The Government Accountability Office has sent Congress a report titled Nuclear Fuel: Actions Needed to Enhance Cost Reporting and Economic Analysis for Federal Uranium Supply Efforts. The document covers National Nuclear Security Administration enriched uranium supply and demand estimates along with Department of Energy work on the commercial front-end fuel cycle.
GAO issued five recommendations. Among them, the agency asked that NNSA report the long-term cost of national security enrichment to Congress and that DOE analyze whether its current actions are sufficient to support domestic enrichment needs. NNSA projects its existing inventory lasting into the 2040s and is pursuing three enrichment efforts estimated at roughly 140 billion dollars through 2105, cost details that Congress has not received.
The report notes that NNSA is downblending excess highly enriched uranium into low enriched uranium to fuel two Tennessee Valley Authority reactors that produce tritium. That downblending is expected to finish by 2027, and unobligated low enriched uranium inventory is considered sufficient to supply the TVA reactors into the early 2040s.
GAO also covers the small centrifuge technology being demonstrated at the pilot plant BWX Technologies is building in Erwin, Tennessee. That facility would first produce limited unobligated low enriched uranium and later shift to highly enriched uranium for naval propulsion. The report separately discusses the DOE-owned, Centrus-operated American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, which cannot produce unobligated material because its centrifuges contain foreign-made parts.
Source: ANS Nuclear Newswire - https://www.ans.org/news/2026-08-25/article-8336/gao-report-analyzes-nuclear-fuel-efforts-in-national-security-and-commercial-sectors/