI boom? Possibly. LIS Technologies is currently putting its new technology through rigorous, pre-commercial testing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), but Liebenberg is confident in the company’s prospects.
“There’s a huge resurrection, a huge resurgence of nuclear power. We are in the middle of a second nuclear age,” he says. “It can be done!”
