Seth Grae

Seth Grae is chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Lightbridge Corporation (NASDAQ: LTBR), a Reston, Virginia-based advanced nuclear fuel company. Resource investors follow him because Lightbridge works at the point where nuclear growth becomes uranium demand: the fuel itself. He is a frequent public commentator on where the nuclear fuel cycle — conversion, enrichment, and fabrication — is constrained, a bottleneck that sits at the center of any uranium price thesis.

Grae has been involved in advanced nuclear fuel since the 1990s, when he worked with the thorium-fuel venture Radkowsky Thorium Power, and has led the company since 2006, when it operated as Thorium Power, Ltd. He renamed it Lightbridge Corporation in 2009. Under his leadership the company has moved its metallic fuel design through successive test milestones: Norwegian regulatory approval and fabrication of test fuel for the Halden research reactor (2017), the Enfission joint venture with fuel maker Framatome (2018-2021), a front-end engineering study with enricher Centrus Energy for a pilot fuel fabrication facility in Piketon, Ohio (2023), and irradiation (testing fuel under reactor conditions) at Idaho National Laboratory's Advanced Test Reactor, followed in 2026 by selection for the US Department of Energy's Launch Pad program. Lightbridge remains a pre-revenue technology developer — no commercial reactor has yet run its fuel.

Lightbridge Fuel is a metallic uranium-zirconium alloy in a four-lobe, helically twisted rod, fueled with HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium — uranium enriched to 5-20% U-235, above the roughly 5% used in today's reactors). The shape increases surface area, so the fuel runs about 1,000 °C cooler than standard fuel — a safety margin that also lets a reactor produce more power per assembly. Grae's argument to utilities and policymakers is that fuel is one of the biggest levers on reactor output, and that uprates (raising the power output of existing reactors) are among the fastest and most capital-efficient ways to add nuclear generation.

He chairs the American Nuclear Society's International Council and sits on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute, giving him a vantage point across the industry's fuel-supply debates. For investors, his interviews and speeches — including investor-focused videos like "Lightbridge Corp: A New Type of Fuel for Nuclear Reactors" (Bloor Street Capital) — lay out enrichment capacity, HALEU supply, and fuel-cycle bottlenecks in plain terms. His current focus is qualifying Lightbridge Fuel for commercial reactors, a step that would create a new source of demand for enriched uranium if it succeeds.