This Profit Powerhouse Nuclear Stock Is Up 264% In 2025. Is It Too Late to Buy?

• Centrus has the astir precocious and lowest-risk centrifuge successful the business.

• Low debt, beardown currency reserves, and nett maturation marque this banal a standout.

• America's prohibition connected Russian uranium imports and wide request for atomic vigor are almighty tailwinds.

• 10 stocks we similar amended than Centrus Energy ›

2025 was a banner twelvemonth for atomic vigor stocks, and it should beryllium nary wonderment why. Nuclear powerfulness is apt the champion solution to powering the information centers required for the rollout of artificial quality (AI). And Centrus Energy's (NYSE: LEU) banal show is simply a testament to past year's run-up successful nuclear. It ended 2025 up 264% and is up different 26% to commencement this year.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), information centers already devour astir 1.5% of each the energy produced globally, and that has grown astatine a complaint of 12% per twelvemonth implicit the past 5 years.And, successful the IEA's base-case estimate, information halfway vigor request is acceptable to turn to 3% of planetary energy by 2030, treble what it is today.

To conscionable that demand, the U.S. Department of Energy is readying connected tripling America's atomic vigor accumulation by the mediate of the century.

Interestingly enough, bluish Virginia, the epicenter of America's information halfway operation boom, is close successful Centrus Energy's backyard.

Bethesda-based Centrus Energy is America's apical atomic substance refining company. Nuclear vigor isn't arsenic elemental arsenic coal; you can't conscionable propulsion the uranium retired of the crushed and pain it to unlock its vigor potential.

Uranium needs to beryllium refined into usable fuel. In nature, 99% of each uranium is the U-238 isotope with 146 neutrons. It is radioactive, but it's not peculiarly reactive. Unless it's paired with plutonium successful immoderate specialized reactors, it can't beryllium utilized for powerfulness generation.

Centrus takes the earthy U-238 pulled retired of the crushed by uranium miners and turns it into U-235 by stripping disconnected 3 neutrons to springiness it a full of 143. That makes it into the fissile (capable of being divided by neutron bombardment) uranium we usage successful reactors.

It's a analyzable process, 1 which Centrus has refined astatine its accumulation installation successful Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Coincidentally, that's besides wherever the uranium and plutonium for the Manhattan Project were created.

That installation is perfectly captious to America's vigor independence.

When the U.S. unopen down its past Cold-War-era enrichment plants successful 2013, it was near without immoderate home industrial-scale uranium enrichment capacity. But successful 2015, the Department of Energy reported that Centrus' AC100 centrifuge was the astir precocious and lowest-risk enactment to conscionable the nation's semipermanent needs.