Centrus Energy Corp. will shave a full year off its schedule for tearing down the canceled American Centrifuge advanced uranium enrichment technology demonstration in Ohio by starting the work sooner, a company spokesperson said Friday.
“Our revised plan increases the packaging and shipping work being performed in the near term,” the Centrus spokesperson wrote in an email late Friday. “By accelerating our schedule, we are able to reduce future costs for maintaining regulatory programs at the site.”
Centrus, which now expects to complete the work by year’s-end, disclosed the new timeline for decontaminating and decommissioning the industrial-scale enrichment demonstration in its 2016 earnings report last week. Late last year, in its previous quarterly earnings filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Centrus said the demolition would last through December 2018.
The Barack Obama administration defunded the American Centrifuge project in 2015. Centrus paid out of its own pocket to keep the demonstration going through early 2016, but Congress never provided more funding to restart the project.
Centrus estimated it will cost about $40 million to complete American Centrifuge decontamination and decommissioning.
Limited American Centrifuge technology demonstration work continues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Waste from the facility is headed to DOE’s Nevada National Security Site, according to Centrus filings with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
