Global Laser Enrichment
Global Laser Enrichment is a USA company active in the nuclear fuel chain as enrichment.
A joint venture of Silex Systems and Cameco holding the only laser enrichment licence anywhere. Its proposed Paducah plant would re-enrich the Department of Energy's depleted uranium tails back to natural grade rather than enrich fresh uranium, which makes it the only serious proposal to treat that stockpile as a resource.
| Headquarters | Wilmington, United States |
|---|---|
| Founded | not recorded |
| Ownership | joint venture |
| Roles in the chain | enrichment |
Position in the chain
Downstream
Enriched uranium from this company feeds fuel fabrication, and from there 373 operating reactors across these types. Heavy water reactors are absent because they run on natural uranium and skip enrichment entirely.
| Reactor type | Operating units |
|---|---|
| Pressurised water reactor | 309 |
| Boiling water reactor | 45 |
| Gas-cooled reactor | 9 |
| Light water graphite reactor | 7 |
| Fast reactor | 2 |
| High-temperature gas reactor | 1 |
Facilities
| Facility | Stage | Country | Capacity / output | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility | enrichment | USA | 6,000tSWU/yr | planned |
Global Laser Enrichment in context
Global Laser Enrichment has 1 facility on record in 1 country (United States): 0 operating and 1 planned, licensing or under construction.
How these are worked out: shares and ranks use the world totals cited in the table, and only named companies are ranked (unnamed or country-level entries in a source are not). A facility with no stated capacity is counted as a facility but adds nothing to a capacity figure. Vendor figures count operating units where this company is the recorded reactor vendor; ages count from the start-up year on record, and build times run from construction start to grid connection, as on the age and build-times pages.
Sources
- Global Laser Enrichment, company source
- Global Nuclear Power Tracker, Global Energy Monitor, August 2026 release , CC BY 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-06
How these sources are used, including the corrections applied on top of them and what is deliberately left blank · download the underlying data