LIS Technologies has acquired K-1580, a three-story, 37,803-square-meter building at the Heritage Center historical site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for a total of $6.2 million. The announcement was made on August 12, 2026. K-1580 stands on what was once the perimeter of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant — one of the central facilities of the Manhattan Project — and sits alongside the K-1330 structure that LIST already occupies for laser enrichment testing.
The building expands a campus that LIST is developing in a methodical, phased approach. In addition to K-1580 and K-1330, the company already holds a 206-acre plot — internally dubbed “LIST Island” — where a commercial laser enrichment facility worth $1.38 billion is planned, projected to create 203 jobs in Roane County. K-1580 is the piece that bridges the demonstration phase with industrial-scale operations: it will house a pilot plant for the SMILE (Stable and Medical Isotope Laser Enrichment) program, space for more than 100 new employees, and a pilot facility for UF6 deconversion. Christo Liebenberg, President and co-founder of LIST, described K-1580 as the space to expand the company’s supplementary operations in a concrete and structured way.
LIST’s technology is the only U.S.-origin patented process for laser uranium enrichment. The CRISLA-3G process uses infrared lasers to selectively excite molecules of target isotopes and separate them from the rest. Compared to conventional pulsed CO2 lasers, the system operates at a wavelength of 5.3 microns, with lower absorption and a more compact design. It is optimized for both LEU — low-enriched uranium for existing civil power plants — and HALEU, the high-assay low-enriched uranium required by the next generation of SMRs and microreactors. The platform also covers the production of stable isotopes relevant to advanced electronics and quantum technologies, as well as medical isotopes for cancer diagnostics and therapies.
The strategic context extends well beyond the local level. In December 2024, LIST was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of only six domestic companies for the LEU Enrichment Acquisition program — an initiative with a combined contract ceiling of $3.4 billion and contract terms of up to ten years. In parallel, LIST and Nano Nuclear Energy — linked by an enriched uranium supply agreement signed in 2024 and by overlapping shareholding and management structures — are building an integrated supply chain: Nano is developing upstream capabilities to supply UF6 to LIST, which in turn delivers enriched UF6 to fuel Nano’s reactors or sell on the broader market. Nano also serves as a key subcontractor on LIST’s DOE contract.
Jay Yu, Executive Chairman and CEO of LIST, has called Oak Ridge “the Silicon Valley of nuclear.” The description is precise: Oak Ridge concentrates expertise, industrial history, and now private capital aimed at reshaping the American nuclear fuel cycle. If the roadmap holds — with an NRC license application underway and the commercial plant on the horizon — LIST’s campus could become the benchmark for civil-scale laser enrichment in the United States, at a moment when dependence on foreign enriched uranium has returned to the center of the energy security debate.
