Amir Vexler, president and CEO of Centrus, called the partnership “another critical milestone for us as we begin our expansion in earnest. Fluor is a global leader with decades of experience managing complex nuclear construction projects and is an ideal partner as we transition to a large-scale deployment. With centrifuge manufacturing already underway, we are moving full speed ahead with our expansion.”
Al Collins, Fluor’s business group president for mission solutions, said, “We look forward to working with Centrus to restore the United States’ ability to enrich uranium at large-scale while fortifying its supply chain and creating local jobs.”
LEU and HALEU: Centrus’s uranium enrichment plant in Piketon is being expanded with a Department of Energy award valued at $900 million to support the further implementation of high-assay, low-enriched uranium enrichment, though Centrus is planning to add capacity there for both HALEU and low-enriched uranium production.
The large-scale production of LEU is intended to address Centrus’s commercial LEU enrichment contingent backlog of $2.3 billion and the increasing demand for LEU for existing reactors.
The company is in Phase III of a DOE contract to produce and deliver HALEU at a rate of at least 900 kilograms of HALEU UF6 per year for up to nine years. Last June, the DOE executed a contract amendment and split the first extension in two to exercise a one-year option. All HALEU produced under the contract is owned and controlled by the DOE.
Centrus also said that its uranium enrichment is “the only production-ready option for national security missions.” It was recently notified by the National Nuclear Security Administration of the agency’s intention to “sole source certain uranium enrichment activities” from Centrus.
Oak Ridge plant: Centrus expects that the first new centrifuges will come on line at the Piketon plant in 2029. In January, the company announced that it was also expanding its Technology and Manufacturing Center in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to produce the centrifuges needed for the Piketon facility. The Oak Ridge plant is the only uranium enrichment centrifuge manufacturing facility in the United States.
The expansion work being performed at the Oak Ridge and Piketon facilities is creating hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in investments for the local economies. Centrus plans to add nearly 430 jobs and investments of more than $560 million in Anderson Country, Tenn. The company has stated that the Piketon project could create as many as 1,000 construction jobs and at least 300 new operations jobs at that site.
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