In a move necessary to produce hundreds of kilograms of energy-dense, U.S.-origin uranium fuel for DOE, Centrus Energy Corp. extended a lease on Department of Energy buildings at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio for three years, through 2025.
The buildings support the 16-machine cascade Centrus, Bethesda, Md., is building for DOE under a $115 million sole-source, cost-share contract awarded in 2019. Centrus and the agency agreed to extend the lease through Dec. 31, 2025. It otherwise would have expired on May 31, 2021, according to an 8-K filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
Centrus said it would append the terms of its extended lease with DOE to the company’s next 10-Q filing with the Commission. That report will cover financial results for the quarter that ends Sept. 30.
The base period of Centrus’ contract with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy calls for the company to produce a sample of High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) by March 15, 2022. A one-year option period, which DOE had yet to exercise at deadline, would call for the company to produce a 200-kilogram tranche of HALEU for DOE advanced reactor projects after that. The fuel would have a 19.75% concentration of the Uranium-235 isotope: about as energy-dense and low enriched uranium can be.
Centrus built the 16-machine cascade in Portsmouth on the site of the former American Centrifuge Project, which shut down in 2016. The new cascade is based on the company’s AC100 technology, which is one of the technologies the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) might use in a next-generation enrichment facility capable of producing low enriched uranium for nuclear-weapon programs by 2050 or so.
The HALEU cascade Centrus finished building at Portsmouth in March 2021 cannot, as constructed, make defense-usable uranium because some of the parts used to build it are of foreign origin and subject to peaceful-use restrictions. The company has said it could either produce new centrifuges with all domestic parts or even modify the existing ones for defense duty.
Amid broader controversy about whether U.S. nuclear weapons programs can only use domestically mined and refined uranium, the NNSA has delayed its choice between AC100 technology and a smaller-scale technology developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The agency has put off the choice again and again, most recently after election day, when the agency decided to study whether various uranium efforts at the NNSA and the Office of Nuclear Energy could be somehow combined. At one point, the agency thought it would make the selection by the end of 2019.
