Urenco USA produces its first commercial LEU+ cylinder in New Mexico

Urenco USA has finished producing its first product cylinder of LEU+, uranium enriched to between 5% and 10% uranium-235, at its enrichment plant in Eunice, New Mexico, the company said on November 2, 2026. Urenco calls it the first commercial production of LEU+ in the Western world. Most commercial reactors in operation use fuel made from uranium enriched to between 3% and 5%, per the release.

Urenco pitches the extra enrichment at two kinds of reactor. Existing light water reactors could run longer cycles between refueling outages, and several advanced reactor technologies in development will use LEU+ as fuel. It can also be feedstock for high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), the 10% to 20% material many advanced reactor designs need, and Urenco says it will increase the amount of fuel a dedicated HALEU plant could produce.

The plant has been cleared for this since September 30, 2025, when the NRC authorized it to produce uranium hexafluoride enriched to less than 10% uranium-235, on the strength of operational readiness reviews the agency had performed over the preceding year.

The schedule has a loose end. When Urenco announced that authorization on October 2, 2025, it said initial LEU+ production would take place that year, "with the first product deliveries to a fuel fabricator planned for 2026." The November release names no fabricator, customer or delivery date, with two months of 2026 left to run.

Urenco calls itself the only commercial-scale producer of enriched uranium in the US, and says the Eunice plant's annual capacity of 4.3 million separative work units can meet about one-third of current US demand for low-enriched uranium. Urenco plans to begin building a new enrichment plant at the site in 2029, with its first cascades starting production in 2032, and says that capacity will also be able to make LEU+. Others are building toward the same market: Centrus expects its first new enrichment capacity in Ohio in 2029, and General Matter, whose Paducah application the NRC accepted for review in October, says it will produce LEU, LEU+ and HALEU by 2030.