MANY MINDEDLaser enrichment aims to turn stranded uranium waste into reactor fuel
Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is developing laser technology to reprocess uranium waste stored in cylinders near a closed facility at Paducah, Kentucky. Under a contract with the US Department of Energy, GLE would take material with at least 0.25% U-235 and enrich it up to about 0.7% — the level of natural uranium — turning waste into feedstock. The Paducah site could hold up to 200,000 metric tons of material. GLE completed a demonstration pilot in fall 2025, processing several hundred kilograms.
Enrichment is the bottleneck between raw uranium and reactor fuel. Natural uranium is over 99% U-238 and only about 0.7% U-235; conventional reactors need roughly 5%, and some advanced designs up to 20%. Centrifuges dominate today. GLE says a full-scale laser plant would use fewer than a thousand units, against thousands of centrifuges — a claim about lower cost, footprint, and energy use.
Why it moves abundance: nuclear supplies about 9% of global electricity, and fuel supply is a real constraint on expanding it. Recovering usable material from waste already sitting in storage would add fuel without new mining, which bears on both the cost and the pace of low-carbon baseload power.
The caveats are large. GLE's specific technology is classified and officials declined to explain it, so the efficiency claims can't be independently checked. The work remains at demonstration and licensing stages. A separate firm, LIS Technologies, founded in 2023, has bought a 200-acre Oak Ridge site and is in NRC pre-application.
Source: MIT Tech Review