Western States Brace for a Uranium Boom as the Nation Looks to Recharge its Nuclear Power Industry

After years of federal efforts to revive nuclear power, old mines are stirring again in Wyoming, Texas and Arizona, while new ones line up for permitting expedited by a Trump executive order.

BAIROIL, Wyo.—The remote dirt road through dusty fields of sagebrush that John Cash drove along in June seemed to pass little of economic value. But his car was, in fact, rattling towards the top-producing uranium mine in Wyoming. 

In 2022, the Lost Creek Mine became the first of several such sites across the West to restart operations as the U.S. scrambles to reestablish a domestic supply chain for nuclear fuel. 

Cash, the CEO of UR Energy, which operates the Lost Creek Mine, believes more mines will come online in the years ahead.

“This [area] is loaded with uranium,” he said amid the vast, arid expanse of Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin. “I promise you right now, if I drilled a hole right here, we would hit uranium.”

Newly revived mines are also humming in Texas and Arizona, their owners hopeful that a boom in demand lies ahead. Ten uranium mines operate in the country today, up from three in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency. Company announcements and public records show dozens of others on standby for reopening or queued up for permitting in Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, with at least four currently fast-tracked for approval under recent executive orders. 

“We’re right at the edge of a good little uranium mining boom,” said Travis Deti, executive director of the Wyoming Mining Association. “We’ve been off the playing field for decades on some of this stuff.”

For more than a generation, many of these sites sat dormant, stifled by a cheaper imported supply and modest demand from a stagnant nuclear power sector. However, uranium markets have recently re-awakened: Spot prices doubled between 2022 and 2024, driven by global supply chain disruptions, geopolitical tension and lofty expectations for a renaissance of American atomic power. 

Lately, a buzzing landscape of nuclear startups has stirred excitement with announcements of ambitious plans for advanced reactors to power artificial intelligence and other heavy industries across the country. But almost all of these companies are waiting for the U.S. to rebuild a nuclear fuel supply chain before they can even power up their prototype units. 

“Expectations for uranium demand have been growing,” said William Freebairn, an associate editorial director at S&P Global Commodity Insights. “But this kind of demand is slow to show up.”

Investor appetite for uranium started to increase around 2022, he said, “as climate concerns became more prominent.” Uranium is processed and enriched into nuclear fuel that provides abundant energy without carbon emissions, although it poses other significant health and safety risks. 

Presidential administrations since Barack Obama’s have pushed to increase domestic production of uranium fuel to supply the national nuclear sector, but that goal remains years away. President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders this year to streamline permitting, expedite environmental reviews and impose tariffs on imports that compete with American products. 

Despite the recent activity, the U.S. still has a long way to go before it could even come close to meeting its nuclear needs with uranium from domestic mines, Freebairn said. 

Unlike pit mines, which scrape away acres of earth, most modern uranium extraction projects drill hundreds of wells, inject them with solvents and suck up the mineral slurry they create. This method has a much lighter impact on the surface but can contaminate or deplete freshwater aquifers if improperly managed. 

In Wyoming, several hundred wells churn out a modest 28,000 pounds of uranium oxide per month at the Lost Creek mine. The site has the capacity to produce more than 2 million pounds per day, according to UR Energy, but uranium miners are still waiting for the development of a domestic nuclear supply chain before ramping up production.

Supply Chain Bottleneck 

For now, American uranium production remains a dribble. Despite recent steep increases, total output in 2024 was less than 2 percent of the country’s peak production in 1981. The U.S. lacks the infrastructure to transform uranium oxide concentrate, known in the industry as “yellowcake,” into the uranium hexafluoride gas used for enrichment. About 99 percent of the feedstock consumed by U.S. power plants is imported, and much of that uranium is enriched in Russia, despite the prohibition on importing Russian uranium then President Joe Biden signed in May 2024. The ban doesn’t fully go into effect until 2028.

“Uranium mining, uranium processing and uranium enrichment have all largely been offshored because they could do it cheaper,” said Rusty Towell, director of the Nuclear Energy Experimental Testing Laboratory at Abilene Christian University. “That whole supply chain was weakened.”

In the U.S., just one commercial plant converts uranium into the gaseous form required for enrichment and only one commercial plant enriches that gas into nuclear fuel at the scale required to fuel power plants. No facility can produce significant volumes of the higher-grade fuel used by new reactor designs—High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, or HALEU. That also comes primarily from Russia, though the Department of Energy has posted billions in grant funding for private-sector enrichment projects in the U.S. 

“The U.S. [government] is moving very fast on this,” said James Walker, CEO of a startup called Nano Nuclear Energy and a former nuclear engineer at the U.K. Ministry of Defense. “Now the pressure is on everybody to ramp up as fast as they can.”

A whole cluster of advanced nuclear startups like Nano eagerly awaits the availability of American HALEU to begin testing their reactors, and they’ll purchase the new enrichment facilities’ product as soon as it becomes available, Walker said. 

However, even a booming domestic market for nuclear fuel doesn’t guarantee that American uranium miners will supply the needed raw material. New enrichment projects could continue to import uranium mined overseas—but government policies are making that harder, including with the Biden administration’s ban on imports of Russian uranium.

“We are making investments to build out a secure nuclear fuel supply chain here in the United States,” the announcement of that ban stated.

This year, Trump imposed tariffs on imports from 70 countries, including the top uranium producers: Kazakhstan, Canada and Namibia. 

“As long as we’re keeping that foreign uranium from coming in, then I think there is hope for domestic production,” said Brent Elliott, a geologist with the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas. But if “we can get it cheaper somewhere else, then that will more likely be the case.”

Cover photo: By ICN