Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) thinks the Department of Energy may not have the authority to fund a new uranium enrichment cascade under a $115 million sole-source contract announced with Centrus Energy earlier this month.
“Congress did not authorize or fund this project in the 2019 annual budget appropriations process,” Barrasso wrote in a Wednesday letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry. “This contract appears to use American taxpayer funding to bailout Centrus, an unsuccessful business that relies on commercial relationships with Russian state-owned corporations to stay in business.”
Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor obtained a copy of the letter on Thursday.
Centrus, run by former Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Poneman, is the onetime United States Enrichment Corp. The company shut down the last U.S. domestic enrichment plant in 2011 and has since survived as a reseller of uranium, including from Russian stock. It emerged from a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in 2014.
Earlier in January, DOE’s Nuclear Energy Oak Ridge Site Office said it would give Centrus subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating LLC a contract worth up to $115 million over three years to build a brand new series of its AC-100M centrifuges at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio. The 16 machines would by October 2020 produce an unspecified quantity of 19.75-percent enriched uranium fuel product known as high-assay low-enriched uranium.
The new cascade would be built on a site that once housed the much larger American Centrifuge industrial-scale enrichment demonstration that DOE defunded in 2015, and which Centrus has since demolished. The new cascade would have to produce uranium suitable for defense programs: something the old cascade could not do, because it contained parts limited by international agreements to peaceful use.
The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is eyeing Centrus technology as a possible future source of low-enriched uranium needed to produce tritium for nuclear weapons.
Barrasso said he was “at a loss” as to why the NNSA, which is keeping some Centrus technology on life support at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory under a separate contract, would not competitively procure an enrichment demonstration such as the one sole-sourced to Centrus by the agency’s Nuclear Energy office.
The chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee asked Perry to reply to his letter by Feb. 8, and answer nine questions about why the agency decided to sole source this work to Centrus. Among other things, Barrasso wanted to know how much uranium Centrus would need for the demonstration and whether any commercial spin-off of the demonstration centrifuge would be required to refine only U.S. origin uranium.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
Centrus, through a spokesperson, did not address Barrasso’s challenges directly, but said the company would be open to work with all stakeholders to get the new ACM-100 technology up and running.
“Centrus is working closely with DOE and U.S. industry to ensure that American companies lead the way in the nuclear industry and in fueling nuclear plants around the world for decades to come,” the spokesperson wrote in a Friday email. “Our work to ensure the United States has an advanced uranium enrichment technology to meet the country’s energy and national security needs is a key piece of this larger effort. We are pleased to provide our expertise and services to meet DOE’s needs. We look forward to working with all interested parties to facilitate the emergence of a U.S. fuel cycle to support the promising advanced reactor market.”
Barrasso’s home state of Wyoming was once a major domestic supplier of uranium ore.
