On Capitol Hill, Centrus makes case for sidelining allied uranium enrichment

The Department of Energy should prioritize U.S. companies as it awards billions of dollars worth of uranium enrichment subsidies over the next 10 years, the CEO of Centrus Energy said during a Capitol Hill briefing this week.

“There is a strong case for investing in an American supply chain,” Amir Vexler, Centrus’ chief executive, said during the briefing. 

Centrus is among the companies competing for funding under DOE’s Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) Enrichment Acquisition, a 10-year, $3.4 billion, indefinitely-quantity, indefinite-delivery contract for which the agency solicited bids in July and envisions multiple awardees.

The competition is open to both U.S. companies and companies owned by allied countries, so long as those ally-owned shops build new enrichment facilities in the U.S. That puts European stalwarts such as Urenco and Orano in the mix. 

“The Europeans are important partners,” Vexler said during the Centrus-hosted briefing. “Nothing can take that away from this discussion. But, in my view, when it comes to U.S. taxpayer dollars, the focus should be on American technology built by American workers and rel[y] on [an] American supply chain.” 

Even for new European enrichment facilities built in the U.S., “[a]ll the supply chain jobs and all the supply chain and engineering is done in Europe,” Vexler said. 

Though Centrus’ current crop of centrifuges, a 16-machine cascade of cranking out high assay low-enriched uranium for a DOE pilot project, are not built wholly from U.S.-made parts, their design, AC100M, is the only domestic design producing enriched uranium in the U.S. today.

DOE is nurturing a competitor to the AC100M, but the government so far has classified that centrifuge, being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, as a possible means of enriching uranium for defense purposes. 

As it carried out its influence campaign this week on Capitol Hill, Centrus is in the process of adapting to the federal government’s decision this year to ban imports of Russian uranium beginning on Jan. 1, 2028. 

The decision had foundation-shaking ramifications for Centrus, which since its emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014 has made most of its money brokering Russian uranium to operators of U.S. nuclear power plants. In 2023, these imports counted for $208 million of Centrus’ annual revenue, or about 65% of the company’s top line.