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Urenco

Urenco

🇬🇧 London, GB · Founded 1971 · Active

Urenco is a uranium enrichment company set up in 1970 to 1971 under the Treaty of Almelo and headquartered in London. It is owned in equal thirds by the UK government, the Dutch government and the German utilities E.ON and RWE. It enriches customers' uranium in gas centrifuges at Capenhurst (UK), Almelo (Netherlands), Gronau (Germany) and Eunice, New Mexico (US), and had capacity of 17,200 tonnes of separative work a year at the end of 2025. It plans to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched up to 20% uranium-235, at Capenhurst for advanced reactors. It co-owns the centrifuge maker Enrichment Technology Company with Orano and runs a stable-isotope business, Urenco Isotopes.

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Sector
Fuel cycle
Fuel
Low-enriched uranium, High-assay low-enriched uranium
Role
Supplier

Terms

Low-enriched uranium
Uranium enriched to 5% uranium-235 or less, typically 3 to 5%: the range almost all power reactors use. Formally, anything below 20% is low-enriched; this site holds the band from 5% to just under 20% separately as HALEU, with its 5 to 10% part also tagged as LEU+. A fuel above 5% uranium-235 belongs in one of those, never here, whatever a developer's own materials call it.
High-assay low-enriched uranium
High-assay low-enriched uranium: uranium enriched to between 5% and just under 20% uranium-235, as the US Department of Energy defines it. It is still formally low-enriched, because the international line for highly enriched uranium is 20%, which is why many designs specify 19.75%. The binding supply constraint for many advanced reactor designs. The 5 to 10% part, which carries lighter US physical-security requirements than material from 10% up, is also tagged as LEU+. A developer calling fuel in that band 'LEU' is making a labelling choice, not describing a different enrichment.
Enrichment
Raising the fissile fraction of uranium. The chokepoint of the fission fuel cycle, and the step with the heaviest non-proliferation constraints.

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