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Quantum Leap Energy and Necsa Formalize HALEU Partnership

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October 15, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Quantum Leap Energy and Necsa formalized a binding agreement to establish a joint venture for High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) production at Necsa’s Pelindaba site in South Africa, the company says. This partnership builds on agreements signed in November 2024 and February 2026, following Quantum Leap Energy’s July 2026 approval from South Africa’s Ministry of Electricity and Energy to advance uranium enrichment activities.

“The world needs new, reliable and secure sources of advanced nuclear fuel, and South Africa is well placed to provide them,” said Loyiso Tyabashe, Group Chief Executive Officer of Necsa, explaining that the collaboration positions South Africa as a potential key player in the HALEU supply chain.

Joint Venture Establishes Framework for HALEU Production at Pelindaba

Necsa’s Pelindaba site, home to the 20MW SAFARI-1 research reactor and over six decades of nuclear activity, provides an established platform for commercial HALEU production. Quantum Leap Energy intends to hold approximately 80% ownership of the Joint Venture, leading operations and capital arrangements, while Necsa will retain 20% and contribute essential site access and licensing support, according to the company.

Dr. Ryno Pretorius, Chief Executive Officer of Quantum Leap Energy, stated, “We are proud to be working alongside Necsa, whose nuclear site, infrastructure and expertise cannot be replicated by any other partner.” Currently, refurbishment of the infrastructure housing a previously constructed test bench facility is underway at Pelindaba, and engagements with relevant authorities are in progress.

Quantum Leap Energy has also secured offtake agreements with TerraPower, a leading advanced nuclear reactor developer, ensuring a market for the HALEU the Joint Venture is expected to produce. Dr. Pretorius added, “This agreement demonstrates real commercial progress and brings us one step closer to enrichment.” The arrangement also anticipates Necsa entering an engineering, procurement and construction agreement with Quantum Leap Energy, providing direct access to Necsa’s engineering capabilities and streamlining the project.

The world needs new, reliable and secure sources of advanced nuclear fuel, and South Africa is well placed to provide them.

Loyiso Tyabashe, Group Chief Executive Officer of Necsa
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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