Citing COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions on the agency’s end, the Department of Energy has cancelled plans for Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., to operate a new uranium enrichment centrifuge at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, next year, the company disclosed Friday.
Under a DOE contract awarded in 2019, Centrus subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating was by March supposed to produce a small sample of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel using the 16-machine cascade of AC100M centrifuges going up at Portsmouth, in the same building where the company’s now-cancelled American Centrifuge Project used to be.
But on Dec. 7, DOE “modified the scope of the existing contract to eliminate the requirement to operate the cascade,” Centrus wrote in an 8-K filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. “DOE has indicated that it is considering providing for the operational portion of the demonstration to be performed under a new, competitively-awarded contract, with operations to begin in 2022.”
In its 8-K filing, Centrus said that because of COVID, DOE would not be able to deliver HALEU storage cylinders in time “to begin production during the current period of performance of the Agreement.”
In a statement to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor, the company added that it “is continuing its work under the contract and 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 last year” in the Energy Act of 2020.
As part of 2022 appropriations bills that were unreconciled as of Tuesday morning, the full House directed, and Senate Appropriations Committee encouraged, DOE to make industry compete for funds doled out under the availability program. Both bills would fund the program.
Centrus’ sole-source, 80-20 cost-share HALEU demonstration contract with DOE is worth about $115 million. The contract had two years of firm money, which largely covered construction of the new cascade and delivery of a sample of HALEU by March 15. HALEU contains just under 20% of the Uranium-235 isotope, slightly less than what is by international convention considered highly enriched.
An option on the contract called for delivery of 200 kilograms of HALEU from Portsmouth by June 1, 2022.
In November, and previously, Centrus said it “has managed to keep our own construction work on track throughout the pandemic.” The company first sounded the alarm about possible pandemic-related delays to the HALEU cascade in April 2020.
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.
