John Donelson is the senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Centrus Energy, a supplier of fuel and services to the nuclear power industry.
Geopolitical conflicts have long underscored the hard reality that the United States is vulnerable to energy supply chains in unstable regions. The current turmoil in Iran, and the resulting price shock in oil markets is just the most recent reminder. American consumers are feeling it at the gas pump and their power bills.
Thankfully, the U.S. is the global leader in oil production, but that’s not the case in other parts of our energy supply chain where we are heavily reliant on foreign suppliers. As instability persists across the globe, the U.S. must accelerate investments in secure, domestic energy sources. One especially vulnerable and often overlooked area is nuclear fuel.
Nuclear power provides roughly 20% of America’s electricity. Yet despite its central role, the U.S. has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign, state‑owned suppliers of enriched uranium to fuel our civilian reactors. That dependence is now colliding with geopolitics. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Congress enacted sanctions on Russian uranium — scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2028 — cutting off access to a supplier that today represents nearly half of the world’s enrichment capacity and in recent years has supplied about a quarter of U.S. needs.
Prices are already reflecting the strain. Since early 2022, uranium enrichment prices have nearly tripled and are likely to climb further as the market tightens, which will ultimately flow through to electricity costs for homes and businesses.
Overseeing nuclear fuel sales at Centrus, the only U.S. company that enriches uranium today, I’ve seen firsthand how urgent it is to restore America’s ability to enrich uranium at commercial scale so that we can meet the needs of the nation’s existing nuclear fleet. And that is only the starting point. President Trump has called for quadrupling nuclear energy production by 2050. Meeting that goal will require enormous growth in nuclear fuel supply for decades to come.
But enriched uranium is just one part of the equation. The centrifuges needed to produce that fuel also represent a critical choke point. European-owned enrichment companies, who supply the vast majority of the non-Russian enrichment to the U.S., rely on a single centrifuge manufacturer in Europe to make their centrifuges. This creates a significant supply chain risk at a time when the world needs more resilient infrastructure — not less.
That is why, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Centrus is making a multi-billion-dollar commitment not only to expand the capacity of our uranium enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, but also to rapidly scale centrifuge manufacturing at our factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which uses an exclusively domestic supply chain.
These investments are designed to rebuild capabilities that the U.S. ceded long ago and to reduce reliance on foreign technology. With demand for nuclear set to rise just as Russian imports go away, there is a big hole to fill. No one company can do it alone.
This is just the beginning. Revitalizing America’s enriched uranium supply chain — including not only enrichment but “upstream” steps like uranium mining and uranium conversion as well — won’t happen overnight. It will require sustained focus from industry leaders and policymakers alike.
The recent disruption caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz should prompt every CEO in America to re‑examine their supply chains. Where are the bottlenecks? What happens if a critical supplier becomes inaccessible? And how can solving these vulnerabilities create new economic opportunities?
Nowhere is this self‑assessment more important than in the energy sector, which is the foundation of the entire U.S. economy. As demand continues to rise, ensuring we can reliably and affordably meet the nation’s energy needs is not optional. It is a strategic imperative.
By rebuilding America’s nuclear fuel supply chain, we can reduce geopolitical risk, protect consumers from price shocks and strengthen the nation’s energy independence for generations to come.
