Centrus Energy Corp. on Thursday said it can finish building an enrichment plant at a Department of Energy’s site in Ohio in time to make a test batch of energy-dense uranium fuel by December.
In a press release, Centrus said it has built and tested a 16-centrifuge enrichment cascade at DOE’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, but still has to finish building a storage area to the house hundreds of kilograms of high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel the government has hired the Bethesda, Md.-based company to make.
The enrichment plant also needs some approvals from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Centrus said in its press release.
“Centrus [is] on track to begin demonstrating first-of-a-kind production of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU) in Piketon, Ohio, by the end of 2023,” the company wrote in the release.
Centrus on Nov. 30 signed a potentially 10-year, $1-billion contract with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy to produce HALEU using the company’s new cascade of 16 AC100M-model centrifuges at Portsmouth. The base period runs through December 2024 and is followed by a trio of three-year options that would run the contract out to 2032. Centrus would owe DOE 3.6 metric tons of HALEU if the government picks up all of its options. That’s 900 kilograms a year, starting with the 12 months ending December 2024.
Before Centrus can lock in the options, however, it has to produce a 20 kilograms test batch of DOE-approved HALEU by Dec. 31, 2023.
And before Centrus can produce the test batch, it has to finish building the Portsmouth plant’s Fissile Material Storage Area: the holding pen for DOE’s HALEU. As of August, the storage area was about 60% percent complete, the Department of Energy wrote in a solicitation for bids for the contract that Centrus, the sole bidder, eventually won.
HALEU contains 19.75% uranium-235 by mass, just below what is conventionally considered high enriched uranium. DOE wants to produce HALEU domestically to help develop new nuclear reactor designs.
The agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), meanwhile, has considered using Centrus’ technology AC100M technology to produce uranium for national defense programs, including nuclear weapons and naval-reactor fuel. The NNSA has said it will need a new domestic uranium enrichment plant by the 2050s or so.
