Since starting up a new enrichment cascade in the fall, Centrus has delivered 100 kilograms of energy-dense uranium fuel to the Department of Energy, the company wrote Friday in a regulatory filing.
“Centrus has now achieved cumulative deliveries to the DOE of over 100 kilograms of [high assay low-enriched uranium] UF6,” the company wrote in an 8K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, using a shorthand for uranium hexafluoride.
The company was able to move the product after the Department of Energy finally provided government-furnished canisters that had set deliveries back compared with schedules originally envisioned at DOE.
Centrus is operating a 16-machine cascade of its AC100M machines to make high assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for the Department of Energy under a contract awarded in 2022 and worth $1 billion over 10 years, including options. Centrus has to deliver 900 kilograms of HALEU annually under most of the contract’s performance periods.
DOE, which previously paid Centrus under a sole-source contract to develop the cascade at the agency’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, wants the HALEU to help commercialize non-light-water reactor designs that require the material for fuel.
HALEU is enriched to 19.75% uranium-235 by mass, just below the threshold of what is internationally considered highly enriched uranium.
Centrus’ AC100M technology is one of two enrichment technologies the National Nuclear Security Administration is considering as the foundation of a future all-domestic enrichment facility that could produce uranium for defense programs.
The other defense-enrichment candidate is a smaller enrichment technology being developed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. DOE has said the Oak Ridge technology is less mature than Centrus’.
Under international agreements, the NNSA says uranium for defense programs must be entirely domestic and processed only with entirely domestic machines.
