Centrus Energy, which is developing a new uranium enrichment cascade for the Department of Energy, is scheduled to report first-quarter 2020 earnings today after U.S. markets close.
The Bethesda, Md., nuclear fuel supplier has scheduled a conference call for 8:30 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday on the earnings report for the quarter ended March 31, according to a press release.
When Centrus reported its 2019 yearly earnings in March, management suspended its earnings guidance for 2020 and said the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic could probably prevent it from returning to profitability this year, as it had previously forecast.
Also in March, CEO Daniel Poneman predicted the COVID-19 response could slow progress on the new 16-machine enrichment cascade the company is building at DOE’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, to produce high assay low enriched uranium.
Centrus is building the cascade on the site of the now-dismantled American Centrifuge project. That system, like the one under construction, was based on the company’s AC100 technology, but could not produce uranium for U.S. nuclear weapons and defense programs owing to some foreign parts in its supply chain.
The new Centrus cascade — funded under a sole-source, 80-20 cost-share contract from DOE’s Nuclear Energy Oak Ridge Site Office — could with modifications eventually produce unobligated low-enriched uranium suitable, among other things, for producing weapon-usable tritium in civilian nuclear power plants.
The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration is considering whether to use Centrus’ AC100 technology for this purpose, or whether to instead use what it calls a smaller-scale enrichment technology developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The weapons agency was set to pick between the two by December and needs one of them to be ready to go by the 2040s.
Editor’s note, 5/11/2020, 7:48 p.m: The story was corrected to indicate that the new cascade Centrus is building would require modifications to produce unobligated enriched uranium
