DOE Doubles Down on Domestic Fuel — Four New Companies Selected

On September 30, 2025, the Department of Energy announced its second round of selections under the Fuel Line Pilot Program, naming Oklo Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc., TRISO-X LLC, and Valar Atomics Inc. as conditional selectees, according to Energy.gov.

This builds on DOE's earlier selection of Standard Nuclear for TRISO fuel fabrication. The new round targets fuel supply for the 11 reactors already in DOE's Reactor Pilot Program — the same program aiming to have at least three reactors achieve criticality by July 4, 2026.

Deputy Secretary of Energy James P. Danly was direct about the stakes: "Restoring a secure domestic fuel supply will ensure that advanced reactors can move quickly from design to deployment and into operation."

The four selections include:

• Oklo (Santa Clara, CA) builds three fuel fabrication facilities for its Aurora and Pluto reactors
• Terrestrial Energy (Charlotte, NC) develops a molten salt fuel fabrication process
• TRISO-X (Oak Ridge, TN) adds a pilot-scale integration lab to support its TX-1 commercial facility
• Valar Atomics (Hawthorne, CA) supports TRISO fuel for the Ward250 high-temperature reactor

Valar Atomics is notable here. The company raised $19 million in seed funding in February 2025 to build the Ward250 test reactor at Utah's San Rafael Energy Lab, per Net Zero Insights. Now it has a DOE fuel line selection to match. CEO Isaiah Taylor, 25 years old, is running a 35-person team. That's either impressive or terrifying depending on your risk tolerance.

Antares Goes to Britain for Fuel America Can't Reliably Provide

Antares — described as one of the most advanced microreactor developers in the U.S., with a sodium heat-pipe design and a contract with the Department of the Air Force's Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations program — just signed the world's first multi-year commercial HALEU supply deal. According to ZeroHedge, the supplier is Urenco, a European consortium, using a new enrichment facility in the United Kingdom scheduled to come online in 2031.

Antares CEO Jordan Bramble said plainly: "This partnership ensures that when we scale beyond material allocated by the federal government, we will have commercial supply ready to meet our needs."

Urenco Head of Advanced Fuels Magnus Mori called it "an important milestone in the maturation of this new market."

The U.S. government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars — with billions more pledged — into domestic HALEU suppliers including Centrus. Yet the leading American microreactor developer signed its first long-term commercial fuel deal with a foreign company.

HALEU — High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium — is the single biggest fuel constraint for the entire advanced reactor wave. The American enrichment industrial base has been hollowed out for decades, and throwing government money at it hasn't fixed the timeline fast enough.

Antares is on track to take its first reactor critical prior to July 4th. That's weeks away. They needed fuel certainty. They couldn't get it domestically at commercial scale. So they went to England.

Newcleo: A $2.4 Billion European Entrant With MOX Fuel and a U.S. Angle

Separately, Paris-based Newcleo announced it will merge with NewHold Investment Corp III (Nasdaq: NHIC) in a SPAC deal valuing the company at $2.4 billion, per ZeroHedge.

The deal includes a $220 million PIPE at $10 per share — oversubscribed — plus up to $209 million from the SPAC trust, for potential gross proceeds of $429 million before fees and redemptions. The combined entity targets a Nasdaq listing under ticker NWCL in the second half of 2026.

Newcleo is not a startup in the traditional sense. Founded by Stefano Buono — the man who took Advanced Accelerator Applications public and sold it to Novartis for $3.9 billion in 2018 — the company has already raised $780 million privately, employs 900-plus people across seven countries, and generated roughly $80 million in revenue last year from its supply-chain subsidiaries.

Its technology: a 200 MWe lead-cooled fast reactor burning MOX fuel made from reprocessed nuclear waste. Target for commercial fuel manufacturing: 2031. Pipeline of advanced commercial opportunities: 9.2 GW, including a state-backed Slovak project for up to four units.

The U.S. connection is direct. Newcleo is Oklo's fuel-cycle partner on the DOE's Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program — the deal to convert up to 20 metric tons of Cold War-era weapons plutonium into usable reactor fuel. The two companies signed a strategic partnership last October worth up to 2 billion in combined project scope.

The Fuel Supply Chain's Central Problem

The nuclear fuel supply chain is the central national security problem in the advanced reactor buildout. The DOE selections represent real progress. The Newcleo SPAC represents real capital formation. But the Antares-Urenco deal sends a different signal: America is still years behind on commercial-scale fuel production, and private developers cannot wait for Washington to catch up.

Congress passed the ADVANCE Act. The NRC is modernizing. The Trump administration's DOE is pushing hard. But bureaucratic momentum doesn't fill a fuel assembly.

Until domestic HALEU production reaches commercial scale — currently not expected before the early 2030s at best — every American advanced reactor developer is either rationing government stockpiles or signing deals with Europeans. The gap between policy ambition and industrial capacity remains the constraint driving the sector.