Centrus Energy hedged the end date for decommissioning and decontaminating its shuttered industrial-scale uranium-enrichment demonstration in Ohio, saying in its latest quarterly earnings report Tuesday the project will be “substantially complete” by year’s end.
In the 2017 first quarter, Centrus spent some $5.4 to decommission and decontaminate (D&D) the American Centrifuge plant at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth facility. Those costs are outside the company’s now-expired contract to operate that plant. In the corresponding period of 2016, costs outside the company’s American Centrifuge contract were nearly twice that: $12 million or so.
The 2016 first quarter included the cost of demobilizing the Piketon facility in preparation for the D&D that began in the second quarter of last year, Centrus said in its latest quarterly earning press release.
American Centrifuge D&D at Piketon should be “substantially completed by year-end,” according to the company.
Centrus has continued limited American Centrifuge technology research and development at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory under contract with UT-Battelle, DOE’s prime contractor for the Tennessee lab. The one-year, $25 million contract expires Sept. 30, and Centrus is angling for a follow-on, according to Tuesday’s press release.
While Centrus plans to lease the main American Centrifuge complex in Piketon through 2019, when its lease with DOE expires, the company has already de-leased two facilities there and plans to de-lease two more by 2018.
Overall, the company earned $7.6 million, or $0.72 per share, for the quarter ended March 31, 2017, compared with a loss of $14.6 million, or $1.60 a share, for the first quarter of 2016. The company credited “gains on early extinguishment of long-term debt” for its first-quarter profit. Revenue was down sharply year over year, some 92 percent, to just over $7 million in the first quarter.
Centrus, the former U.S. Enrichment Corp., gets most of its revenue from brokering uranium fuel to commercial nuclear-power utilities. Last year, Centrus said, more customers took their fuel deliveries earlier in the year. This year, customers plan to take deliveries in the fourth quarter, according to the latest press release. The company said it is on track to hit its year revenue target of $200 million to $225 million.
Centrus on April 12 de-leased the X-1020 and X-3000 administrative facilities, which were never used for enrichment. That is according to a company filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made public Tuesday. The company plans to de-lease the X-801 and X-112 facilities on Nov. 1, and April 4, 2018.
De-leasing the facilities would be “mutually beneficial to both Centrus and the DOE,” the company wrote in the filing, which is dated April 28.
Much of the waste from the American Centrifuge demo in Ohio will be trucked over the road to DOE’s Nevada National Security Site for disposal, Centrus has said.
