After almost four years on the job, Philip Strawbridge on Aug. 4 announced he would retire as Centrus Energy Corp.’s chief financial officer by the end of the month.
Strawbridge, who was 64 when he took the job, has served as a senior vice president, chief financial officer, chief administrative officer and treasurer of Centrus since 2019.
He plans to retire from all of those positions effective Aug. 31. From then until Dec. 31, Strawbridge will serve as a special advisor to Chief Executive Daniel Poneman and the board of directors “to assist with the transition” to a new finance chief, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The same day Strawbridge announced his retirement, the board of directors unanimously appointed Kevin Harrill – the company’s chief accounting officer and controller since November 2021 – to succeed him.
“Harrill’s promotion is part of the Company’s normal, enterprise-wide succession planning process,” the company said in its Aug. 4 SEC filing.
Prior to joining Centrus, Harrill held positions at educational technology services company Blackboard from 2015 to 2021, where he served as vice president, chief accounting officer and controller. He has two decades of finance and accounting experience across a range of public companies, including Computer Sciences Corp., Harris Corp., and Science Applications International Corporation.
Harrill joins the Bethesda, Md.-based uranium broker and enrichment-technology developer as it gears up to produce high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) at the Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio this year.
Once he succeeds Strawbridge, Harrill will receive an annual base salary of $300,000 and will be eligible to receive an annual non-equity incentive plan award with a target award of 80% of his base salary, pro-rated for 2023, according to the SEC filing.
Centrus is the only company in the U.S. with a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to produce HALEU. In early February, the company completed construction and initial testing of a cascade of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, which it built under a cost-share contract with the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
To begin earning money from a follow-on DOE contract to operate the cascade, Centrus must produce a test batch of HALEU by year’s end for the agency’s approval.
The deal to operate the 16-machine HALEU cascade at the agency’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio, is worth up to $1 billion over 10 years, with options.
In June, Centrus announced that it had completed its NRC operational readiness review for HALEU production and received NRC approval to possess uranium at the Piketon, Ohio, site and to introduce uranium into the cascade of centrifuges Centrus has constructed.
