The Department of Energy this week solicited bids for a potentially 10-year contract to produce high assay low-enriched uranium fuel using a centrifuge cascade Centrus Energy Corp. built at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio.
Bids for the The High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) Demonstration Cascade Completion contract are due Aug. 8. The contract has a one-year base period and a trio of three-year options. Under phase one of the contract’s base period, the winner would finish building the cascade, switch it on and demonstrate its viability by cranking out a 20 kilogram tranche of HALEU. The second phase of the base would call for production of 900 kilograms of HALEU.
The three-year options each call for production of 900 kilograms of HALEU annually. The fuel, which by mass would contain 19.75% of the Uranium 235 isotope, would ring in at the upper boundary of what is considered low-enriched uranium.
The cascade completion contract, officially open to all offerors, is a follow-on to the sole-source, 80-20 cost-share contract DOE awarded to Centrus in 2019, and which the agency recently extended to November.
Centrus’ existing deal, now worth about $140 million, calls for the company to bring the cascade of 16 AC100 centrifuges to the brink of operation. Originally, the contract had an option that would have called for Centrus to produce the cascade’s first tranche of HALEU, some 200 kilograms of it, on a sole-source basis.
But after delays blamed on supply chain issues brought about by COVID-19, the agency decided instead to cancel Centrus’ option and contract out a much larger production run under the new HALEU Demonstration Cascade Completion contract.
Centrus’ AC100 technology was one of two core technologies the National Nuclear Security Administration was considering using as the basis of a new domestic uranium enrichment plant that could be ready by the 2050s or so to produce uranium for use in nuclear weapons programs.
