You will hear about paperwork, fuel, and paperwork for fuel. The DOE's Deputy Secretary James Danly put it bluntly last week: "If we are going to have this nuclear renaissance, we are not going to be able to do it without fuel."

So it makes sense that the latest move from the NANO Nuclear (NNE), a company we have covered at length over the past year due to its leading position in the nuclear space, is a reactor-free one. This morning NANO and its subsidiary HALEU Energy Fuel signed a definitive agreement to buy the US nuclear fuel processing assets of Radnostix (formerly International Isotopes) and its subsidiary International Isotopes Fluorine Products.

The headline terms:

After rising 2.5% premarket, NNE stock is now lower on the day which is odd for a stock that jumped 13% on the similarly sized $13M Secured Transportation Services deal in May. That fits a market where, as Goldman's sector specialist put it in mid-September, "inbounds have been extremely light on the nuclear front" (we discussed this in "Uranium Term Prices Hit A Record... So Why Is Nuclear Getting Nuked?"). We would argue the market is underpricing this one.

What is NANO buying?

The asset is the old International Isotopes Fluorine Extraction Process and Depleted Uranium Deconversion (FEP/DUP) project near Hobbs, NM. According to the NRC, the license was issued on October 2, 2012, with a 40-year term. It was the first commercial license of its kind in the US, and the facility was "not yet constructed."

The plant was designed to take the depleted UF6 "tails" left over from enrichment, convert them into stable uranium oxide for disposal, and recover the fluorine as high-purity fluoride products, including anhydrous hydrogen fluoride, which goes into semiconductor and solar manufacturing. Put differently, it turns nuclear waste into chip-fab chemicals, which is about as 2026 as a business plan gets.