Laser uranium enrichment is moving from a long-running nuclear engineering idea toward a commercial test at an old uranium site near Paducah, Kentucky. Global Laser Enrichment, or GLE, plans to use lasers to reprocess thousands of cylinders of uranium-bearing waste from a closed enrichment facility, turning material now sitting in storage into feedstock that could replace freshly mined uranium in the fuel supply chain.
The company has a contract with the US Department of Energy to work on waste at the Paducah site. GLE says the facility could process as much as 200,000 metric tons of material left over from older enrichment work. The initial target is modest: take material containing at least 0.25% uranium-235 and raise it to about 0.7%, roughly the concentration found in natural uranium.
Nima Ashkeboussi, GLE’s vice president of government relations and communications, described the stockpile as “a large aboveground uranium mine” for the company.
The timing matters because nuclear fuel supply has become a geopolitical problem as well as an engineering one. Nuclear power supplies about 9% of global electricity, and countries including the US and China are pursuing new reactors. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US, UK and others have moved to restrict or ban Russian uranium imports. Charles Forsberg, a principal research scientist in nuclear science and engineering at MIT, said Russia’s long dominance of enrichment had discouraged new Western enrichment plants.
How does laser uranium enrichment work?
Uranium mined from the ground is mostly uranium-238, with uranium-235 making up about 0.7%. Reactors need more U-235 because that isotope can sustain the fission chain reaction used to generate electricity. Conventional reactors generally use low-enriched uranium at about 5% U-235, while some advanced reactor designs are expected to use fuel enriched up to 20%.
Most enrichment today is done with centrifuges. They spin uranium-containing material at high speed so the slightly heavier U-238-rich material moves outward and the U-235-rich material can be separated closer to the center.
Laser enrichment uses a different trick. Isotopes and molecules have slightly different atomic-scale behaviors, so a tuned laser can add energy to a selected target, such as material containing U-235. That change can make the target easier to separate through chemical, physical, electrostatic or magnetic methods. GLE’s exact method remains classified, and company officials did not disclose how its process performs the separation.
GLE chief executive Stephen Long said the company’s units are more complex and more expensive than individual centrifuges, but a plant would need fewer of them. Long said a comparable centrifuge plant would require many thousands of centrifuges, while a full-scale GLE plant would use fewer than a thousand laser-enrichment units. He also said the approach should require less up-front investment and lower operating costs, partly because it uses less energy.
Those claims still need a commercial plant behind them. GLE operates a test site in Wilmington, North Carolina, and completed a demonstration pilot in fall 2025 that processed several hundred kilograms of uranium. The company has decommissioned that system and is building another demonstration at the North Carolina facility intended to show commercial-scale operation.
GLE has also applied to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license for the Paducah project. Long said the final safety evaluation is expected in November, with final approval expected in 2027. The company plans to begin processing material at Paducah by 2030.
Other companies are chasing the same supply gap. LIS Technologies, founded in 2023, bought a 200-acre site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and is in the NRC pre-application process. President Christo Liebenberg said demand is rising as buyers look beyond Russia. LIS plans to enrich natural-grade uranium to about 5% U-235 and later hopes to make higher-assay material for next-generation reactors.
Stephen Greene, a senior fellow at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, said laser enrichment plants may prove cheaper than current systems. His caveat is the one that matters: the economics remain unproven until someone builds one.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.
