This is highly dangerous, right? If a bad actor possess centrifuge technology and can divert this This severely reduces the "breakout time" the international community relies on to detect and stop nuclear proliferation.
Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
71–80 of 98 posts
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#72So this is basically a calutron... a huge mass spectrometer. 1940s technology, upgraded with state-of-the-now control systems, and electromagnets. A formidable engineering work, but more of a breakthrough from legislation and compliance perspective possibly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron
IIRC Calutron's were basically abandoned because they were massively inefficient compared to gaseous diffusion and, particularly, centrifuges. What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors? Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?
> What has changed here to make them competitive again?
Nothing. This is a company that specializes in making medical isotopes, which is something Calutrons are good for - you need high levels of enrichment in a single step, you don't need to process large quantities, and the energy consumption doesn't matter. Any talk of using it for reactor fuel production is pure PR spin.
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC Calutron's were basically abandoned because they were massively inefficient compared to gaseous diffusion and, particularly, centrifuges. What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors? Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?
They talk about that in the article: >"A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed," said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide.
The obvious thing to consider is throughput and yield/loss. A centrifuge plant can produce kilograms of material and doesn’t fundamentally misplace any material, although it may struggle to extract all the inputs that are the correct isotope. A calutron needs to ionize every single atom, accelerate it to an appropriate energy, deflect it, and decelerate it without losing it. And it needs to deal with inadvertently multiply-charged ions. And if you’re dealing with radioactive source material, you need to deal with the atoms that embed themselves in your apparatus.
At least uranium isn’t actually all that radioactive.
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#74This is highly dangerous, right? If a bad actor possess centrifuge technology and can divert this This severely reduces the "breakout time" the international community relies on to detect and stop nuclear proliferation.
Centrifuge and nuclear technology is not some latest and greatest super complicated and barely understood technology with hard to source components anymore. Old restrictions like ball bearings quality on export and such are basically meaningless today. You can buy common tooling today from China that would trounce anything people were using 60 years ago and nobody has stopped people from studying and researching nuclear technologies.
It is mostly a matter of money and international politics now. It takes a significant amount of money to build and power, and it is hard to hide the scale of building and power usage from international watchdogs. Because nothing consumes tons of energy and doesn't output tons of product to sell except for nuclear material refinement for weapons.
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pantex is outside Amarillo, that's where all the US's nukes come from. If Texas wanted nukes ( well more nukes actually ) they'd juts place an order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex
Pantex doesn't power a panopticon, nor does it threaten my livelihood.
Since I got downvoted for posting that, I'll also add that Pantex doesn't cause a sudden and massive spike in electricity usage, with the potential for related costs to be socialized into my bill.
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#76This is highly dangerous, right? If a bad actor possess centrifuge technology and can divert this This severely reduces the "breakout time" the international community relies on to detect and stop nuclear proliferation.
If the bad actor has centrifuge technology and access to low enriched uranium, they are already weeks away from achieving weapons grade material. If a country with Iran's enrichment capabilities had a sufficient LEU stockpile swapped for an equivalent amount of HALEU, it would shave about 7 days off the time necessary to produce a bomb's worth of weapons grade uranium.
For nations with enrichment capabilities, enrichment is not a major contributor to overall breakout time. Enrichment doesn't take much time, it's building enrichment facilities that takes a while, especially clandestinely.
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#77This is highly dangerous, right? If a bad actor possess centrifuge technology and can divert this This severely reduces the "breakout time" the international community relies on to detect and stop nuclear proliferation.
Centrifuge and nuclear technology is not some latest and greatest super complicated and barely understood technology with hard to source components anymore. Old restrictions like ball bearings quality on export and such are basically meaningless today. You can buy common tooling today from China that would trounce anything people were using 60 years ago and nobody has stopped people from studying and researching nucl…
> it is hard to hide the scale of building and power usage from international watchdogs. Because nothing consumes tons of energy and doesn't output tons of product to sell except for nuclear material refinement for weapons.
Until datacenters
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we wanted to find out what an LLM thought we'd ask the LLM. Don't be a meat proxy. https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
But you weren't going to ask the LLM, and now you know something you weren't aware of. Seems no different than someone reporting what they found out in a Google Search, as long as they disclose that they used an LLM (as long as they used one that actually searches the web, but pretty sure even ChatGPT Free does that these days).
One of the more annoying pre-llm behaviours was responding with the first link of google when a question was asked (but not of them specifically).
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC Calutron's were basically abandoned because they were massively inefficient compared to gaseous diffusion and, particularly, centrifuges. What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors? Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?
They talk about that in the article: >"A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed," said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide.
This is a bit uncharitable to the concept of a centrifuge here. The Iranian nuclear program seems to have centrifuges that are a lot smaller and cheaper, and you can certainly build one that meets these needs.
Re: Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)
#80So this is basically a calutron... a huge mass spectrometer. 1940s technology, upgraded with state-of-the-now control systems, and electromagnets. A formidable engineering work, but more of a breakthrough from legislation and compliance perspective possibly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron
IIRC Calutron's were basically abandoned because they were massively inefficient compared to gaseous diffusion and, particularly, centrifuges. What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors? Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?
> What has changed here to make them competitive again?
The article has to be read carefully. "On Actinide's engineering estimates, a single Fortitude machine would provide roughly half the isotope-separation capacity of the U.S. government's current electromagnetic fleet."
The "U.S. government's current electromagnetic fleet" is tiny. Oak Ridge is building a modest plant.[1] Idaho has a benchtop-sized separator. That's what Actinide is comparing against. Not the rows of basketball court sized calutrons from WWII. So the announcement gives the impression of a larger operation than it really is.
> Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?
That is a very good question. A company called Silex, and their subsidiary Global Laser Enrichment, has been trying to commercialize this for years.[3][4] Exactly how they do this is classified.[5]
There's another startup in this area, crawling along, underfunded, but building something.[6]
Meanwhile, URENCO continues to operate a centrifuge plant in New Mexico.[7] URENCO is a a European company, and seems to be the leader in centifuge technology. Units in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US.
I've been expecting something big to happen in the laser enrichment area since the 1990s, but it never has. This suggest that it either doesn't work very well or is being suppressed because it works too well.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/doe-expands-stable-i...
[2] https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/content/uploads/50/2026/04...