The Department of Energy has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars building out a policy scaffolding for advanced nuclear — loan guarantees, ARDP awards, the ADVANCE Act of 2024 — but the entire edifice rests on a single physical chokepoint: Centrus Energy's American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. That facility houses the only operating U.S. commercial-scale enrichment cascade capable of producing HALEU, the high-assay low-enriched uranium (enriched between 5% and 20% U-235) that next-generation reactor designs require. Without it, the fleet of advanced reactors Washington wants built domestically cannot be fueled domestically.
That single-point dependency is a policy catalyst in the most literal sense — every federal dollar directed at advanced reactors flows through the Piketon cascade whether the appropriators know it or not.