HALEU Could Be the Key to Energy Independence — and This U.S. Company Holds the Patent

By Contributor Content  |  July 7, 2025 | 2:24pm
Image credits: LIS Technologies
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HALEU Could Be the Key to Energy Independence — and This U.S. Company Holds the Patent

Nuclear energy in the U.S. is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. As the country moves toward energy independence, manufacturers are working on the next generation of nuclear reactors. Here’s the problem: There’s currently no way to make fuel for those reactors on a large scale. A patent held by LIS Technologies could change that.

This isn’t the first time the country has invested in building its own nuclear supply chain. “The U.S. used to be the world’s biggest producer of enriched uranium,” says Christo Liebenberg, co-founder and CEO of LIS Technologies. “Actually, it started in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the same spot where our new research facility is today.”

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the United States was funding the development of efficient uranium-enrichment processes. One of those was Condensation Repression Isotope Selective Laser Activation (CRISLA), a technology invented by Dr. Jeff Eerkens, the other co-founder of LIS Technologies.

That funding stopped virtually overnight after the fall of the Soviet Union. In an effort to bolster its flagging economy, Russia began flooding the international market with cheap enriched uranium (an essential component of nuclear fuel). It was more cost-effective for the U.S. to purchase enriched uranium from Russia than it was to continue developing its own.

“That sunk many, many technologies,” says Liebenberg,  “It totally destroyed the U.S. nuclear industry, and we became dependent on imported Russian nuclear fuel.”

That arrangement continued until 2024, when the Biden administration banned Russian uranium imports in response to shifting geopolitical tensions. While this decision was necessary to protect our energy security and our national security, it created a sudden vacuum in the fuel supply for the country’s nuclear reactors.

“Now there’s a bottleneck, and the U.S. doesn’t know where to get HALEU [high-assay low-enriched uranium],” says Jay Yu, President of LIS Technologies. “We’re building all these billion-dollar reactors, yet we don’t even have the fuel for them.”

HALEU is a specific type of enriched uranium used to power most modern reactors. It contains up to 20% U-235, the uranium isotope that’s most important for the creation of fuel. Many older reactors run on the less-concentrated low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is up to 5% U-235.

It takes far more resources to create HALEU than it does to create LEU, making it particularly difficult to manufacture on a large scale.

“It’s put up on a pedestal now,” says Yu. “But we have the future answer to this. We have the future fuel.”

Yu isn’t exaggerating. LIS Technologies holds an exclusive patent for advanced laser isotope separation, a sophisticated technology that makes the creation of HALEU efficient and scalable.

Instead of separating U-235 using centrifuges and other time-, labor-, and space-intensive techniques, LIS Technologies uses lasers. With lasers, one can enrich LEU in a single stage and HALEU in two stages.

Liebenberg explains that applying the laser to the uranium once results in LEU. If you take that LEU and irradiate it with the same laser again, you get HALEU.

Laser enrichment as a technology isn’t exactly new. The crucial development here is the fact that the LIS Technologies patent makes the process scalable. Liebenberg notes that while laser enrichment has been around for more than 50 years, no one has been able to successfully scale it. More than 20 countries have tried it since 1971.

The patent could serve the future of nuclear energy in the United States, but LIS Technologies must make it through a rigorous testing and regulatory process before it can start producing HALEU on a commercial scale.

“The NRC [U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission] is the watchdog over nuclear safety,” says Liebenberg. “That’s why it takes so long, like seven years or so, because of the integrated safety analysis and environmental reports. Safety to the environment, equipment, and to humans is very important. Safety and security are the two key steps for the regulator.”

For the first two years, Liebenberg says LIS Technologies will replicate the CRISLA results from 1993. It plans to demonstrate the ability to create LEU in a single stage, and HALEU in two stages. . Then repeat these with scaled equipment. Assuming these activities are completed uneventfully, the company will then move on to building a commercial facility.

But some of the company’s efforts are paying off already. LIS Technologies was recently one of only six recipients to receive a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy under an initiative to boost domestic fuel supply chains while taking nuclear technology forward.

It may still be several years before the new technology becomes commonplace, but the patent alone is exciting news for the national nuclear industry. The U.S. could be headed for a new atomic age, with LIS Technologies at the forefront.

 

The Splinter editorial staff was not involved in the creation of this content.

 
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