Urenco USA plans $billions expansion of New Mexico uranium enrichment plant
Urenco USA will add 2.1 million SWU at Eunice, lifting the only U.S. enrichment plant past 7 million SWU by the mid-2030s.
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Urenco USA said it will spend billions of dollars to expand its Eunice, New Mexico, enrichment plant by nearly 50 percent, with construction set to begin in 2029 and first low-enriched uranium output due in 2032. For a fuel cycle that often gets discussed in abstractions, the milestone is concrete: more centrifuges, more separative work units, and more reactor fuel moving through the only commercial uranium enrichment plant in the United States.
That is why the project matters well beyond southeastern New Mexico. Uranium has to be mined, converted and enriched before it can become fuel pellets, then fuel assemblies, then electricity in a reactor core. Enrichment is the choke point in that chain, and Urenco’s Eunice site sits at the center of it. The company said the new plant would add 2.1 million SWU of capacity using its gas-centrifuge technology, while refurbishment of existing equipment is scheduled to start in 2027. Taken together, those investments would push installed capacity at the site to more than 7 million SWU over the next decade.
The timing also tells the story. Urenco has long emphasized that enrichment is a business built on long-lived contracts, and the new expansion is underpinned by commitments from U.S. nuclear utilities. That matters because a centrifuge plant is not a quick build. It takes years between a customer booking capacity and a kilogram of enriched product reaching a reactor operator’s supply chain. The company said the new cascades would come online in stages, with additional capacity rolling through 2036.
Urenco is not starting from zero. In the current expansion program, the company began production in a new cascade in 2025 and said it had reached the halfway point in 2026, with 350,000 SWU installed in the previous year. That ongoing effort is adding 700,000 SWU between 2025 and 2027, a 15 percent increase from a prior capacity of about 4.3 million SWU. Urenco has said the Eunice plant can meet about one-third of the enrichment needs of U.S. commercial nuclear power plants.
The new build is the cleaner fit for conventional light-water reactors, which still generate nearly 20 percent of U.S. electricity and need low-enriched uranium today. It also helps the broader effort to rebuild domestic fuel security as utilities look for non-Russian supply. For advanced reactor developers, the benefit is more indirect: Urenco has said LEU+ from the site can serve as feedstock for future HALEU production, but the new plant itself is still an LEU machine, not a HALEU line. That leaves the industry with a real step forward, and a clear reminder of what still has to be built after the enrichment bottleneck starts to widen.
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