Centrus Energy Corp. appointed Phillip Strawbridge as its new chief financial officer, the company announced this week.
Strawbridge, 64 this year, was most recently an adviser for the mid-market investment firm Court Square Capital, in New York. He was previously chief financial officer for nuclear services firm EnergySolutions,from 2006 to 2010, according to Centrus’ announcement on Monday. Strawbridge led BNG America, another nuclear cleanup company, from 1999 until its 2006 acquisition by EnergySolutions.
Strawbridge takes over as Centrus’ chief financial officer about a month-and-a-half after his predecessor, Marian Davis, left the job. Davis, who tendered her resignation in June, capped her eight-year Centrus career with a roughly 18-month run as CFO.
Along with chief financial officer, Strawbridge is also Centrus’ senior vice president, chief administrative officer, and treasurer. Davis also held those titles.
Strawbridge joins the Bethesda, Md.-based uranium broker and enrichment-technology developer as it dives headfirst into construction of a new centrifugal cascade for uranium enrichment. Just that could give it a leg up in a competition to design the next domestic uranium enrichment complex.
Under a $115-million DOE contract, Centrus is on the hook to produce 600 kilograms of high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel by June 1, 2020. The pact calls for Centrus to build a new enrichment cascade on the site of the canceled American Centrifuge Project demonstration at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
Centrus did not reply to a request for comment this week about whether the agency had yet definitized the contract, which, according to a copy of the deal Centrus posted online, is with the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management in Tennessee. The Office of Environmental Management deferred a request for comment to DOE’s Office of Science, which did not reply to a request for comment.
An undefinitized contract lets work begin on a project before the parties have agreed on all the cost, schedule, and other terms of the work.
Unlike the American Centrifuge Project, Centrus plans to build the new cascade using only U.S.-made parts, making the system potentially suitable for defense programs. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to select its preferred domestic enrichment technology by December 2019. In that evaluation, the NNSA is considering only Centrus’ AC-100 technology and a smaller-scale technology being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The NNSA will need a source of unobligated low-enriched uranium by the 2040s to continue production of tritium in commercial reactors. Unobligated uranium does not carry peaceful-use-only restrictions attached to uranium purchased on the spot market. Tritium boosts the explosive power of nuclear weapons. The radioactive hydrogen isotope decays over time and must be replaced regularly with new tritium.
