Centrus Signs HALEU Deal With X-energy as Xe-100 Fuel Supply Chain Starts to Form
The commercial supply agreement, which includes prepayments from X-energy, is an early step toward domestic HALEU production at scale for next-generation reactors.
X-energy, Inc. and Centrus Energy Corp. signed a commercial supply agreement on Thursday (2026-08-06) covering both low-enriched uranium and high-assay low-enriched uranium for X-energy's Xe-100 advanced small modular reactor programme, the companies announced jointly.5,4,6
Fuel supply has been one of the persistent choke points on advanced reactor timelines. HALEU, enriched to between 5% and 20% uranium-235 compared with the roughly 4%-5% in conventional light-water reactor fuel, is required by most next-generation US designs but has not been commercially available domestically at scale. The Centrus deal begins to address that gap.6,4
Under the agreement, Centrus will produce the HALEU at its American Centrifuge Plant in Pike County, Ohio. The material will go to TRISO-X, X-energy's fuel subsidiary, which will fabricate TRISO-X-coated particle fuel at its Tennessee campus. The deal includes prepayments from X-energy to Centrus, indicating a firmer financial commitment than a standard offtake letter.6,4
Centrus arrives at the agreement with a substantial existing order book. The company reported a $3 billion contingent LEU and HALEU backlog, of which $2.4 billion is definitized, suggesting demand for the fuel type is accumulating faster than production capacity is being built.4
X-energy has also been moving on the regulatory front. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued an environmental approval for the company's proposed Texas reactor site on Monday (2026-05-18), completing that review in roughly half the time the agency has historically required. The faster timeline reflects directives from both the Biden and Trump administrations to streamline reactor approvals rather than any specific accommodation for X-energy.1
The wider advanced reactor sector has been accumulating technical milestones. Antares Nuclear Inc. reported achieving initial criticality for a TRISO-fuel microreactor, the first under a Trump administration programme to reach that stage.2 Aalo Atomics separately said its design became the fourth US advanced reactor to demonstrate criticality, with plans to deploy 10-megawatt-electric units in 50-MWe configurations targeting AI data centres and to power an on-site data centre by 2027.3
That count exceeded, at least in headline terms, an administration benchmark. A Trump executive order had set a target of at least three advanced reactors reaching criticality by the July 4, 2026 national holiday; the Department of Energy confirmed four designs had done so by the time Aalo's result was reported on Wednesday (2026-07-08). The source material carries two different dates for that executive order, March 23 and May 23, 2025, without clarifying which is correct. That discrepancy is worth resolving given how frequently the order is cited in regulatory and financing contexts as the legal anchor for the administration's nuclear push.2,3
The ambition underlying these efforts, growing US nuclear generating capacity from roughly 100 gigawatts to 400 GW by 2050, requires a pace of construction the country has not managed in decades. The US added essentially no new commercial nuclear capacity for more than a decade after the Vogtle AP1000 project ran massively over cost and schedule. The current SMR and advanced reactor pipeline remains years away from first power.2,3
The X-energy/Centrus deal is a commercial contract rather than a government grant, which distinguishes it from the DOE demonstration awards that have driven much of the sector's recent visibility. But a supply agreement for fuel that has not yet been produced commercially at scale, for a reactor that has not yet broken ground, is a step in a long sequence rather than a conclusion to one.4,6
The URA uranium ETF traded at $45.25 as of 02:52 UTC on August 18, 2026, up 0.98%. X-energy's Texas construction permit application and Centrus's ability to demonstrate actual HALEU output at the volumes implied by the new contract are the next concrete tests of whether the supply chain taking shape on paper can deliver in practice.