Centrus signs HALEU supply contract for Radiant's Kaleidos microreactors

Centrus Energy has signed a definitive multi-year contract to supply high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for multiple Kaleidos microreactors, with deliveries scheduled to begin before the end of the decade, the company said in a Form 8-K filed on September 9, 2026. The contract with Radiant Industries includes prepayments to Centrus to support what the joint release calls its domestic commercial enrichment capacity program. The release names no quantity, no dollar value, and no reactor count beyond "multiple," and the press-release copy attached to the filing carries a September 8 dateline while the 8-K cover and the wire version both say September 9.

The same day, Centrus priced a $500 million underwritten public offering of 500,000 Class A shares, pre-funded warrants for 2,005,513 more shares, and four series of common warrants for up to 6,992,382 shares, at $199.64 per share with accompanying warrants. The company says the net proceeds are for general working capital and corporate purposes, which may include technology development and deployment, debt repayment, capital expenditures, and potential acquisitions; closing is expected on or about September 11. The preliminary prospectus supplement gives the last reported sale price as $185.53 on September 8. Read together, the two announcements describe how Centrus is paying for new centrifuges: customer prepayments on one side, equity on the other.

The Radiant contract is the second enrichment contract with customer prepayments Centrus has announced in five weeks. On August 6, it signed a contract with X-energy for LEU and HALEU enrichment services that also includes customer prepayments, which that release called part of "Centrus' strategy of obtaining de-risked funding to strengthen its capital stack." The X-energy release put Centrus's contingent LEU and HALEU backlog at $3 billion, $2.4 billion of it definitized. Centrus says its AC100 centrifuge is the only deployment-ready US-origin technology available for unobligated enrichment today, meaning product that can be used for national security applications, a distinction the joint release ties to Kaleidos's national security applications.

What Centrus can deliver, and when, runs through Piketon. Under a Department of Energy demonstration contract, its cascade there produced a cumulative total of more than 1,900 kilograms of HALEU UF6, Centrus said on July 1, 2026, when it finalized a $900 million DOE task order to deploy commercial-scale HALEU capacity at the site. The first new capacity is expected online by 2029, per that release, and the initial build-out is to include 12 metric tons of annual HALEU production capacity; in the interim, Centrus says it intends to operate the existing cascade privately on a commercial basis, and is working with DOE on agreements for that transition, including a long-term lease extension. Two other planned US enrichment plants described in The Duck Curve's August uranium coverage, Global Laser Enrichment's Paducah plant and Orano's Project IKE, had license applications before the NRC as of late August.

For Radiant, the contract is one more link in a fuel chain it has been assembling around a 1 MWe reactor. Standard Nuclear will fabricate TRISO fuel to Kaleidos specifications through the early 2030s under a supply agreement Radiant announced on August 20, the same fabricator whose Antares deal we covered in Standard Nuclear to supply Antares up to eight tons of TRISO fuel; enrichment is the step before fabrication, which is where Centrus comes in. On the government side, DOE made a conditional commitment on July 23, 2026 to provide HALEU from its own sources for Radiant's planned microreactor at Buckley Space Force Base, the Air Force's preferred location, Radiant's second allocation after one supporting its Kaleidos demonstration reactor. DOE's release says HALEU "is not currently available from domestic suppliers"; the joint release describes the contract as "adding another domestic source of fuel." The two companies first announced a partnership on January 26, 2023, under which Centrus was to identify a path to supply HALEU for as many as 20 Kaleidos units; the 2026 contract is the definitive version, without the 20.

Radiant's order book explains the urgency. Radiant said on August 26, 2026 that its Army Janus Program award, part of the five-vendor selection covered in US Army awards up to $2.2 billion for microreactors at five bases, is a binding agreement of up to $750 million to develop and deploy 15 Kaleidos reactors, and in the same release its chief commercial officer, Mike Starrett, says Radiant will deploy 15 reactors by 2030 through Janus. The company also says it holds a commercial agreement with Equinix for 20 units, and its first commercial Kaleidos is targeted for delivery to Buckley Space Force Base by 2028, per Radiant's announcement as reported in Five US microreactor designs went critical in the summer of 2026. The reactor itself is at Idaho National Laboratory's DOME test bed for the full-power campaign described in Five US microreactor designs went critical in the summer of 2026, capped by a minimum of 150 continuous hours without operator assistance, with completion targeted for the third quarter of 2026. Radiant's chief nuclear officer, Rita Baranwal, framed the fuel strategy in the joint release as "build it in parallel, and don't depend on any single path."

Outlook

The filings suggest the microreactor fuel chain is being financed by the reactor developers' own prepayments, then refinanced in the equity market: Centrus has now attached prepayments to two enrichment contracts and priced a $500 million offering the same day it announced the second. Whether Piketon's demonstration cascade can carry commercial deliveries before the 2029 capacity arrives depends on the DOE lease and transition agreements Centrus said on July 1 it was still working out, and the joint release does not say how much HALEU the contract covers. If Radiant's 15 Janus units and 20 Equinix units hold to their 2030 and early-2030s schedules, the contract's "multiple" reactors will need to become a number before Centrus's first new cascade is running.