Piketon, Ohio lost thousands of enrichment jobs when its old gaseous diffusion plant shut down decades ago, and residents have watched partial comebacks rise and stall ever since. A fuel deal signed this September gives that comeback its most concrete boost yet.
What Centrus and Radiant Just Signed
Radiant does not have a single commercial reactor running yet, and it just locked up the fuel to run dozens of them. On September 9, Centrus Energy and the California microreactor developer signed a HALEU fuel supply deal, a multi-year contract for the specialized enriched uranium that most next-generation reactor designs need and that no US company currently sells commercially at scale. Deliveries start before the end of the decade. It’s the kind of unglamorous supply-chain agreement that ends up deciding whether an entire generation of small reactors gets built at all.
Why This Fuel Has Been So Hard to Get
High-assay, low-enriched uranium, known as HALEU, is enriched to between 5 and 20 percent uranium-235, well above the roughly 5 percent used in most of today’s commercial reactors. Advanced designs need that higher concentration to run smaller and go longer between refuelings. The catch is that almost nobody makes it in the United States yet. Centrus has been building toward that gap since 2019, when the Department of Energy first funded a demonstration cascade at its American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, with a 2022 contract moving the company into production. Radiant’s new agreement gives Centrus a paying customer to help justify expanding that capacity further, and gives Radiant a contracted source of the one input its reactors cannot run without.
Reactor developers have spent years perfecting designs, running test loops, and clearing regulatory reviews, but fuel has lagged behind all of it. A reactor with no enriched uranium to load is just an expensive steel box. Rita Baranwal, Radiant’s chief nuclear officer, put it plainly: “You can’t deploy nuclear reactors without fuel, so we have approached our fuel supply the same way we have approached the reactor: build it in parallel.”
What Kaleidos Actually Runs On
Radiant’s Kaleidos is a high-temperature, gas-cooled microreactor small enough to ship inside a single shipping container. It uses helium as a coolant, prismatic graphite blocks for its core structure, and TRISO fuel: tiny ceramic-coated uranium particles engineered to survive extreme heat without breaking down. At roughly 3 megawatts thermal, or about 1 megawatt of electricity, Kaleidos is built for remote sites and military bases, not utility-scale grids. Radiant already locked in TRISO fuel fabrication through its Standard Nuclear fuel supply agreement; this new deal secures the enriched uranium feedstock that fabricator needs in the first place, closing the loop from raw material to finished fuel pellet.
Why Piketon, Ohio Should Care
Radiant’s prepayments will help fund a further buildout at Piketon, a project Centrus expects to add roughly 1,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent positions while preserving 150 existing ones. For a town that has spent decades watching its enrichment workforce shrink, that’s not an abstraction. It’s electricians, machinists, and plant operators getting hired for work that uses the same skills their parents used at the old gaseous diffusion plant, on a site that never fully recovered from losing it.
What to Watch Next
Every new enrichment cascade coming online in Ohio chips away at a supply constraint the whole industry has been watching, not just Radiant. For a fuller picture of where US fuel capacity stood heading into this year, see our earlier look at the state of nuclear fuel supply in 2026. Whether other microreactor developers can strike similar deals may end up mattering more than any single design breakthrough.
Full details on the agreement are available from World Nuclear News.