Fueled by expected growth in the nuclear energy sector, Global Laser Enrichment, which uses lasers to enrich uranium, has increased its local footprint and employee base in recent years.

In June, Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) moved into its new headquarters inside the Wilmington Trade Center, an industrial park along U.S. 421. At more than 67,000 square feet, the space is about 10 times larger than the company had previously occupied on GE Hitachi’s Castle Hayne campus.

The expanded space helps speed up the work needed to commercialize the company’s enrichment technology, said CEO Stephen Long. GLE also continues to operate a test loop facility on the GE Hitachi campus through a lease agreement.

GLE’s laser technology increases the concentration of the 235 isotope present in uranium. The nuclear industry uses uranium with high concentrations of 235 isotopes because the isotope can be split more easily, yielding higher amounts of energy.

But when uranium is mined in its original form, it’s predominantly made up of the 238 isotope, Long said. That means enrichment is typically needed before uranium can be used in the nuclear energy process.

To enrich uranium, GLE starts with uranium hexafluoride in the form of a gas.

“Our technology takes that gas, we pass a precisely tuned laser light through that gas,” Long explained, “and when we do, our laser light is tuned to only excite the uranium 235 isotope in the gas.”

That allows the company to separate the 235 isotope from the others. “We take (the uranium) from roughly 0.7% 235 isotope to roughly 5% for the existing reactors and up to 20% for future reactors,” Long said.

Traditional methods use a gas centrifuge, which spins the uranium to separate the isotopes. GLE’s method produces more usable material and has a higher throughput than the centrifuge method, Long said, which means the process is more efficient and has lower costs.

GLE was formed in the 2000s by General Electric (GE), Hitachi and Cameco to develop uranium enrichment services capability.

In 2021, the company saw a restructuring when GE Hitachi sold off its 76% interest in GLE. Australia-based Silex Systems Ltd. purchased a 51% interest in GLE, and Canada-based uranium and nuclear fuel supplier Cameco increased its interest in the company from 24% to 49%.

Through the ownership changes, GLE’s mission has remained the same, and the company has been able to grow its workforce.

“Since the transaction closed, and we became an independent company from GE in 2021, we’ve grown from a small team then about a dozen employees to 85 today,” Long said.

About 90% of those employees work in the Wilmington area, according to Long, with the majority working out of the headquarters building and a couple dozen engineers and operators working at the test loop facility. 

The company expects to continue that growth and aims to add new employees over the next year, bringing the total employee count to more than 100 by the end of 2025, Long said. GLE is recruiting primarily “highly skilled engineers and operators with nuclear and mechanical and electrical backgrounds,” he added.

The company’s growth has been fueled by a broad uptick in energy demand that’s looking to tap into the capabilities of nuclear power.

“There’s been a revival across the board, both in the U.S. and globally,” Long said.

He views the technology sector – specifically artificial intelligence – as having the highest growth potential for the nuclear energy industry. “Those data centers, especially the training data centers, need significant amounts of clean and reliable energy, and that can only really be met by nuclear,” Long said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the ongoing conflict have also played a role in showcasing the “vulnerabilities in depending on some of the countries that are not our allies in the nuclear fuel supply chain,” Long said.

Before signing a lease for the Wilmington Trade Center space last summer, Long said company officials had been looking for a place to establish a new headquarters for about a year. They wanted an overall size of at least 50,000 square feet, a building with a clear height that would accommodate the company’s overhead cranes and other operations and a large industrial floor space.

“We’re standing up a fairly large, advanced manufacturing operation,” Long said, “and as we prototype and eventually produce full-scale equipment out of this facility, we’ll need lots of floor space for that.”

Speed and timing were also factors, Long said. GLE initially considered building its own facility, but the permitting, design and construction would have added years to the company’s timeline. Instead, they opted for the already-built spec space.

Much of the headquarters’ space is a secure engineering, manufacturing and prototyping facility with 40,000 square feet of “state-of-the-art CNC manufacturing capability,” Long said. That allows the company’s engineers to work on prototypes more quickly.

“The fact our engineers can go walk right out to the shop floor, see the part they made, see how it works and then go back and iterate at their desks really allows us to rapidly iterate our designs, advance the designs and get to maturity much faster,” Long said.

The work at GLE’s Wilmington facility is moving the company’s laser technology toward commercialization. GLE has plans for a commercial facility in western Kentucky where the company plans to enrich natural uranium and re-enrich depleted uranium.

The company is working on designs for the Kentucky production facility and preparing to submit a license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by mid-2025. GLE aims to bring the production facility online by 2030 or sooner, Long said.

“Our goal really is to scale this technology, get it to commercial viability as soon as possible,” Long said, “and then deploy production scale capacity to serve today’s existing nuclear reactor fleet, as well as the new reactors … we expect to be built here in the next decade or two.”