Centrus Energy, Bethesda, Md., on Wednesday posted net income of about $41.5 million, or $2.95 a share for the 2021 third quarter, up from a loss of $7 million or 83 cents a share, in the year-ago period.
Quarterly revenue was about $91 million, up from more than $57.5 million a year ago, mostly due to a $43.5 million pension settlement with the Department of Energy in the 2021 quarter, the company wrote in an earnings press release posted after markets closed.
Quarterly revenue in the company’s bedrock LEU, or Separative Work Units, segment — which accounts for uranium fuel sold to utilities — was about $19 million, up from only $100,000 in the 2020 third-quarter.Revenue for the Uranium segment, which sells natural uranium to traders and utilities, was just under $13 million for the third quarter, down from more than $18.5 million in the 2020 quarter.
At the Technical Solutions segment, the main beneficiary of the pension settlement in the quarter, quarterly revenue was about $59 million, up from nearly $15 million in the 2020 third quarter. Net out the settlement and technical solutions revenue was about $20 million for the third quarter of 2021, the company said. Technical Solutions handles Centrus’ uranium enrichment technology development, including the high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) demonstration contract with DOE and the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio.
Bill Condon became the lead for Amentum’s Nuclear & Environment Business, replacing the recently promoted Jim Blankenhorn, and will quarterback the company’s pursuit of Department of Energy defense-nuclear site contracts, the closely held Germantown, Md., group announced.
A longtime URS man who remained with the company through the AECOM years, Condon has more than 30 years experience in nuclear cleanup and operations, including at the Hanford site in Washington state and at Sellafield in the United Kingdom, according to a company press release last week.
Amentum recently made Blankenhorn the head of the company’ s Technical Services business, which involves engineering, design and operation of environmental projects for domestic and international governmental customers.
Among his recent assignments, Blankenhorn was the recovery manager at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s management and operations contractor from 2014 to 2017, when the Department of Energy’s only deep-underground repository for transuranic waste was clawing back from a pair of accidents that shut the mine down and backed up waste disposal across the old weapons complex for about three years.
In 2020, Dan Brouillette, then-President Donald Trump’s second energy secretary, allegedly violated the Hatch Act — the law that prevents public servants from campaigning for or supporting candidates for office, the special counsel said in a report this week.
Brouillette and 12 other Trump administration officials were implicated in the findings. According to the report, Brouillette made statements opposing then-candidate Joe Biden’s platform during an official appearance on Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade Show in October 2020.
A former public servant found guilty of Hatch Act violations could be barred from serving in a public capacity for five years or fined up to $1,000.
Brouillette was appointed energy secretary in 2019, replacing former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who oversaw the Trump administration’s ill-fated attempt to restart the mothballed Yucca Mountain repository in Nye County, Nev.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is still hammering the Department of Energy about a nearly decade-old recommendation to stiffen safety requirements at Savannah River Site’s Building 235-F to avoid a plutonium release from the aging structure.
In a Nov. 2 letter to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, Joyce Connery, the board chair, praised DOE for removing “combustibles, ignition sources and some material-at-risk” from the 1950s-vintage facility, but dinged the agency for not updating Building 235-F’s safety basis — a document that categorizes a nuclear facility’s risks and hazards and explains how to mitigate them — to comply with DOE standards.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) also asked for annual briefings on DOE’s progress deactivating and decommissioning the Building 235-F, or the F-Area Materials Storage Facility. The windowless, concrete structure has most recently been used as a plutonium way station, storing material on its way to other parts of the site or the DOE complex.
Previously, 235-F manufactured plutonium-238 fuel for NASA spacecraft. DOE started deactivating the facility in 2020 and planned to finish deactivation in fiscal 2022, according to the agency’s fiscal 2022 budget request. Though slated for deactivation, DNFSB, among other things, still recommended that DOE classify parts of 235-F’s fire protection program as specific administrative controls — declare that those parts are needed to prevent some specific accident — and categorize the building’s ventilation and sand filter systems as safety significant.
In a roughly 20-page report appended to the letter, DNFSB fretted about plutonium dispersal either because of fires or a stronger-than-anticipated earthquake at 235-F, especially because some parts of the facility, walls or ceilings, might not be as easy to decontaminate as gloveboxes.
