Mark Chalmers

In early 2026, while larger uranium producers debated restart schedules and long-term contracting strategies, Mark Chalmers was already running the only conventional uranium mill still operating in the United States — and using it to do something most of the industry still treated as experimental. At the White Mesa Mill in Utah, Energy Fuels was processing monazite sands into separated rare-earth oxides, including the heavy rare earths that China had restricted, while simultaneously producing uranium for American nuclear utilities.

The move looked opportunistic to some and strategically inevitable to others. Chalmers, a mining engineer who had spent five decades in uranium operations from Colorado to Namibia, framed it simply: the mill already existed, the chemistry overlapped, and the United States needed domestic capacity in both fuel and critical materials. Critics questioned whether a company that had long been a modest U.S. uranium producer could credibly stretch into rare earths, titanium, zircon and eventually magnets without diluting focus. Chalmers’ answer was already visible in production numbers, government financing interest, and a pipeline of feedstock and downstream deals. The controversy was not whether the strategy was ambitious; it was whether anyone else in the Western uranium sector had moved as far, as fast.