This uranium company wants to break the grip that foreign state corporations have on U.S. nuclear fuel

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President Donald Trump’s push to dramatically increase nuclear power in the U.S. will require a tremendous amount of fuel, but the country remains heavily dependent on foreign state-owned companies for its supplies, the CEO of the only publicly traded uranium enricher in the world told CNBC.

“There’s barely enough Western enrichment, if at all, to satisfy existing operating plants,” Centrus Energy

CEO Amir Vexler said in an interview. “If the nuclear industry is to add all this generation capacity, there will have to be a tremendous amount of enrichment capacity that’s added.”

Trump issued a series of executive orders on nuclear power last month that set a target for the U.S. to quadruple the sector’s capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. Nuclear energy is one of the few issues in deeply polarized Washington these days that enjoys some level of bipartisan support. Trump’s push expands on former President Joe Biden’s goal to triple nuclear power by midcentury.