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

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ddsalzman about 16 hours ago 79 commentsRead Article on actinideinc.com

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peri-cl•about 15 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 15 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 15 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 15 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 14 hours 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 14 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 14 hours 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 15 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 14 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 15 hours ago

That's fine

fodkodrasz•about 14 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.

trhway•about 8 hours ago

>1940s technology

yes, i'd have expected that laser enrichment would be more preferable technology for modern development

shevy-java•about 15 hours ago

But mass spectrometers don't use uranium.

ta988•about 15 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 14 hours 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 14 hours 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 15 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 15 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 15 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 14 hours 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 14 hours ago

Nuclear nonproliferation relies on surveillance/monitoring and statecraft.

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

john_strinlai•about 15 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 15 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•about 13 hours 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).

uygiugiu•about 14 hours ago

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

gfalcao•about 13 hours ago

wow

doodlebugging•about 14 hours 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•about 13 hours 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.

benabbott•about 15 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 15 hours ago

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

kaashif•about 14 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 14 hours ago

That would have been fine.

datakan•about 15 hours ago

So will we start bombing Dallas now?

cicko•about 14 hours ago

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

lotsofpulp•about 15 hours ago

Might make it more walkable.

chasd00•about 15 hours ago

hah probably help cool things off too.

theredleft•about 15 hours ago

Hegseth is on it

josefritzishere•about 15 hours ago

I have a bad feeling.

futura_heavy•about 15 hours ago

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

jmward01•about 14 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.

shevy-java•about 15 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.

netik•about 12 hours ago

This is highly dangerous, right? If a bad actor possess centrifuge technology and can divert this <20% enriched uranium, they are essentially days or weeks away from achieving weapons-grade material.

This severely reduces the "breakout time" the international community relies on to detect and stop nuclear proliferation.

jjk166•about 11 hours ago

If the bad actor has centrifuge technology and access to low enriched uranium, they are already weeks away from achieving weapons grade material. If a country with Iran's enrichment capabilities had a sufficient LEU stockpile swapped for an equivalent amount of HALEU, it would shave about 7 days off the time necessary to produce a bomb's worth of weapons grade uranium.

For nations with enrichment capabilities, enrichment is not a major contributor to overall breakout time. Enrichment doesn't take much time, it's building enrichment facilities that takes a while, especially clandestinely.

AngryData•about 11 hours ago

Centrifuge and nuclear technology is not some latest and greatest super complicated and barely understood technology with hard to source components anymore. Old restrictions like ball bearings quality on export and such are basically meaningless today. You can buy common tooling today from China that would trounce anything people were using 60 years ago and nobody has stopped people from studying and researching nuclear technologies.

It is mostly a matter of money and international politics now. It takes a significant amount of money to build and power, and it is hard to hide the scale of building and power usage from international watchdogs. Because nothing consumes tons of energy and doesn't output tons of product to sell except for nuclear material refinement for weapons.

jjk166•about 11 hours ago

> it is hard to hide the scale of building and power usage from international watchdogs. Because nothing consumes tons of energy and doesn't output tons of product to sell except for nuclear material refinement for weapons.

Until datacenters

fc417fc802•about 6 hours ago

Just wait, we might well have some sort of AI nonproliferation effort soon enough. I eagerly await any chip under 5 nm being subject to national security regulations.