Actinide is first startup to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU)

126

ddsalzman about 4 hours ago 56 commentsRead Article on actinideinc.com

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

46% Positive

Analyzed from 1327 words in the discussion.

Discussion (56 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

peri-cl•about 3 hours ago

> "Actinide’s flagship commercial product: enriched ytterbium-176,"

To save HN a search: a stable isotope used as a neutron capture target, to produce lutetium-177[i], used in targeted radioligand therapies[ii]. Discussed once on HN[iii].

[i] https://isotopes.gov/Ytterbium-176_is_Available_Now

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutetium_(177Lu)_vipivotide_te...

[iii] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690196 ("Radioactive drugs strike cancer with precision (knowablemagazine.org)")

fodkodrasz•about 3 hours ago

So this is basically a calutron... a huge mass spectrometer. 1940s technology, upgraded with state-of-the-now control systems, and electromagnets. A formidable engineering work, but more of a breakthrough from legislation and compliance perspective possibly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron

jabl•about 3 hours ago

IIRC Calutron's were basically abandoned because they were massively inefficient compared to gaseous diffusion and, particularly, centrifuges.

What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors?

Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?

Legend2440•about 2 hours ago

They talk about that in the article:

>"A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed," said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide.

ta988•about 1 hour ago

yeah they don't talk about cleaning them either... that's a massive problem in this kind of ion separation techniques, things splatter and stick everywhere.

p1mrx•about 2 hours ago

Take these numbers with a grain of salt because I got them by chatting with AIs, but if you're producing electricity from HALEU, then centrifuges require reinvesting <1% of the output, whereas historical calutrons required 200% (useless) and modern technology could potentially bring that down to 10%.

So calutrons will always be less energy efficient than centrifuges, but if the capital cost and construction time is low enough, calutrons might still be economically viable.

KennyBlanken•about 1 hour ago

If we wanted to find out what an LLM thought we'd ask the LLM. Don't be a meat proxy.

https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

piyh•about 2 hours ago

>Under the Atomic Energy Act, all information not specifically declassified is classified as Restricted Data, whether it is privately or publicly held

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...

scythe•about 2 hours ago

Well, for one thing, the only existing Yb-176 production facilities are in Russia. That means demand for a domestic supply is pretty high right now.

The other thing is that for a nuclear reactor, you need many kilograms of uranium. But for a Pluvicto patient, you need less than a gram of ytterbium.

bpodgursky•about 3 hours ago

That's fine

fodkodrasz•about 2 hours ago

Totally agree, just summarized what I found in the press release. Even boring engineering is honest work, and this is not boring, even if not cutting edge in my understanding. Nuclear operations have their special challenges which need special care, also from engineering side. Still I think this is less of an engineering news.

Anyways, I didn't mean to downplay it.

shevy-java•about 2 hours ago

But mass spectrometers don't use uranium.

ta988•about 2 hours ago

they can absolutely see uranium. It ionizes and thus get separated like many other things https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7470433/

Calutrons are using the same principle of separating ions by their mass/charge ratio, just in a preparative scale (you want to collect what is separated) rather than analytical (you just want to know how much of what).

numpad0•about 1 hour ago

sounds like this is similar to doing basic paper chromatography and cutting out the strip with scissors just to get the desired substance, spectrometry as means to produce the material rather than means to analyze

colechristensen•about 1 hour ago

Mass spec is about separating things by mass... exactly what enrichment requires.

A mass spec used as an instrument measures the components of a substance, this is just the same concept for actual separation of components not just to look at them

ortusdux•about 2 hours ago

I've been following SuperCritical, a new startup working on Uranium extraction from sea water. My understanding is that the process is much more sustainable than mining, which makes it easier/faster to establish a domestic source vs the permits needed for a new US based mine.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/08/26/335139...

git_rancher•about 3 hours ago

A few hundred thousand dollars worth of tech replacing what used to be a massive industrial investment is amazing. And I thought enriching uranium is something that counties with nukes go to extreme lengths to make it not accessible.

Legend2440•about 2 hours ago

>And I thought enriching uranium is something that counties with nukes go to extreme lengths to make it not accessible.

It's not that difficult from an engineering perspective, the tech is almost a century old. It's just that we will drop bombs on anyone who tries.

Nuclear nonproliferation relies on active enforcement.

colechristensen•about 1 hour ago

It's not difficult from a conceptual engineering perspective but it is difficult from an industrial scale perspective. It requires a tremendous amount of hardware and energy and precision equipment.

KennyBlanken•about 1 hour ago

Nuclear nonproliferation relies on surveillance/monitoring and statecraft.

There are many, many steps before "drop bombs".

john_strinlai•about 3 hours ago

>And I thought enriching uranium is something that counties with nukes go to extreme lengths to make it not accessible.

low-enrichment (~20%) is what's happening here.

the bad stuff, for nukes, is ~90% enrichment.

HPsquared•about 3 hours ago

It's the same process either way, and the first few percent are the hardest (as it's super dilute so you need to handle a lot of material). It's much easier to go from 20% to 90%, than it is to get to 20%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separative_work_units

dopa42365•14 minutes ago

5% enrichment (regular reactor grade) is 2/3 the way to weapons grade already.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Hence there technically being no enrichment cap for any country that signed the NPT and stuff (not to be confused with protection from US bombs or rogue states that never signed the NPT).

benabbott•about 2 hours ago

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see careless AI-generated images added to a site's homepage.

If your images are AI, I'm assuming your text is too. But even if it's not... if you're not willing to put in the time & effort to make the images on your homepage look good, my expectations go way down.

yieldcrv•about 2 hours ago

I like the part where you act like they would have ever had images otherwise

kaashif•about 2 hours ago

Pointless images are bad. Like those images at the top of blog posts, I didn't like those pre AI.

pavel_lishin•about 2 hours ago

That would have been fine.

datakan•about 3 hours ago

So will we start bombing Dallas now?

cicko•about 2 hours ago

No. Economic sanctions are in right now. Maybe tomorrow.

lotsofpulp•about 3 hours ago

Might make it more walkable.

chasd00•about 3 hours ago

hah probably help cool things off too.

theredleft•about 2 hours ago

Hegseth is on it

uygiugiu•about 1 hour ago

General Matter is also working on HALEU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Matter

gfalcao•about 1 hour ago

wow

doodlebugging•about 1 hour ago

Investors groups include: Neo Ventures - SE European VC group with mostly Bulgarian leadership and a diverse portfolio that doesn't mention Actinide at all; Mana Ventures - one of their companies is Flock Safety, the ubiquitous surveillance company in the recent news; Discipulus Ventures - MAGA supporting religious nutjobs from their own description in their opening paragraph [0], and from Forbes (paywalled) [1];

[0] https://www.discipulusventures.com/ [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2025/02/10/silicon-v... (paywall)

Interesting revival of or use of old technology to accomplish their goal. I'm not sure this belongs as a private tech company. I feel like it should be under the control of the federal government and no, I don't care what the libertarians on HN think about it. This needs to be a regulated company and process with clear reporting responsibilities and permanently disruptive penalties for noncompliance by individuals and the corporation.

chuckadams•4 minutes ago

You can bet your sweet patootie that even under the current government, any company producing radioactive isotopes is not operating without regulation or supervision.

josefritzishere•about 3 hours ago

I have a bad feeling.

futura_heavy•about 2 hours ago

Is it the menacing guys in the photo, or that headache-inducing logo?

jmward01•about 2 hours ago

The logo. Definitely the logo. It both sucks you in and repels you at the same time. 'eye catching' to say the least, but so are laser pointers.

johnea•about 3 hours ago

If we didn't have a lunatic in the whitehouse, I'm sure we could negotiate with Iran.

With Texas, I'm not so sure...

Private enterprise enriching uranium is a seriously worrying development...

maxall4•about 3 hours ago

I’m no expert, but I don’t believe that “high-assay low-enriched uranium” is the sort you can use in nuclear weapons, per it being “low-enriched”. According to the DOE, HALEU only goes up to 20% enrichment [0]. Nuclear weapons, it seems, need it to be enriched beyond 20% [1]

[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-high-assay-low-enric... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium

NewJazz•about 3 hours ago

Dirty bombs

comicjk•about 3 hours ago

Uranium-235 isn't useful for dirty bombs: it's too long-lived and not radioactive enough. Making dangerous levels of radiation requires short-lived isotopes. Some of these are the products of uranium fission, which is why spent uranium fuel is a radiation hazard. But isolating U-235 just to fission it to get radioactive isotopes like cesium-137 would not be the easiest way to get them.

Legend2440•about 2 hours ago

>Private enterprise enriching uranium is a seriously worrying development...

Or seriously exciting. We might actually get affordable, clean nuclear energy this century.

philipkglass•about 2 hours ago

Urenco USA is a private enterprise that enriches uranium. It built its first American enrichment plant 20 years ago, and lately it has been expanding capacity:

https://urencousa.com/about/our-history

The parent Urenco company has been operating private uranium enrichment plants in Europe since the 1970s.

charliebwrites•about 3 hours ago

I’m just waiting for one of these private rocket companies to buy a private nuclear enriching company

We could reach Lex Luther level villainy in no time at all

chasd00•about 2 hours ago

Pantex is outside Amarillo, that's where all the US's nukes come from. If Texas wanted nukes ( well more nukes actually ) they'd juts place an order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex

porkpieshoe•about 2 hours ago

Pantex doesn't power a panopticon, nor does it threaten my livelihood.

tmp10423288442•about 1 hour ago

Iran is essentially finished at this point - they no longer have control over the Strait of Hormuz, and oil is rapidly flowing through the strait (to say nothing of the oil already exported via other pipelines, or the impetus the war gave to accelerate pipelines under construction, such as the Iraq-Turkey pipeline).

shevy-java•about 2 hours ago

They are killing the environment now. I remember this discussion some 25 or 30 years ago in serbia, e. g. depleted uranium. Well, guess some company always wants to find ways for dumping or lifting-up radioactive substance.