Parts of Centrus’ high assay, low-enriched uranium cascade at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio were ready to operate as specified in a sole-source contract with the Department of Energy, the company said Wednesday.
The 16-machine AC100M cascade was ready to start up by March 31, a company spokesperson said in an email Wednesday, except for its mass spectrometer, distributed control system and fissile material storage area — those essential elements were except from last week’s deadline, under the company’s recently modified contract with DOE.
Because DOE decided last year to handle high assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) production from the cascade under a new, competitively awarded contract expected to hit the streets in April or May, last week’s milestone will be the last big one on Centrus’ sole-source, 80-20 cost-share contract, awarded in 2019 and worth more than $120 million after the recent modification.
Previously, DOE thought it could start production at Portsmouth this summer by triggering an option on Centrus’ sole source contract, the base period of which covered construction of the new cascade. However, Centrus said that the COVID-19 pandemic delayed delivery of government-furnished cylinders, without which the company could not start producing HALEU.
So, DOE planned to hold a competition for a follow-on HALEU production contract, which notionally will require the winner to produce 900 kilograms of HALEU at Portsmouth instead of the 200 kilograms called for under the production option on Centrus’ sole-source deal.
After complaints from Capitol Hill that DOE was steering HALEU development money to Centrus without regard for existing — but foreign-owned — suppliers of of the material, Congress, in a report appended to the omnibus 2020 budget bill passed in March, directed DOE to conduct any advanced nuclear fuels programs in a way “that will encourage, rather than discourage, the private sector commercialization of HALEU production.”
Orano USA, the U.S. arm of the French-owned nuclear-services giant, is one of — and one of the most vocal — companies keeping an eye on DOE’s HALEU program.
“Orano’s many years of experience supporting the U.S. commercial nuclear energy industry with uranium conversion and enrichment services can be of significant value to the DOE as it develops a secure and stable HALEU market,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email on Monday. “We look forward to seeing the details in the pending HALEU RFP [request for proposals] and considering how we may support and respond to this significant effort.”
Centrus’ sole-source HALEU contract was ostensibly part of DOE’s effort to create fuel for advanced reactors the agency wants to help shepherd to commercial viability, but the deal has also given Centrus practical experience with its AC100 centrifuge, and the associated supply chain, amid an ongoing search for a next-generation enrichment technology that could be used for nuclear weapons production later this century.
By the mid-2040s or so, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) says it will start running out of the U.S.-origin uranium it needs for nuclear weapons programs. Under a domestic uranium enrichment analysis of alternatives now two years overdue, Centrus’ AC100 machines are one of two enrichment technologies the NNSA was considering for a new all-domestic enrichment facility. The other was a smaller scale technology developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The NNSA had yet to select one technology or the other as of Wednesday afternoon.
