GLE and Silex announce final EIS for Paducah enrichment facility

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released a final environmental impact statement for Global Laser Enrichment's proposed Paducah Laser Enrichment Facility (PLEF) near Paducah, Ky.

GLE and Silex Systems-the Australian firm that holds 51 percent ownership of GLE and that developed the enrichment technology to be used at the PLEF-announced that the EIS supports the issuance of a license to begin construction work on the facility. GLE completed its application for the license in July 2025.

Although GLE plans for the PLEF to begin operations in 2030, and the release of the final EIS fits within the company's planned timeline, one more step must be completed before the NRC issues the license for the facility's construction and operation: a safety evaluation report (SER) for the facility.

Silex said that it expects the NRC to release the SER before the end of contract year 2026 and to follow with license approval in 2027.

The report and GLE's plans: GLE acquired the 665-acre plot of land where the PLEF will sit in November 2024 and submitted its own environmental report on the site to the NRC as part of the license application process a month later. The location, which is adjacent to the site of the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, is key to GLE's plans.

GLE plans to use Silex's proprietary laser enrichment technology to produce low-enriched uranium and low-enriched uranium plus. In the words of the EIS, the company is seeking an NRC license "to re-enrich depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF₆) tails to natural levels and to enrich natural-grade uranium hexafluoride to a maximum of 8 percent by weight uranium-235."

The tails that would be processed at the PLEF are left over from previous enrichment operations at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which ceased in 2013; they currently are being stored at the site.

The EIS also notes GLE's planned output for the facility. According to the report, GLE applied for a license to cover enrichment of "up to 2,000 metric tons of uranium per year of equivalent natural uranium hexafluoride and 6 million separative work units (SWUs) per year of low-enriched uranium."

The NRC began preliminary work on the EIS in September 2025 and issued a draft of the report for public comment on March 27, 2026. In preparing the EIS, the NRC not only took into consideration such environmental factors as air quality, noise, potential groundwater contamination, and soil structure but also weighed those factors and more against potential costs and benefits of the project.

The EIS found four areas in which construction and operation of the PLEF would have effects that the NRC's environmental review guidance classify as "small" to "medium": surface water, ecology, transportation, and socioeconomics, with the PLEF's possible socioeconomic effects being mostly positive. All other resource categories likely would see small effects, according to the report.

Support in a growing field: GLE has received financial support for the PLEF from government entities at several levels. In March 2026, the commonwealth of Kentucky and the government of Kentucky's McCracken County gave preliminary approval to a performance-based economic incentive package for GLE worth approximately $98.9 million. This followed a January 2026 award of $28.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.

However, GLE was not the only uranium enrichment company to receive funding in the January round of awards from the DOE:

• Orano Federal Services received $900 million to develop new capacity for producing LEU at a gas centrifuge plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
• American Centrifuge Operating received $900 million to add capacity for producing high-assay low-enriched uranium at its gas centrifuge facility in Piketon, Ohio, which to date has produced only demonstration quantities of HALEU for the DOE.
• General Matter received $900 million to build new HALEU production capacity using as-yet undisclosed enrichment technology at a facility it has applied for a license to build near GLE's in Paducah.

The January awards did not extend to other newcomers in the commercial enrichment space, like Nusano and LIS Technologies, nor did they reach Louisiana Energy Services, a subsidiary of Urenco USA and the only commercial uranium enrichment company currently operating in the United States.

Of the companies that did receive awards from the DOE in January 2026, General Matter is of note for also planning to build its enrichment facility near the former site of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. In the environmental report for its own NRC license application, General Matter incorporated parts of the PLEF environmental report, stating that the proximity and similar use of GLE's proposed facility made it a comparable reference.