BWXT Canada to supply fuel bundle hardware for fabrication of full-scale ANEEL demonstration fuel bundles at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories.
Mehul Shah (left), Clean Core Thorium Energy’s CEO & Founder, with John MacQuarrie (right), BWXT’s President of Commercial Operations, at the BWXT facility in Toronto
CHICAGO, Aug. 03, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) has taken another step toward the commercial demonstration of its ANEEL nuclear fuel platform through a fuel fabrication agreement with BWXT Canada Ltd. (BWXT). The agreement enables the fabrication of full-scale demonstration fuel bundles at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), bringing together the final manufacturing capabilities required to prepare ANEEL fuel for irradiation in an operating reactor.
Under the agreement, BWXT Canada will supply qualified fuel bundle hardware that will be integrated with ANEEL fuel pellets and assembled into complete, reactor-representative fuel bundles at the CNL’s Chalk River Laboratories. The agreement establishes another key element of the manufacturing pathway supporting CCTE’s commercial demonstration program.
Completing the Demonstration Supply Chain
This collaboration establishes a clear pathway for fabricating ANEEL fuel in a form suitable for in-reactor testing.
- CCTE provides the ANEEL fuel design and material specifications.
- BWXT Canada supplies the fuel bundle component hardware under the existing manufacturing QA Program.
- CNL fabricates ANEEL fuel pellets and carries out final full-bundle assembly for demonstration under established nuclear standards.
Together, these roles enable the transition from validated fuel design to fully assembled fuel bundles ready for demonstration irradiation.
“Sourcing materials from BWXT Canada represents an important step forward in demonstrating the viability of ANEEL fuel in existing reactor systems,” said Mehul Shah, CEO and Founder of Clean Core Thorium Energy. “Their decades of expertise in safe and reliable fuel fabrication, combined with deep experience with CANDU technology, combine to build a strong foundation for advancing our mission to deliver safer, more efficient nuclear energy solutions.”
The assembled ANEEL fuel bundles will be used in a demonstration irradiation program to generate in-reactor performance data. This data will support regulatory qualification and future deployment of ANEEL fuel across compatible reactor platforms. By leveraging existing fuel formats and infrastructure, the program is designed to introduce thorium-based fuel into the current reactor fleet without requiring major reactor modifications. This collaboration ensures manufacturer’s fuel qualification for commercialization.
The fabrication program builds on a series of technical milestones achieved by CCTE over the past year. CCTE recently completed accelerated irradiation testing of ANEEL fuel rodlets at Idaho National Laboratory’s Advanced Test Reactor, achieving burnups exceeding 60 GWd/MTU. The company also published a comprehensive peer-reviewed engineering assessment in Nuclear Engineering and Design, a leading peer-reviewed journal in nuclear engineering published by Elsevier, demonstrating the fuel’s performance, safety characteristics and compatibility across multiple reactor applications.
Together, these achievements establish the analytical, experimental and manufacturing foundation supporting the commercial demonstration of the ANEEL nuclear fuel platform.
About ANEEL Fuel
ANEEL is CCTE’s nuclear fuel platform which includes fuel designs, patents and intellectual property, physical, high-burn up irradiation data, and advanced modeling. The fuel is a flexible design with a combination of thorium and enriched uranium that is a drop-in replacement for existing and new reactor designs including Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs), Gen IV reactors, and Light Water Reactors (LWRs). This allows for integration into current reactor fleets without reactor or core design modifications. ANEEL is designed to achieve higher burnup and improved fuel utilization, with the potential to reduce long-lived spent fuel volumes per unit of energy generated and strengthen safety margins and proliferation resistance.
About Clean Core Thorium Energy
Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) is a US-based nuclear fuel company exploring thorium-driven nuclear innovations. Clean Core’s patented nuclear fuel platform (called ANEEL) is designed, patented and tested for flexibility across configurations of thorium and enriched uranium (LEU to HALEU).This novel solution delivers significant benefits as compared to current fuels including improved safety margins and proliferation resistance, reduced waste, better economics and more in today’s nuclear reactors. CCTE is developing the fuel and supply chains to support today’s nuclear reactors and the future’s nuclear scale up.
Learn more at https://cleancore.energy/. Follow us on social media: LinkedIn and X.
Media Contact
Milan Shah
Chief Operating Officer
[email protected]
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3c7717ef-da26-4439-9b30-dac44f73e0d0
