Is Uranium Enrichment Itself the Hard Part?

Scott Nolan says the hard part is not simply doing uranium enrichment. The real challenge is doing it in a way that can scale and stay highly cost competitive, so a United States capability is truly commercial and can compete with Europe, Russia, and China over time.

Nuclear is perceived as incredibly complicated. Fusion is pretty difficult, new physics and new science, but fission has been around for a long time. For reactors, from advanced designs to gigawatt scale, the most interesting question is the cost implication, more than the technology alone. Enrichment has been done before, and a number of countries already do it. The United States built a first-generation technology to win World War II and stay dominant in the Cold War, and supplied over 90% of the world. The specific design and technology were not cost competitive with the European and Russian approaches.

A missing United States producer does not mean the market or the buyers are broken. The history is a path dependency of how the industry got here, and cost is the North Star.