Centrus Energy Corp. said Monday it has appointed Phillip Strawbridge as its new chief financial officer.
Strawbridge, 64 this year, was most recently an adviser for the mid-market investment firm Court Square Capital, in New York. He was also previously chief financial officer for nuclear services firm EnergySolutions,from 2006 to 2010, according to Centrus’ announcement. Strawbridge led BNG America, another nuclear cleanup company, from 1999 until its 2006 acquisition by EnergySolutions.
Strawbridge takes over as Centrus’ chief financial officer about a month-and-a-half after predecessor, Marian Davis, left the job. Davis, who tendered her resignation in June, capped her eight-year Centrus career with a roughly 18-month run as chief financial officer.
Along with CFO, Strawbridge is also Centrus’ senior vice president, chief administrative officer, and treasurer, as Davis was.
Strawbridge joins the Bethesda, Md.-based uranium broker and enrichment-technology developer with the company diving headfirst into construction of a new centrifugal enrichment cascade. Just that could give it a leg up in a competition to design the next domestic uranium enrichment complex.
Under a still-undefinitized $115-million contract with DOE’s Office of Science, Centrus is on the hook to produce 600 kilograms of high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel by June 1, 2020. The pact calls for Centrus to build a new enrichment cascade on the site of the canceled American Centrifuge Project demonstration at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
Unlike the American Centrifuge Project, Centrus plans to build the new cascade using only U.S.-made parts, making the equipment potentially suitable for defense programs. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration plans to select its preferred domestic enrichment technology by December 2019. In that evaluation, NNSA is considering only Centrus’ AC-100 technology and a smaller-scale technology being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
