It will take more than a year longer than lately expected for Centrus Energy Corp., of Bethesda, Md., to decontaminate and decommission the industrial-scale uranium enrichment demonstration in Pike County, Ohio, the company wrote In a third-quarter earnings statement released after market close Wednesday.
The American Centrifuge Project was shut down in October 2015 after a protracted campaign, championed in Congress by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), to keep the facility open. Including $15 million worth of work done in the nine months ended Sept. 30, the total cost of D&D at the American Centrifuge will be between $45 million and $55 million through 2018, Centrus said in the release.
As recently as August, the company thought it would complete D&D in early 2017. The Wednesday earnings statement did not give a reason for the expected delay, other than what it called “changes to the approach” to performing the work.
Centrus is the former United States Enrichment Corp. The company, now led by former Obama-era Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman, reinvented itself as a uranium fuel broker for commercial nuclear power plants after a 2014 bankruptcy reorganization.
Overall, Centrus trimmed its third-quarter loss to $41.3 million, or $4.54 per share, from a net loss of $55.1 million, or $6.05 a share, in the year-ago quarter. In what was expected to be a slow quarter, revenue for the three months ended Sept. 30 dropped to just over $20 million from almost $30 million in the corresponding 2015 quarter.
“With a large percentage of customer deliveries occurring in the fourth quarter, we expected a slow quarter in the fuel segment, but we are on track to meet our sales volume and revenue guidance for 2016,” Poneman said in the Wednesday earnings statement.
Centrus’ third-quarter earnings call is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Eastern time Thursday.
