South Carolina Gets A Nuclear Fuel Factory

Happy Thursday.

The build this week: One of the world's largest nuclear fuel plants, in Hopkins, South Carolina, is about to grow. Westinghouse will spend about $1 billion there on a factory for a richer grade of fuel for the reactors already running, the first fleet-scale fuel plant built in the U.S. in more than 50 years.

Underneath: Phoenix Tailings plans a $375 million rare earth plant in Rochester, New York, Wildcat Defense agreed to buy the owner of Fraser Shipyards in Superior, Wisconsin, with plans to invest $350 million there, Hudbay and Mitsubishi approved the $2.1 billion Copper World mine in Arizona, and Blue Bird will spend $300 million on a school bus plant in Fort Valley, Georgia.

The Lead

The big picture: Before uranium can power a reactor, it has to be manufactured. Enriched uranium is pressed into ceramic pellets, sealed into metal rods and bundled into fuel assemblies, and only a handful of U.S. plants do that work. Most U.S. reactors run on fuel enriched to 5% or less. Fuel enriched to between 5% and 8%, which the industry calls LEU+, lets a plant run longer between refueling outages, which lowers operating costs, and supports uprates, upgrades that let a reactor run at higher power.

Driving the news: On Wednesday Westinghouse said it will invest about $1 billion in a new factory to make that fuel at its Columbia Fuel Fabrication Facility in Hopkins, in the Lower Richland area of Richland County. Construction is already underway on a new building on the plant's Bluff Road campus, and Westinghouse calls it the first fleet-scale nuclear fuel factory built in the United States in more than 50 years. It is also the company's largest single manufacturing investment for the operating fleet.

Why it matters: The Hopkins plant has made fuel since 1968, and Gov. Henry McMaster says the fuel made there powers about 10% of the country. It employs more than 1,200 people, and the state approved job development credits for the new project. A study Westinghouse commissioned with researchers at the University of South Carolina's Darla Moore School of Business projects $4.9 billion in economic impact across the state over 10 years, about $3.8 billion of it in Richland County. Construction will put several hundred contractors on the site at its peak, along with an in-house Westinghouse team of 30 to 50 people. Hopkins has already shown it can make the fuel: lead test assemblies built there became the first LEU+ fuel loaded in a U.S. reactor last year, at Georgia's Plant Vogtle.

What's next: Westinghouse expects the factory to start operating in 2030, using a dry manufacturing process with more automation than the existing plant. The fuel is aimed first at reactors already running, in line with the Energy Department's UPRISE program, which aims to add 5 gigawatts of output from the current fleet through uprates. Westinghouse also expects LEU+ to support new AP1000 reactors, the design behind The Nuclear Company's Wednesday proposal for a plant of up to six units in Lewis County, Kentucky.

Read Westinghouse's announcement.

See South Carolina's release.

Defense & Space

• The Space Force wants a third launch range for medium and heavy rockets by 2030, Space Systems Command chief Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant said, on top of the $1.3 billion Congress has put into upgrading the service's spaceports through 2028.

• Raytheon won a two-year contract extension that raises the ceiling on its Missile Defense Agency work supporting AN/TPY-2 missile defense radars by about $394 million, to nearly $3 billion, with work in Woburn, Massachusetts, and at radar sites around the world.

• Anduril's YFQ-44A Fury carried out commands from an F-22 pilot in flight, with the drone's onboard autonomy acting on the fighter pilot's directions in real time during an Air Force test.

• Natilus won $3.5 million from the Pentagon and the Air Force to demonstrate its KONA blended-wing cargo aircraft, built to carry about 8,000 pounds 800 nautical miles, in an Indo-Pacific exercise ahead of full-scale flight tests in late 2027 or early 2028.

• Space Nuclear Power Corp. signed a DARPA agreement to ground-test a Kilopower space reactor with active control rods alongside Los Alamos National Laboratory, with integration work at its shop in Medina, Ohio.

Maritime & Shipbuilding

• Fairbanks Morse Defense broke ground on a $60 million expansion of its Pascagoula, Mississippi, propeller plant to double its output of propulsors for Virginia-class submarines and future surface combatants, with $27 million from the Navy, including $22 million from Australia under AUKUS.

• Wildcat Defense signed an exclusive agreement to buy Fraser Industries, owner of the Fraser Shipyards in Superior, Wisconsin, in a deal expected to close in about three months, and plans to invest $350 million in the yard, which is teamed with Fincantieri and Donjon to compete for the Coast Guard's light icebreakers.

• Gecko Robotics saw the Navy raise the ceiling on its ship-inspection contract from $71 million to $300 million about seven months after the five-year deal was announced in March, as the service plans to take the company's robots from 18 Pacific Fleet ships to the Atlantic surface fleet.

• Whiskey Project Group opened a 60,000-square-foot boat plant in Edenton, North Carolina, its North American hub for building and servicing tactical vessels and rigid inflatable boats, with 30 new jobs expected.

Semiconductors & Electronics

• Apple said TSMC's Arizona fabs have produced more than 100 million chips for it this year and committed up to $100 million over three years to Perryman Co. in Houston, Pennsylvania, to melt, forge and roll titanium for the iPhone.

• Micron will fund an expansion of Indium Corporation's refining and manufacturing in Rome, New York, restarting U.S. processing of critical minerals used in chipmaking under a planned long-term supply agreement, part of Micron's plan to put up to $3 billion into its U.S. supply chain.

• Nvidia gave chip-testing company KYEC a $1.1 billion advance to build new test facilities and buy equipment in the U.S., with high-volume production targeted for April 2027.

Manufacturing & Automation

• Blue Bird will invest about $300 million and add 375 jobs in Fort Valley, Georgia, turning a former motorhome plant of about 1 million square feet into a school bus factory, with construction starting in early 2027.

• SendCutSend will spend $63.2 million on its first Pennsylvania plant, a 200,000-square-foot laser cutting, machining and bending operation in Pittston that will create 309 jobs over three years.

• Nucor will invest $60 million to expand its utility pole plant in Decatur, Alabama, adding 60 jobs to make more of the steel poles used in new transmission lines.

• Tesla started building its Optimus humanoid robot in space that once built cars at its Fremont, California, factory, and Elon Musk said the company could reach 20,000 robots a week by the end of 2027.

Energy & Materials

• Phoenix Tailings plans to build a $375 million rare earth separation plant at Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York, committing to at least 90 jobs and processing about 18,000 tons of material a year at full production in 2028.

• Hudbay and Mitsubishi approved construction of the $2.1 billion Copper World mine southeast of Tucson, Arizona, which is expected to create more than 1,000 construction jobs and 500 permanent ones, with first copper in the second half of 2029.

• Indiana, Hoosier Energy and AtkinsRéalis agreed to study building up to eight Candu reactors, about 6 gigawatts in all, including at power plant sites that are retired or retiring.

• The Energy Department announced about $967 million in additional grid resilience grants for states, territories and tribes to strengthen their power systems.

Supply Chain & Freight

• DSV opened a $90 million cross-border logistics hub in Laredo, Texas, an 853,000-square-foot site on 49 acres along Interstate 35 with bonded storage and customs brokerage for U.S.-Mexico freight.

• Tesla began producing its Semi truck in Nevada, where it has installed capacity to build 25,000 a year.

• A. Duie Pyle opened a 44-door freight terminal near Cincinnati, starting with 21 jobs and growing to about 36, as the carrier expands its less-than-truckload network in Ohio.

Dealbook

• Peak Energy raised a $108 million Series B led by GM Ventures to start production at a 4-gigawatt-hour sodium-ion battery factory in Sacramento, California, in early 2027, backed by more than $1 billion in customer orders and commitments.

• ASI raised a $325 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation led by Spark Capital, after winning work with the Army, the Air Force and the FAA.

• Eka Robotics raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime to build robots that pick and handle objects with human-like dexterity.

• Watchtower Labs came out of stealth with a $35 million seed round led by Shield Capital and Conviction to build AI planning tools for military operations, starting with logistics and sustainment, after the Defense Innovation Unit selected it in January.

• Mach9 raised a $34 million Series A co-led by First Round and Bessemer for software that turns road and corridor surveys into engineering drawings, already used by Caltrans and the Minnesota and Maryland transportation departments.

• Hephaestus came out of stealth with $17.2 million to make high-temperature superconductors without rare earths, with production starting in 2027 at a 70,000-square-foot New Jersey plant, as a step toward low-cost fusion power.

• Helicon came out of stealth with $16.5 million led by AlleyCorp to build composite drone airframes on an automated line in Torrance, California, in a 36,000-square-foot plant sized for more than 1 million frames a year.

• Tide Rock bought Electro-Spec, a specialty plating shop certified for aerospace and defense work, to start a surface-finishing business.

Back Tuesday.