Actinide Inc. Becomes First Startup to Produce HALEU, Using a Revived Manhattan-Era Technology
Actinide Inc., a Dallas-based advanced materials company, announced on August 26, 2026 that it has produced high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) — the first startup in history to do so. An independent laboratory accredited under ISO/IEC 17025 verified the material at 15.38% uranium-235 enrichment, placing it within the U.S. legal definition of HALEU: uranium containing more than 5% but less than 20% U-235. (Natural uranium is roughly 0.7% U-235; the fuel in today's commercial reactors is enriched to 3–5%.)
The enrichment was carried out on Actinide's first-generation calutron — an electromagnetic isotope-separation machine the company designed, built, and operates in-house. A calutron works by passing ionized atoms through a magnetic field; because lighter isotopes deflect more than heavier ones, the machine can sort atoms by mass and collect the desired isotope. Weeks before the HALEU announcement, the same calutron was producing enriched ytterbium-176, delivered to Oklo Isotopes. The company's co-founders are CEO Eric Olszewski and CTO Robert Mendelsohn.
Production was carried out in research quantities under a laboratory-scale exclusion in Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations, specifically 10 CFR part 70.4. The material would still need to be fabricated into rods, pellets, or particles before any reactor could use it as fuel.
Calutrons are an old technology with a specific American history. The United States built them at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project to help produce the uranium for the first atomic bombs, and continued operating some to supply stable isotopes for medicine, industry, and research until 1998. The U.S. government has since rebuilt and is expanding federal electromagnetic-separation capacity, but that capability has remained concentrated inside the government. Actinide's claim to being the first startup to enrich uranium rests on the fact that every prior calutron operator in the U.S. has been a federal entity.
Actinide is already developing Fortitude, its second-generation separator. According to the company's engineering estimates, Fortitude would provide roughly half the isotope-separation capacity of the U.S. government's current electromagnetic fleet. That figure is an internal projection, not a measured result.
The announcement lands in a supply gap that the Department of Energy has flagged repeatedly. The DOE states that most advanced reactor designs require HALEU and that zero is currently available from domestic suppliers. In 2025, 77% of enrichment services purchased by U.S. civilian reactor owners came from foreign sources, including 26% from Russia, compared with 23% from American sources.
Prior to Actinide's announcement, the only domestic HALEU production came from Centrus Energy Corp, which produced the nation's first 20 kilograms of HALEU at a DOE-funded demonstration cascade in Pikton, Ohio, with NRC authorization. HALEU Energy Fuel Inc., a subsidiary of NANO Nuclear Energy Inc., is also pursuing HALEU development and manufacturing but has not reported production. The DOE separately contracted six companies in 2024 to build out HALEU deconversion capacity — the downstream step of converting enriched uranium hexafluoride into reactor-ready forms.
The broader context is that HALEU is the gating fuel input for nearly every advanced reactor design under serious development in the United States. Gas-cooled reactors, sodium-cooled fast reactors, and molten-salt designs all assume enrichment levels that the current commercial infrastructure, optimized for low-enriched uranium at 3–5%, is not configured to produce at scale. The DOE's own assessment that zero HALEU is available from domestic suppliers underscores how early the supply chain remains. Actinide's laboratory-scale production does not close that gap, but it does show that a private company can build and operate the separation hardware outside the federal apparatus.
It is worth flagging the distinction between enrichment and fuel cycle readiness. Actinide has produced enriched material in research quantities under a regulatory exclusion. Scaling to commercial HALEU production would require a full NRC license under 10 CFR Part 70, a process that typically spans years. The material still needs deconversion and fabrication before it enters a reactor core. The DOE's 2024 deconversion contracts suggest the government is working the downstream problem in parallel, but the full chain from natural uranium to fabricated HALEU fuel does not yet exist in the private sector.
The calutron approach is also worth examining on its technical merits. Electromagnetic separation is energy-intensive and comparatively low-throughput compared with gas centrifuge enrichment, which is why centrifuges displaced calutrons for commercial uranium enrichment decades ago. Gas centrifuges spin uranium hexafluoride gas at extremely high speeds, separating isotopes by the slight difference in their mass; the process is far more efficient for bulk enrichment. Actinide's bet is that calutron technology, built and operated with modern engineering, can be economical for isotope separation broadly, with HALEU as one application among several. The earlier ytterbium-176 production suggests the company is already generating revenue from stable isotope enrichment, which could fund the longer path to nuclear fuel cycle participation.
Actinide's Fortitude separator, if its engineering estimates hold, would materially expand private-sector electromagnetic separation capacity. The company's press contact is press@actinideinc.com.
