Centrus to supply Oklo with HALEU for up to five reactors

Centrus and Oklo have tied their southern Ohio plans to the one input advanced reactors cannot run without: HALEU. Under a June 18 letter of intent, Centrus would supply enough domestic fuel to power up to five Oklo Aurora powerhouses for multiple years, with deliveries set to begin in 2029.

That puts the deal among the first large-scale commercial HALEU supply agreements and, more importantly for reactor deployment, it tackles the supply gap that has dogged the sector for years. The U.S. Department of Energy created the HALEU Availability Program in 2020 because domestic supply did not exist at commercial scale, and the department has said those gaps could delay advanced reactor deployment. Congress then pushed the issue further in the NDAA of 2024, directing DOE to make at least 21 metric tons of HALEU available to advanced reactor developers by June 2026.

The fuel would come from Centrus’ American Centrifuge Plant in Pike County, Ohio, keeping the center of gravity in the same region where Oklo is trying to build its next phase. Centrus’ Ohio expansion plan, announced in September 2025, projected 1,000 construction jobs and 300 operating jobs, while retaining 127 existing jobs at the Piketon site. Oklo has separately described its own southern Ohio project as a 1.2 GW Clean Energy Campus, and it has an MOU with Kiewit Nuclear Solutions Co. to support engineering, procurement and construction planning for the initial Aurora deployments there. Meta also agreed in January 2026 to back that campus by prepaying for power and funding project certainty.

For Oklo, the timing matters as much as the fuel source. The company’s Aurora powerhouse is a liquid-metal-cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with a maximum power level of 75 MWe. Aurora-INL, the first unit, broke ground at Idaho National Laboratory on September 22, 2025, and Oklo has paired that effort with a power conversion-system contract with Siemens Energy. The design itself builds on the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which operated in Idaho from 1964 to 1994.

The new Centrus agreement does not erase every hurdle, and a definitive contract still has to follow, but it does change the shape of the problem. Fuel, factory base, customer demand and deployment planning are now being lined up in the same supply chain, and for advanced reactors that is the difference between a concept on paper and a path to loading fuel.