Nuclear power is quickly emerging as the future of clean energy. And while there’s plenty of buzz around the development of new nuclear reactors, many people don’t realize that fueling those reactors is more complicated than it seems. LIS Technologies is one of the American companies seeking to solve that issue.
To grasp why fueling nuclear reactors is such a major undertaking, it’s important to understand how nuclear fuel is made. Nuclear reactors run on enriched uranium, which has an artificially high concentration of the specific isotope U-235. Natural uranium has less than 1% U-235.
Older reactors and nuclear power plants usually rely on low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is up to 5% U-235. Newer, smaller reactors usually need high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which is up to 20%.
Enriching uranium with centrifuge cascades and other traditional methods can take weeks or months. LIS Technologies, a company based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has developed an ultra-efficient laser-enrichment process.
The company was co-founded by Dr. Jeff Eerkens, widely considered the “father of laser enrichment,” and laser scientist Christo Liebenberg. Its headquarters are near the site of the former K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a massive facility that produced enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project.
LIS Technologies’ laser-enrichment process creates usable enriched uranium in just one or two stages. It takes a fraction of the time (and space) the old K-25 plant required.
“Single-stage means you irradiate the uranium only once, and it’s enriched all the way from natural to the LEU level,” Liebenberg explains. “If you irradiate it a second time, you can go all the way to HALEU, or 20%.”
Liebenberg notes that the science of laser enrichment itself isn’t new. However, LIS Technologies believes it will be the first company to make the technology fully scalable.
“Laser enrichment has been around for 50 years, and no one has been able to successfully scale it, to take it to commercialization,” he says. “Not one out of 26-plus countries. Now we’re using a laser and a process that is very different from what we’ve been using in the past. It’s much more scalable, with significantly higher reliability. With our modular approach, we can now scale the entire process.”
While scaling laser enrichment represents a big leap forward, LIS Technologies and others in the energy sector now face a new challenge: assembling a skilled workforce.
To someone on the outside, laser enrichment sounds simple. But any enrichment facility needs nuclear engineers, laser and optical physicists, vacuum system engineers, controls experts, and other highly specialized professionals.
How does a company like LIS Technologies go about finding qualified candidates? There aren’t many pipelines for training personnel, but the U.S. Navy Nuclear Training Program is one. Technical and community colleges are increasingly offering degrees in nuclear science, and experienced professionals in the chemical and aerospace sectors often have transferable skills.
Liebenberg explains “We are planning to develop a curriculum and use laser enrichment as a case study for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education at school, college, and/or the university level”.
LIS Technologies has some time to put together a skilled workforce. Because of safety and security regulations around nuclear power, it will take a few years before large-scale enrichment facilities can open.
“The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is the watchdog over nuclear safety. That’s why it takes so long, like five years or so, because of the integrated safety analysis and environmental reports,” Liebenberg notes.
“There are a lot of safety-related items that you have to have in place before the NRC will grant you a license. You need a license from the NRC to start anything, even just to do experiments.”
Creating a scalable enrichment solution is a major accomplishment, but LIS Technologies and the U.S. nuclear industry as a whole still face many challenges. From Liebenberg’s point of view, though, there’s plenty of reason for optimism.
“There’s a huge resurrection, a huge resurgence of nuclear power. We are in the middle of a second nuclear age,” he says. “It can be done!”
