The Department of Energy said Monday it added half a dozen companies to an indefinite-quantity, indefinite contract to supply low-enriched uranium for commercial nuclear power generation.
The contract has a total value of $3.4 billion over 10 years. Each company will get at least a task order worth $2 million, DOE said in its solicitation for the work this summer.
The awardees are:
- American Centrifuge Operating, LLC, a subsidiary of Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md., operating a 16-machine uranium enrichment cascade under contract to the Department of Energy at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio.
- General Matter, Inc., San Francisco. The company has a light internet presence and its website does not say exactly what the company does. General Matter’s unique entity ID, a number assigned to companies doing business with the government, does not have any data associated with it on SAM.gov, the federal procurement website. General Matter is also one of the companies added to a separate DOE contract for high-assay, low-enriched uranium. The company, incorporated in Delaware on Jan. 25, according to publicly available state records, did not responded to an email query about its company’s capabilities. A Department of Energy spokesperson declined to say whether the agency was familiar with the company’s capabilities and directed requests for comment to the company. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesperson on Monday said General Matter “has mailed a letter of intent to the NRC in anticipation of a forthcoming application for the necessary licenses to support the production and handling of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium.”
- Global Laser Enrichment, LLC, a Wilmington, N.C., company that licenses laser enrichment technology owned by Australia’s Silex Systems. Global Laser Enrichment in November announced it acquired land for a new enrichment plant near the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site near Paducah, Ky., a former gaseous diffusion complex that enriched uranium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
- Louisiana Energy Services, LLC, a subsidiary of Urenco USA, the U.S. arm of the European-govern-owned Urenco, with stateside headquarters in Eunice, N.M., where the company also operates an enrichment plant.
- Laser Isotope Separation Technologies, Inc., An Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based company developing a U.S.-origin laser enrichment technology.
- Orano Federal Services, LLC, a domestic arm of the French company Orano, which plans to build a new uranium enrichment facility on land formerly owned by the Department of Energy at the Oak Ridge Site near Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Though there is some overlap among the awardees, the low-enriched uranium contract is separate from a DOE contract, awarded in October, for high-assay, low-enriched uranium.
This year, the U.S. banned imports of uranium from the country’s biggest supplier, Russia. The ban will go fully into effect in 2028, with Centrus, the biggest broker of Russian uranium to U.s. utilities, seeking waivers to continue imports until then.
