About a week remained as of Friday for interested parties to express interest to the Department of Energy about running a demonstration project in Ohio to produce hundreds of kilograms of high assay low enriched uranium for the department.
DOE envisions a contract lasting as long as 10 years. The first year could call for completion of the cascade demonstration, including production of 900 kilograms of high assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), which contains 19.75% by mass of the Uranium 235 isotope. That is the upper boundary of what’s considered low-enriched uranium. The contract could include a trio of three-year options for additional HALEU production, DOE wrote.
“The new contract will be a competitive award in early 2022 to complete the HALEU demonstration and produce HALEU in the most expeditious manner possible,” DOE wrote in a procurement note last week. “The Department of Energy will make available the American Centrifuge Plant through a lease arrangement with the successful offeror, DOE said.
Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., built a HALEU enrichment cascade at DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, under a contract awarded in 2019 and worth up to $115 million: a figure that includes options that won’t be picked up now that the government has separated the production of HALEU from the contract to construct the 16-machine cascade at Portsmouth.
Centrus, the former U.S. Enrichment Corp., built the new HALEU cascade in the same building that once hosted the now-decommissioned American Centrifuge Project, which DOE canceled in 2015.
DOE, the agency wrote in its procurement note, decided to separate the construction and demonstration portions of the HALEU project because of supply chain disruptions related to COVID-19. Centrus said in regulatory filings last year that the pandemic affected the government’s ability to deliver HALEU storage containers in time to start a production demonstration that was supposed to wrap up in June.
DOE wants the HALEU to fuel demonstrations of next-generation advanced nuclear reactors. The agency now says it wants even more of the fuel than it did before: 900 kilograms annually under the contract to be awarded this year, compared with a maximum of 600 kilograms annually under the options on Centrus’ contract.
The cascade at Portsmouth, funded by DOE’s Office of Science, is built on the same technology that the National Nuclear Security Administration is considering using for the next domestic uranium enrichment cascade, which the nuclear-weapons agency has said it needs by 2050 or so to ensure continuity in nuclear-weapons maintenance and modernization. The weapons agency in January told the Exchange Monitor that it still has not decided which technology to use.
In December, after disclosing DOE’s planned changes for the HALEU demonstration at Piketon, Centrus said in a statement that it “looks forward to the opportunity to compete for additional funding when and if it becomes available as part of the HALEU Availability Program authorized by Congress” in the Energy Act of 2020.
