Lede. Every advanced reactor the Department of Energy is currently subsidizing — NuScale's SMR-160, Oklo's Aurora, X-energy's Xe-100 — runs on HALEU: uranium enriched to 5-20% U-235, versus the ~4-5% that fuels today's light-water fleet. Russia's Rosatom is the only entity that has ever produced HALEU at commercial scale, and Congress banned Russian enriched uranium imports starting 2028. That leaves the DOE's HALEU Availability Program, created under the Energy Act of 2020, to manually bootstrap a domestic supply chain — and there is exactly one U.S. company licensed by the NRC to actually enrich it. This is a chokepoint trade: it doesn't matter which reactor vendor wins the advanced-nuclear race, because every one of them needs fuel from the same single domestic tap.
Who cashes in: