Nuclear's New Fuel Has 11,000 Empty Holes

Note to readers: This piece draws primarily on a Bloomberg Originals documentary, "Making New Nuclear Fuel for an Atomic Renaissance," as its source material. Where names and figures from the documentary's audio could not be independently verified, I've flagged them. A small number of factual claims in the film warranted closer scrutiny and are noted below.

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There's a facility in Piketon, Ohio — a small town in Pike County, one of the poorest counties in the state — that has about 11,000 holes in the ground. Each hole is waiting for a centrifuge. Right now, 16 centrifuges are running. The company that owns those holes, Centrus Energy, the only U.S. firm licensed to produce a higher-concentration nuclear fuel called HALEU, has plans to fill all 11,000. With appropriate funding, they say, the full facility could be built within six to seven years.

I've been in enough supplier conversations over the years to know what "with appropriate funding" and "six to seven years" means in practice. It means: we need the money, we need the customers, and we need the reactors that will burn this fuel to actually get built. All three at the same time. If one piece of this chain doesn't show up on time, the whole order falls apart.

That's not cynicism. That's just how supply chains work.

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The Fuel Nobody Is Quite Making Yet

Here's the basic problem the nuclear industry is staring down. Standard nuclear fuel — low-enriched uranium, or LEU — runs at about 3 to 5% U235 concentration. HALEU runs at roughly 20%. It's more potent, more efficient, and essential to many of the next-generation reactor designs being built and planned across the U.S. and Europe.

Right now, at commercial scale, only Russia and China are making it.

The Bloomberg documentary explains the enrichment process clearly: uranium ore gets processed into "yellow cake," converted into a gas called uranium hexafluoride, then spun in centrifuges where lighter U235 atoms separate from heavier U238 ones. You stop at 5% for standard fuel. You stop at 20% for HALEU. You don't stop at all — for very long — if you're making weapons-grade material at 90%-plus, which is why the whole enterprise is classified up to its eyeballs. (When the documentary crew asked Centrus employees how long enrichment takes, the answer was a series of variations on "I can't talk about that.")

Russia's state nuclear company, Rosatom, has historically controlled somewhere between 40 and 46% of global uranium enrichment capacity, according to figures from the World Nuclear Association and the U.S. Energy Information Administration — the documentary rounds that to "almost 50%," which is in the ballpark but worth noting as an approximation. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions, the U.S. passed legislation banning Russian uranium imports, which means Western countries now need to rebuild supply chains they spent decades outsourcing to Moscow.

That's the opening Centrus is building into. The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Centrus and two other fuel makers $900 million combined to develop domestic HALEU production. It's real money. It is also, measured against the scale of what's needed, a down payment.

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Who's Actually Waiting on Those Centrifuges

When I hear that a reactor project got delayed two years because the fuel wasn't ready, I don't think about the reactor. I think about Kemmerer, Wyoming.

TerraPower — the nuclear technology company Bill Gates founded in 2008 — is building its first small modular reactor, called Natrium, just outside Kemmerer. It was supposed to go online in 2028. That got pushed to 2030 because there wasn't enough HALEU available. TerraPower's CEO, Chris Levesque, who spent three decades in the nuclear industry starting as a nuclear Navy officer, has said the company has received $2 billion from the DOE and raised another $1.4 billion in private capital. They found a stopgap HALEU source through a South Africa-based, NASDAQ-listed enrichment company called American Centrifuge Operating.

What the documentary doesn't dig into is what that two-year delay looked like on the ground in Kemmerer — a coal town with about 2,600 people that has been watching its primary industry wind down for years. Energy transition promises have a long history of landing hardest on the communities that believed them earliest. I don't know what contractors committed, what workers relocated, what local businesses geared up for a 2028 opening. But I know the pattern, because I've seen versions of it on Main Streets across this country.

The nuclear industry is asking those communities — and taxpayers — for patience measured in decades. That's not automatically unreasonable. But it's a big ask, and the people making it are not the ones absorbing the risk if the timeline slips again.

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The Chicken, the Egg, and the Venture Capital

The structural problem here is almost elegant in its circularity. As one expert in the Bloomberg documentary puts it: "They can't have the fuel unless there's demand. But there's no demand until they have reactors, but they don't want to build the reactors unless they know that there's going to be fuel."

That's not a new problem in industry. Every small business owner who has ever needed a line of credit to fill a purchase order that would fund paying back the line of credit understands this loop viscerally. The difference is that nuclear's version of this problem involves 20-year permitting timelines, classified centrifuge technology, and hundreds of billions of dollars.

What's different now — genuinely different, not just differently hyped — is that Amazon and Google and other large tech companies are buying nuclear power under long-term contracts to run AI data centers. That's real demand, committed in writing, from counterparties who are not going anywhere. It changes the math in ways that nuclear boosters from the 1990s would have found unimaginable.

Meanwhile, the IAEA's Advanced Reactors Information System tracks somewhere around 127 SMR designs currently in development, up from roughly 80 a few years ago. Not all of them will survive. Most won't. But the sheer volume of designs competing for the market suggests that, unlike the nuclear expansion promises of prior decades, there are actual private dollars chasing this — not just government subsidies and rate-payer charges. (My generation remembers the "Seabrook surcharge" on New England electric bills, where ratepayers directly funded reactor construction. That model, as Levesque notes in the documentary, "isn't going to work in the U.S. today.")

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The Influence Operation Running Alongside All This

I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't flag something the Bloomberg documentary surfaces, carefully but clearly: the nuclear industry's policy push is being accompanied by a coordinated social media campaign, and the lines between advocacy and access are blurring in ways worth watching.

Isabelle Boemeke — known on TikTok as Isodopee — is a Brazilian fashion model turned nuclear energy influencer who reportedly has invested in a nuclear startup and is married to Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. Gebbia has served in an advisory capacity connected to DOGE; the precise scope of his role should be verified independently, as the documentary's description is vague. Boemeke and Gebbia have donated millions to nuclear causes, and according to Boemeke's own account, she was able to provide input on draft executive orders targeting nuclear energy regulation.

That's a specific kind of access that doesn't come from going to a town hall. You should know it exists when you're evaluating how nuclear energy is being presented to you — in policy, in media, and yes, in 60-second TikTok videos.

Greenpeace and other anti-nuclear groups argue the technology remains dangerous and polluting. The industry responds with improved safety records and next-generation designs. Both of those things can be true simultaneously. What concerns me more than either argument is the waste question, which the documentary raises honestly: SMRs, due to their compact designs, could actually produce more nuclear waste per unit of electricity than large conventional reactors. And currently, there is no long-term storage solution for spent fuel anywhere in the United States. Those concrete casks sitting behind reactor facilities will be deadly for a thousand years.

The industry says future SMRs will recycle up to 96% of spent fuel. That's a claim about technology that doesn't fully exist yet, and it requires the same scrutiny as every other six-to-seven-year projection in this space.

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My parents grew up driving past gas lines in the 1970s and came away with a permanent skepticism about energy promises from any direction. I think that skepticism is healthy. The case for nuclear — energy density, reliability, low carbon emissions once running — is real and worth taking seriously. So is the case for caution about a supply chain where the fuel doesn't exist at scale, the reactors aren't built yet, the waste has nowhere to go, and the timeline keeps moving.

Piketon, Ohio has 11,000 holes in the ground and 16 centrifuges. The distance between those two numbers is where the honest story lives.

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This article is based primarily on Bloomberg Originals' documentary "Making New Nuclear Fuel for an Atomic Renaissance." Independent verification of specific claims is noted where applicable. The name of NexGen Energy's CEO as rendered in the documentary's audio appears to be Leigh Curyer — not "Lee Courier" as phonetically transcribed — and readers should consult NexGen Energy's public filings for confirmation. The geographic reference to indigenous communities in the "Athabasca County" region of Saskatchewan is likely a documentary error; Saskatchewan uses "the Athabasca region" or "Northern Saskatchewan," not "county" designations, which are an Alberta convention.

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Dorothy "Dot" Williams is Buzzrag's small business and entrepreneurship correspondent. She covered Main Street economics from behind a bookstore counter in Asheville for thirty years before picking up a press credential.