Energy News Beat Podcast Sep 19, 2026 37m 18m saved
With Christo Liebenberg, President, Co-Founder and CTO of LIS Technologies
The United States runs one commercial uranium enrichment plant, a European company owns it, and it makes 4.3 million separative work units a year. That covers about a third of what American reactors consume.
Laser enrichment has been the proposed answer to that since 1971. Christo Liebenberg said 26 countries have tried it in the 55 years since, and not one of them finished a commercial plant.
"We literally have to rebuild the entire nuclear industry if we want to meet the targets and the goals of 2050."
Liebenberg spent 12 years at ASML, the Dutch company whose machines print the world's advanced chips, and before that was one of 12 engineers sent from Australia to hand laser enrichment technology to General Electric. The company he now runs holds the patents of the man who invented the field.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 37 minutes of audio, 19 minutes of reading.
Here are the 16 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Laser enrichment has been tried by 26 countries since 1971 and has produced zero commercial plants
Liebenberg said the physics worked in the lab and the scaling is what killed every attempt
The US produces one-third of its own enrichment and imports the other two-thirds from Russia and Western Europe
Meeting the 2050 nuclear target needs a factor-12 increase in enrichment, three times to close today's import gap and four times for the build-out
Lasers reach 5% enriched uranium in one stage where a centrifuge cascade needs dozens
The company says it is weeks from loading uranium hexafluoride into its prototype, with an NRC license application due early next year
The commercial plant is planned at 5M SWU a year for 2032, against the 4.3M SWU the country's only existing plant makes
Only about 3% of the fuel in a reactor gets burned, and lasers can strip the contaminating isotopes out of what is left
Quadrupling US nuclear power means 100 GW to 400 GW, which Liebenberg breaks into 100 large reactors, about 1,000 SMRs and 10,000 micro reactors
The patents belong to a 95-year-old who survived a Japanese camp, and the plant is going up on the site that made the bomb that ended his war
ASML's laser business is the model: Liebenberg said the chip-tool maker has a 90% monopoly, and he wants its industrial lasers doing isotope work
1. Why Demand Bent
The host opened on the state of the American fleet: 94 or 95 reactors, with four going critical this year around July 4. He then put a comparison to Liebenberg that he had picked up from Todd Royal, a nuclear author, on an earlier episode. Royal's claim was that the $10.3 trillion the world has spent on wind, spent on nuclear instead, would have bought 173 reactors in the United States and another 700 to give away. The figure is Royal's and reached the episode secondhand.
He accepted the host's framing without qualification
That is a 100% correct statement.
Christo Liebenberg
Liebenberg pointed at Oliver Stone's documentary Nuclear Now as the case for the technology, and named the drivers he sees: electrification, AI data centers and climate change.
The demand curve is moving on a weekly timescale, not an annual one
The demand for nuclear power is just accelerating, almost by the week.
Christo Liebenberg
He tied it straight to supply.
And yeah, we need nuclear more than ever, and we need to also break our dependence on Russian nuclear fuel.
Christo Liebenberg
The host added the second half of that: stop importing from Western Europe as well, make enough fuel domestically to be self-sufficient, and treat it as national security rather than energy policy. He and Liebenberg had met four years ago through Liebenberg's co-founder, JU, whom the host had interviewed before alongside James Walker of NANO Nuclear.
2. Only 3% Gets Burned
The host raised spent fuel from the existing fleet and the military reactors, and asked whether laser separation could work on it. Liebenberg said reprocessing used fuel is a real application, because almost all of the material is still there.
Almost everything that comes out of a reactor is unburned fuel with contaminants in it
As you mentioned, only 3% gets burned up in a reactor. So there's 90-97% still left, and it's contaminated with all sorts of other isotopes — uranium 232, 234, 236.
Christo Liebenberg
The advantage he claims for lasers is selectivity: a laser can be tuned to one isotope and used to kick it out of the way, leaving a clean mixture of uranium 235 and uranium 238. He then walked through the grades the industry buys. A light water reactor runs on low-enriched uranium at about 5%. Between 5% and 10% the material is called LEU plus.
Advanced reactors need a grade that stops just short of 20%
And there is also this new fuel requirement for advanced reactors, and that is HALEU, high-assay low-enrich uranium, that is all the way to 20%, or they tend to stay just below that mass — so 19.75% is considered HALEU fuel for advanced reactors, such as small mod reactors and micro reactors.
Christo Liebenberg
3. Ships, Trucks, Data Centers
The host said his line on the podcast is that energy security starts at home and energy dominance is displayed through exports, then asked about putting small reactors on commercial ships instead of bunker fuel. Liebenberg agreed and listed the rest of the catalog: a micro reactor in an ISO container on an 18-wheeler, driven to a remote site; disaster relief; military installations far from a grid.
Then he came to the customer everyone is chasing.
The five largest technology companies have all landed on the same reactor type
They've all gravitated to nuclear power, and specifically small modular reactors or micro reactors, because those are types of reactors that can grow with the data center.
Christo Liebenberg
He named them as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta. What those buyers want, he said, is clean power available 24 hours a day that scales with the building. Every one of those reactors, whatever its size, needs fuel, which is the part of the chain his company sits in.
His co-founder's line for the division of labor
As JU always says, we create these great, beautiful Ferraris, but they all need gasoline, and LIS Technologies indeed is the one making that gasoline, and we do that with lasers.
Christo Liebenberg
4. One Stage vs Dozens
Asked how fast a plant could be standing, Liebenberg said he would like to be producing now but has a commercialization road map to work through. The technology itself is not new — it was demonstrated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the claim that comes out of those experiments is a step change in process design.
Natural uranium to 5% in a single pass
It showed that it can enrich uranium in a single step. It takes us from natural uranium all the way to LEU, which is up to 5%, in one stage, which is huge. If you compare that to centrifuges, they need dozens of stages just to get it slowly, incrementally, up to 5%.
Christo Liebenberg
The mechanism is a laser beam striking uranium hexafluoride gas, which he said acts instantaneously. Phase one is getting back to the 1993 result, repeating it, optimizing it, and then showing LEU and HALEU in one stage and HALEU in two. The hardware is scaled in phase two, and plants get built in phase three.
The pilot lands at the end of the decade and the commercial plant in 2032
By the turn of this decade, we will have a pilot plant, about a half a million SWU per year. And then, three years later, by 2032, we want a full-scale commercial facility of 5 million SWU per year, which is a pretty massive facility.
Christo Liebenberg
That 5 million figure is the measure of the gap he is describing, because the country currently has one plant.
The only US enrichment plant is foreign-owned and makes 4.3M SWU a year
We only have one enrichment plant in the US currently — only one — and that is owned by the Europeans, it's a foreign company. So Urenco USA is operating this plant in New Mexico, that's 4.3 million SWU a year, but we need many more of those.
Christo Liebenberg
The energy argument follows from the selectivity. A centrifuge has to spin the whole gas stream, uranium 235 and uranium 238 together. A laser is pointed only at the uranium 235. Liebenberg said that is why laser enrichment has carried the reputation it has since 1971, when work on it started: the holy grail of enrichment technologies.
5. Weeks From Loading UF6
The prototype is at the point of taking its first uranium. The last two years went into systems engineering, integration and testing of the hardware, and what is left is paperwork rather than physics — safety, security, training and standard operating procedures.
The first uranium hexafluoride goes in within weeks
So once that is out of the way, we plan to load UF6. We are weeks away. Weeks away.
Christo Liebenberg
After that comes six months of tuning the parameters. Asked about federal approval, Liebenberg said the first phase does not need it, because the quantities are small and the uranium stays in a closed loop.
A state license covers the demonstration; the federal one is being written in parallel
So we have a radiological materials license from Tennessee, because we are — this first phase is just small quantities of uranium, it's in a loop situation, so we don't produce kilograms or tons of enriched product.
Christo Liebenberg
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission application needs an environmental report and an integrated safety analysis, both of which he said are progressing.
We plan to submit our environmental report by the end of this year, and by the beginning of next year, supply our license application.
Christo Liebenberg
6. A 206-Acre Island
The host said he was impatient for that timeline to move up. Liebenberg answered with the property.
The commercial plant site is an island in Oak Ridge
We bought a whole island here in Oak Ridge. It is a 206-acre property surrounded by water except for the right at the north — that's where you can enter this island.
Christo Liebenberg
This is where the 5 million SWU facility is meant to go. Boston Government Services is the lead project integrator running the planning phase. Liebenberg's stated reason for confidence is that the science is not the open question: the result was achieved in the early 1990s, and the work is repeating it, optimizing it and commercializing it.
7. The Patent Holder Is 95
Asked whether the company owns its patents, Liebenberg named the inventor.
One of the three co-founders is 95 and holds the patents
The patent holder is Dr. Jeff Eerkens. He's 95 years old.
Christo Liebenberg
The three co-founders are Eerkens, Liebenberg and JU. Eerkens was born Dutch in Indonesia around 1933 or 1934, when it was the Dutch East Indies. When Japan took the Pacific islands during the Second World War, he spent three years in a Japanese camp, aged 10, 11 and 12, in what Liebenberg described as brutal conditions. The Allies freed him.
What he learned on release set the rest of his life
And he learned that the power of the atom was used to end the Second World War.
Christo Liebenberg
Eerkens went back to Holland, emigrated to the United States at 20, studied at UC Berkeley, took a doctorate in nuclear engineering and began work on laser enrichment.
The plant is going up where the uranium that freed him was made
So he is known as the father of laser enrichment, and now we are developing his technology at the same site — the K-25 site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — that's that very site where those same atoms were produced which saved his life.
Christo Liebenberg
Eerkens' daughter, Mieke Eerkens, wrote a book about the family, "All Ships Follow Me," which Liebenberg recommended and the host said he would look up.
8. Oil and Gas for Nuclear
The host brought up Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who he described as one of the few oil and gas people who cares about nuclear, and Doug Sandridge, an oil and gas executive who started Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear. Wright, the host said, was the first to sign that group's pact. He then asked the obvious question about why the oil industry would campaign for a competing fuel.
Electricity cannot replace the molecules, so the two industries are not substitutes
We need nuclear, and you can't make all the products out of nuclear. You can use electricity, but you can't make everything out of it.
Christo Liebenberg
On data centers specifically, Liebenberg said there is no point in using wind or solar, because the load wants power 24 hours a day and hardware that grows with the building. He then gave the share nuclear holds today.
But currently the US has about 19%, 20% nuclear power of our whole energy mix.
Christo Liebenberg
The comparison he reaches for is France
It would be lovely to increase that — France has 70% nuclear in France, so we're only at 19%.
Christo Liebenberg
The host pushed back on France as a model. He put its fleet at about 35 reactors, said he would have to check himself, and said deferred maintenance under net-zero and anti-nuclear pressure had cut output to 25% at one point. Germany he treated as the worse case: four reactors demolished, a coal plant demolished after them, and the lignite mine being flooded so it cannot be reopened.
9. One Competitor, Australian
Liebenberg said Orano also wants to build an enrichment facility in the United States, and is in Oak Ridge alongside his company. His argument against that is provenance rather than capability: the country needs enrichment technology that originates in the United States. He noted his own accent does not sound American and said the technology does, and described his company as the only patented, US-owned, US-origin laser enrichment business in the country.
There is exactly one rival, and it is Australian
We have one competitor, and that's Global Laser Enrichment.
Christo Liebenberg
The host found it ironic that an Australian company built laser enrichment given the country's anti-nuclear politics. Liebenberg pointed at ANSTO, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation south of Sydney, which runs a research reactor, and said a small company there developed the enrichment process and then sold it to the United States. That is how he arrived.
He was part of the team that carried the technology to General Electric
I was one of 12 that was sent to the US to transfer that technology to General Electric, and this entity is known as Global Laser Enrichment.
Christo Liebenberg
He worked for that company before founding this one, and left the rest of the subject alone.
But yeah, it's now my one and only competitor, so there's a lot of love between us — I'll wait for our second podcast to discuss that.
Christo Liebenberg
10. Texas Grid and Turbines
The host laid out the interconnection problem in Texas as the reason the fuel question is urgent. He said 1,800 requests to connect to the Texas grid have been put on hold, and that the workaround has a name, Bring Your Own Power, or BYOP. Big gas turbines carry a three-year wait, and he described a company buying jet engines out of boneyards to build power turbines from them. He called that American ingenuity and a band-aid in the same breath, because it is natural gas rather than nuclear.
11. A Factor of 12
Liebenberg answered with the arithmetic of the import gap.
Two-thirds of American enrichment is bought abroad
We literally only produce on US soil one-third of our annual needs — one-third of enrichment is produced on US soil, the other two-thirds we import from Russia, from Western Europe.
Christo Liebenberg
Closing that alone means tripling domestic output. The build-out multiplies it again.
Three times to stand still, four times to grow, so twelve times in total
So that's a factor of three that we have to scale up just today. Then you look at the next 25 years, we want to triple nuclear power — we're talking about quadrupling nuclear power. So a factor four there, and another factor three as of today, is a factor 12 increase in enrichment.
Christo Liebenberg
Enrichment is one link. He listed the rest of the chain that has to scale with it: exploration, mining, milling, conversion, enrichment, deconversion and fuel fabrication.
We literally have to rebuild the entire nuclear industry if we want to meet the targets and the goals of 2050.
Christo Liebenberg
12. Tankers and Transport
The host returned to shipping, on the volume of tankers and cargo ships burning heavy bunker fuel and how little the pollution from it is understood. Liebenberg said the precedent already exists in aircraft carriers and submarines.
A small reactor would run a tanker for decades without refueling
But if we can just power all the marine vessels, the big ones, those tankers, with a small mod reactor or something, then yeah, it can power that vessel for, as you say, for 20 or 30 years without having to replace it.
Christo Liebenberg
Asked whether NANO Nuclear has a separate fuel delivery arm, Liebenberg confirmed it and said his company is already a customer.
NANO bought a fuel transport business, and LIS has already used it
They have a fuel transport company now — they bought this company recently, so they can now transport LEU or HALEU anywhere in the world, for that matter.
Christo Liebenberg
The first batch of uranium hexafluoride, the material about to go into the prototype, came in on that service.
13. AI, Not on the Tech
The host asked whether AI models are being used to rebuild the laser technology. The answer was a firm separation between the company's operations and its physics.
The technology is about to be classified, so it stays away from any model
So when we use AI, we're very careful what sort of prompts we put in.
Christo Liebenberg
Liebenberg said the technology is not yet classified but is about to be, which makes it sensitive proprietary information the company cannot discuss freely. Internally, the company is running AI training, and the uses he listed are ordinary office work: building presentations, sorting email, reading resumes, comparing one company's terms and conditions against another's. The material stays inside the company and off the open web.
The host offered an introduction to John Brutin, who he said holds a patent on eliminating hallucinations in AI models, and made his own argument that AI without validation or checks is worthless for anything that involves policy or money, whatever it can do with video.
He uses it constantly and does not entirely trust it
I'm a little nervous, and I use AI in everything, and I'll tell you, it has helped me a bunch, but it also has opened my eyes to how corrupt it could get real quick.
Christo Liebenberg
14. NRC Alumni and ASML
Liebenberg's account of the company's hiring is that it bought regulatory experience rather than trained it. Employees include former Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff across licensing, safety analysis, security and cybersecurity, people he said spent entire careers at the agency and retired early to join.
The licensing team is made of the regulator's own subject matter experts
We have over 200 years of NRC expertise, the subject matter experts of the NRC are in our company.
Christo Liebenberg
The other half of the team is laser scientists, and here Liebenberg explained where his own 12 years went. He asked the host whether he had heard of ASML, described it as Europe's biggest company and the maker of the extreme ultraviolet machines that print advanced chips.
He puts ASML's share of that market at 90%
They've got 90% of the world — they have a 90% monopoly, and they make these extreme ultraviolet machines with lasers, and those machines are sold to Taiwan, for instance.
Christo Liebenberg
He linked that position to the export controls keeping the machines out of China, to ASML's sales to Intel and Samsung, and called the company the enabler of the AI build-out. The connection to his current work is the hardware itself.
Proven industrial lasers applied to a 1990s enrichment process
And I spent the last 12 years there — that's where I realized that I can use lasers, that has a lot of synergy with those lasers, with this crystal process from Dr. Jeff Eerkens.
Christo Liebenberg
15. 94 Reactors Times Four
The host counted forward from today's fleet: 94 reactors, four new ones, seven more coming, and another 19 the military is installing on bases. Liebenberg took the number and worked the target out loud.
Quadrupling by 2050 means roughly 380 reactors
If we want to quadruple nuclear power by 2050, we have to build four times more reactors. 94 times 4 is about roughly 380.
Christo Liebenberg
The host said it could be 500 or 600 if the units are smaller. Liebenberg reframed it in capacity: the existing 94 reactors produce 100 gigawatts, so quadrupling means 400 gigawatts and an extra 300 gigawatts to find. An AP-1000 produces roughly one gigawatt, so the pure large-reactor version of the plan is 300 AP-1000s.
Splitting the 300 GW three ways changes what has to be manufactured
But that implies 100 AP-1000s, and maybe a thousand SMRs, and 10,000 micro reactors.
Christo Liebenberg
Asked whether even 100 large reactors in 25 years is realistic, he said the objection is historical rather than technical.
A lot of people will say no, that's impossible. It's not impossible, it can be done — we did it before, these 94 reactors were built in the 70s and 80s.
Christo Liebenberg
The host said the industry could do it again with the government out of the way. Liebenberg did not take that line.
He credits both administrations rather than one
I have to say the government has been very pro-nuclear — there's an enormous bipartisan support.
Christo Liebenberg
The previous administration signed a set of acts to stimulate the industry, he said, and the current one took them further.
It's become a national security issue to rebuild the US nuclear industry.
Christo Liebenberg
16. 26 Countries, Zero Plants
Asked for closing thoughts, Liebenberg gave the record of the field he works in, which is a record of failure.
Fifty-five years, 26 countries, no commercial facility
It's been around since 1971, now it's 55 years later, tried by 26 different countries, and not a single one of those efforts have led to a commercial facility.
Christo Liebenberg
His diagnosis is that the physics was never the barrier.
This technology was shown it worked in the lab, but the scaling challenges have been the reason why we have zero laser enrichment facilities.
Christo Liebenberg
The difference he claims is simplification: fewer and less complex laser systems than the other approaches carried.
His stated target is five to seven years to a demonstration
We are laser experts, UF6 experts, licensing experts, so we have a lot of confidence that finally we will be the world's first laser enrichment enterprise. That's literally our mission, and it's doable — I think we are on a path to demonstrate this literally within the next five to seven years.
Christo Liebenberg
Bonus Insights
The partnership with NANO Nuclear is meant to cover the whole fuel cycle
Together we are building a vertically integrated supply chain, right — all the way from mining to milling to conversion, that's NANO —
Christo Liebenberg
Liebenberg's company takes enrichment and deconversion; NANO handles mining, milling, conversion, delivery and transportation on either side of it.
Totally vertically integrated — that is our mission.
Christo Liebenberg
The host closed by saying he wanted updates as they come and would write them up, and asked Liebenberg to bring JU back for a joint appearance.
Liebenberg's bottom line is that the fuel, not the reactor, is the constraint on American nuclear expansion: the country buys two-thirds of its enriched uranium abroad, needs twelve times as much of it to reach the 2050 target, and he is betting that a laser process nobody has ever scaled will supply it.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
LIS Technologies (Liebenberg's company: laser isotope separation, three co-founders, patents held by Jeff Eerkens, and a 206-acre island site in Oak Ridge for a 5M SWU plant)
NANO Nuclear Energy (The partner company, co-founded by Liebenberg's own co-founder JU; it supplies mining, milling, conversion and now fuel transport around LIS's enrichment step)
Urenco USA (The only commercial enrichment plant in the country, in New Mexico, at 4.3 million SWU a year and foreign-owned)
Global Laser Enrichment (The single competitor: Australian-origin technology transferred to General Electric by a team Liebenberg was part of)
ASML (Where Liebenberg spent 12 years; he puts its share of extreme ultraviolet lithography at a 90% monopoly and calls it the enabler of the AI build-out)
Orano (Also planning a US enrichment facility, and based in Oak Ridge alongside LIS; Liebenberg's objection is that the technology is not US-origin)
ANSTO (The Australian research organisation near Sydney whose research reactor sat beside the small company that developed the laser process)
General Electric (The recipient of the Australian technology transfer, which became Global Laser Enrichment)
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (LIS is preparing an environmental report and integrated safety analysis for a license application; the company has hired former NRC staff across licensing, safety and cybersecurity)
Boston Government Services (Lead project integrator for the planning phase of the island site)
Westinghouse AP1000 (The roughly one-gigawatt reference unit in Liebenberg's arithmetic: 300 of them, or 100 plus 1,000 SMRs and 10,000 micro reactors)
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta (The five buyers Liebenberg says have all moved to small modular and micro reactors because they scale with a data center and run continuously)
Intel and Samsung (Named as ASML's customers outside Taiwan, in the export-control argument)
US Department of Energy (The host raised Secretary Chris Wright as the reason he is optimistic about federal support for nuclear)
Oil and Gas Executives for Nuclear (Founded by Doug Sandridge; the host said Wright was its first signatory, and used it to answer why oil people back nuclear)
Books & Resources Mentioned
All Ships Follow Me – Mieke Eerkens (The family memoir written by Jeff Eerkens' daughter, covering the war years Liebenberg described)
Nuclear Now – Oliver Stone (The documentary Liebenberg cited as the case for the importance of nuclear power)
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