Centrus Energy should wrap up $15 million worth of decontamination and decommissioning at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee by Sept. 30, according to a financial filing Monday.
Last September, DOE issued the contract to the Maryland-based company to prepare the K-1600 building for demolition. Centrus leased the K-1600 building to further test its American Centrifuge uranium enrichment technology in recent years. The company’s government contract for the centrifuge work expired in September 2018.
“Under our lease with DOE, we will remove and dispose of government owned materials and equipment in order to render the facility non-contaminated and unclassified,” Centrus said in its 10-K annual financial report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The facility did not house any enrichment cascades, only centrifuge machines in individual test stands, according to Centrus spokesman Jeremy Derryberry.
Centrus has cited the remediation contract as one example of how it is generating new income while slogging through tough times in the nuclear fuel services business that followed the March 2011 meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The company was awarded the K-1600 work as a result of its work to dismantle its American Centrifuge demonstration cascade at the DOE Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
“We have been awarded additional D&D work at another facility on the Oak Ridge reservation and are pursuing additional opportunities where we can bring our experience and expertise to bear in solving complex engineering problems and manufacturing to state-of-the-art levels of precision,” Centrus President and CEO Dan Poneman said in a March 29 quarterly earnings call. He did not specify the location of the additional work at Oak Ridge.
The company believes it has successfully completed decommissioning at the Ohio facility. Centrus expects to officially end its lease and return the area inside an existing process building which housed its 120-machine cascade to DOE on June 30 “in the same condition as the facility was in when it was leased to us,” accounting for normal wear-and-tear, the 10-K says.
The company began remediation of the Portsmouth cascade in 2016, after the Energy Department decided not to continue funding the advanced uranium enrichment demonstration in 2015. Centrus briefly kept the cascade going with its own money.
Potential Contract on High-Assay Uranium Fuel Raises Questions
On Jan. 7, DOE issued a notice of intent to award Centrus a contract potentially worth $115 million over three years to deploy a cascade of 16 centrifuges to demonstrate the ability to produce high assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU), suitable for a range of military and civilian applications.
While Centrus has started contract talks with DOE about the proposed demonstration project, there is no assurance a deal will be reached and the project will go forward, the company noted.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Energy Secretary Rick Perry he finds the contract proposal odd given that the URENCO USA plant in Eunice, N.M., already provides over one-third of enriched uranium used by domestic nuclear power plants.
The senator asked during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources hearing on DOE’s budget request for fiscal 2020 why the agency seeks taxpayer funding for “what effectively already exists” in the private sector.
“That company [URENCO] is not a United States-owned company and that is the real key here,” Perry replied. “We need a domestic supply of this high-assay uranium product” to fuel advanced reactors.
URENCO USA is part of the URENCO family of companies. The London area-based organization was founded in 1970 by the governments of Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
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.
“It has to do with the Department of Defense requirement to restore that market,” Perry said during the hearing. The type of reactors that could use this fuel “may have a clear DOD nexus,” he added.
When pressed for details, Perry said he did not think he should discuss specifics during a public hearing. Perry invited Heinrich to discuss the issue in a secure facility at DOE headquarters. Heinrich said he would plan to do so.
“This demonstration is intended to show that a U.S. technology option is available to the private sector as the market for HALEU emerges, making it critical to promoting U.S. leadership in this emerging market sector and to advancing vital strategic interests,” according to language in the budget proposal.
Centrus’ latest financial filing also says total employment at Centrus was 226 as of Dec. 31, 2018, down from 290 one year earlier.
Formerly known as USEC, the company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization on Sept. 30, 2014. The company was incorporated in 1998 as part of the privatization of the United States Enrichment Corp., which was part of DOE.
