NANO Nuclear agrees to buy NRC license for unbuilt New Mexico DUF6 plant

NANO Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ: NNE) will pay $9.5 million in cash and $4.0 million in its own stock for the assets of a depleted uranium deconversion plant that was licensed in 2012 and never built, the company said on October 1, 2026. The seller is Radnostix, Inc., the Idaho Falls radioisotope maker formerly called International Isotopes, together with its subsidiary International Isotopes Fluorine Products (IIFP); the assets include US Nuclear Regulatory Commission license SUB-1011 for a depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) deconversion and fluorine extraction facility in Lea County, New Mexico. Closing, which the parties expect in approximately 90 to 120 days, needs NRC consent to the license transfer, other approvals including from New Mexico officials, and satisfactory site arrangements.

A license that has been for sale before

The license has been sold once before, on paper. International Isotopes agreed in February 2024 to sell the same venture, license included, to American Fuel Resources, and applied to the NRC on October 1, 2025 for consent to transfer the license to that company's subsidiary, Green Salt Products; the application asked for consent by February 28, 2026 against what it called a "hard contractual deadline" of March 31, 2026. A Federal Register notice of March 31, 2026 records that the NRC granted the companies' request, made in a letter dated March 11, 2026, to withdraw the application. Neither Radnostix's release nor NANO's mentions the earlier sale.

The plant was licensed in 2012 and paused in 2014. The NRC issued the 40-year license on October 2, 2012 for a facility the final environmental impact statement, NUREG-2113, describes as one that "would provide services to the uranium enrichment industry," deconverting DUF6 into fluoride products for commercial resale and depleted uranium oxides for disposal; the application asked to possess up to 750,000 kilograms (827 tons) of depleted uranium in Phase 1. Construction never started, so the NRC inspection program its page says begins "after IIFP decides to begin construction of the facility" never started either. The license is a 10 CFR Part 40 source material license; NANO's release says the NRC required its licensing basis to meet applicable requirements of 10 CFR Part 70, Subpart H, which NANO expects to "facilitate a more streamlined regulatory pathway" for adding Part 70 processes by amendment, "subject in each case to applicable NRC review and approval."

By the sellers' own account, nothing has happened at the site since 2014. In the 2025 transfer application, International Isotopes and Green Salt wrote that the venture "has been on hold since 2014," that "economic realities of the nuclear industry following the Fukushima incident" led management to pause it, and that no site construction work had begun, no regular personnel were present, and "no radioactive material has ever been received onto the license," with the economics and the license's decommissioning-funding condition unmet. IIFP's staffing was listed as the chief executive and a radiation safety officer, with every other position described in the license vacant.

What NANO is buying, and what it would do with it

The deal buys permits, paperwork and patents, not a plant. The purchased assets, per NANO's Form 8-K, are the license and its regulatory materials, a New Mexico air quality permit, "a portfolio of issued and/or expired U.S. patents covering fluorine extraction and related processes," and technical materials "including documentation originally acquired from General Dynamics relating to the Sequoyah Fuels conversion plant." NANO put $0.5 million in escrow before signing, and the cash at closing is reduced by that escrow and by any amounts paid to release liens on the assets. Closing also requires NANO's subsidiary HALEU Energy Fuel to obtain title or a lease from Lea County on the Hobbs site, a parcel Radnostix's own 8-K puts at approximately 640 acres, plus environmental assessments showing no remediation expenditures above $0.1 million. Either side may terminate if the site condition is unmet 120 days after September 28, 2026, a period NANO may extend by 60 days, or if the NRC license transfer has not occurred by that outside date.

NANO counts the club it would join at ten; the NRC's own list runs to twelve rows. NANO says the purchase would make it the owner of "one of ten NRC-licensed fuel cycle facilities in the United States." The NRC's own locator, last updated September 14, 2026, lists twelve licensee rows across conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication and deconversion, with International Isotopes' Lea County docket the only entry under deconversion. NANO's plans for it are open: the release says the company "plans to continue its evaluation of several options," including deconversion and other fuel cycle activities, alone or with partners, and that "no final investment decision has been made." Amending an existing license, NANO believes, "could provide a significantly more efficient regulatory pathway than developing and licensing a comparable facility on a new site."

For Radnostix, the sale is an exit. Chief executive Shahe Bagerdjian said in the seller's release that the deal lets the company "fully focus on our radioisotope technologies in medical and industrial applications," and the release says net proceeds will go to its four radioisotope product segments.

Deconversion is a cleanup business as much as a fuel one. DUF6 is a coproduct of enrichment, and with the NRC's only listed deconversion licensee unbuilt, the deconversion that runs in the United States is the Department of Energy's: its Portsmouth Paducah Project Office said on August 26, 2025 that its contractor had converted more than 1,000 cylinders of DUF6 in 2025 at the Paducah, Kentucky and Portsmouth, Ohio sites into uranium oxide, which is packaged and shipped to a licensed disposal facility, under plant operations required by Public Law 107-206. The commercial enrichment industry the IIFP plant was licensed to serve has meanwhile grown on paper: two new enrichment plants were in line at the NRC as of August 28, 2026.

Outlook

If the NRC handles this transfer the way it handled the last one, the calendar is the risk. The Green Salt application of October 1, 2025 drew the NRC's Federal Register notice of receipt, with an opportunity to comment and request a hearing, on February 6, 2026, about four months later, according to the March 31 notice; the parties withdrew before any consent. NANO's agreement gives the site condition 120 days from September 28, 2026, extendable by 60, which runs to January 26 or March 27, 2027 by The Duck Curve's arithmetic. A notice of receipt on the earlier schedule would land inside that window with the consent itself still to come. The term that may matter more is the one neither release prices: the license's decommissioning funding condition, which the 2025 application said had not been met and which Green Salt promised to satisfy "when the requirements of License Condition 15 are met."