EUNICE, N.M. — Urenco USA announced Monday that it has completed production of its first commercial product cylinder of low-enriched uranium plus, or LEU+, at its National Enrichment Facility in southeastern New Mexico — a reactor fuel enriched above the level the commercial industry has used for decades.
The company called the cylinder the first commercial production of LEU+ in the Western world.
Standard low-enriched uranium, the fuel used by most commercial reactors, is enriched to between 3% and 5% U-235. LEU+ raises that level to between 5% and 10%, according to the company. The higher assay allows existing light-water reactors to operate on longer cycles with fewer refueling outages, and several advanced reactor designs now in development are being built to use LEU+ as fuel.
“A tremendous amount of work has gone into preparing our plant and our staff to reach this achievement,” said Jody Blackshear, managing director of Urenco USA, adding that the company “can now supply an innovative fuel option for our customers.”
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission authorized Urenco USA in September 2025 to enrich uranium to as much as 10% U-235, making it the first commercial enricher authorized to produce LEU+, and all of the plant’s gas centrifuge cascades are licensed to produce the fuel, the company said. Urenco USA first produced uranium enriched above 5% in December 2025, in a production run the company described at the time as preparation for commercial deliveries in 2026.
The company said LEU+ can also serve as feedstock for high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU — fuel enriched between 10% and 20% that most advanced reactor designs require, and that the federal government is working to produce domestically at larger scale.
The Eunice plant, which began operating in 2010, is the only commercial uranium enrichment facility in the United States. Its existing capacity of 4.3 million separative work units meets roughly one-third of current U.S. demand for low-enriched uranium, and more than 500 employees and long-term contractors work at the site, according to the company. Urenco USA said it is expanding toward more than 7 million separative work units over the next decade, with construction of a new enrichment plant at the site set to begin in 2029 and the first new cascades starting production in 2032.
For Ohio, the announcement is another marker in the federal push to rebuild a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain — a push with deep stakes in Pike County, where the U.S. Department of Energy’s Portsmouth site near Piketon hosts the nation’s HALEU enrichment work and where the future of enrichment at the former gaseous diffusion plant has been fought over for years. J News Network covers that fight as part of its ongoing Fallout Files investigation.
This article is based on Urenco USA’s announcement of November 2, 2026.
