Centrus Energy said this week it anticipates completing cleanup of its retired advanced centrifuge technology demonstration site in Piketon, Ohio, by the end of the year.
Decontamination and decommissioning of the American Centrifuge facility began in the second quarter of 2016 after the Department of Energy cut off funding for the project the year before and Centrus stopped pouring in its own money.
Under an agreement with Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Centrus puts up surety bonds to ensure the D&D costs are funded at the facility in the event the company goes out of business. There are $29.6 million worth of bonds, according to Centrus’ latest 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
In September 2015, Centrus began winding down its three-year demonstration of the American Centrifuge technology at the DOE’s Portsmouth Site when federal funding dried up.
The demonstration had 120 centrifuges linked together in a cascade to simulate industrial operation of what Centrus management says would be highly efficient gas centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for nuclear power and national security activities.
Centrus used its own money to keep the demonstration going until February 2016, but Congress never provided more money to restart the project. The company has since 2014 conducted more limited research and development of the technology at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Centrus noted that its $25 million government contract with UT-Battelle, which operates Oak Ridge, expired on Sept. 30. The deal was recently replaced with a new $16 million contract that runs through the end of September 2018.
Centrus is a much smaller company than in the days when it – then called USEC — operated enrichment plants at Piketon and Paducah, Ky. In the nine months ended Sept. 30, Centrus had special charges of $2.2 million, which was mostly employee termination benefits dating to layoffs started in the fourth quarter of 2015.
The former USEC emerged from a prepackaged Chapter 11 reorganization as Centrus Energy in September 2014. It currently employs about 338 people, said company spokesman Jeremy Derryberry. By comparison, the Paducah enrichment facility itself employed over 1,200 people when production was going strong.
Centrus Energy remains a supplier of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. The company takes shipments of low-enriched uranium from suppliers such as the Russian government company TENEX.