HALEU
High-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched above conventional reactor fuel and required by many advanced reactor designs.
HALEU is uranium enriched to between roughly five and twenty percent uranium-235, above the level used in the operating light-water fleet and below the threshold conventionally treated as highly enriched. A significant share of advanced reactor designs, including several SMR concepts, require it to achieve their intended core life and power density.
Its supply is narrower than the reactor programmes that depend on it. Enrichment capacity at this assay, the deconversion and fuel fabrication steps behind it, and the certified transport packages needed to move it are each held by a small number of qualified operators, and each of them has its own licensing timeline. A reactor design that is otherwise ready can be waiting on any one of them.
This makes it a useful illustration of a general point about supply modelling: the constraint on a programme frequently sits in a step nobody lists as part of the product. Tracking it means tracking enrichment capacity, fabrication qualification and transport certification as separate entities with their own provenance, rather than as a single line item called fuel.
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