Uranium enrichment company Centrus Energy, which is in the middle of closing down its work on the American Centrifuge Plant (ACP) in Piketon, Ohio, said late Tuesday the transfer of some of that work to Oak Ridge National Laboratory did not happen as expected in 2015.
The news was tucked into a press release about the company’s 2015 earnings, which hit the wire after U.S. financial markets closed Tuesday.
“Our overall revenue for 2015 was lower than anticipated due to a delay in establishing a contract for our ongoing work in Tennessee,” Daniel Poneman, Centrus president and chief executive, said in the press release. “We are working to complete that effort shortly.”
In September, DOE pulled the plug on the extensive research and development portion of ACP at Piketon. According to its latest earnings press release, Centrus paid out of its own pocket to keep the facility online, in case the Department of Energy relented and decided to keep the Ohio enrichment demo going. The agency did not, and Centrus announced it would lay off more than 200 ACP workers in Ohio this year. Some 60 of those workers left in the first wave of layoffs in early March. ACP costs outside the scope of Centrus’ subcontract with Oak Ridge National Laboratory prime contractor UT-Battelle totaled a combined $35.5 million for 2014 and 2015, the company said in its latest earnings presser.
The silver lining of the whole development, the company said last year, was supposed to be that some ACP testing and development work would continue at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee under a follow-on subcontract with UT-Battelle.
Centrus said in September UT-Battelle “intended” to give the company a one-year, fixed-price contract for ACP follow-on work in Tennessee, albeit at an expected annual value of $35 million — less than half of what Centrus made annually under the predecessor subcontract, when Piketon operations were in full swing.
Centrus will talk more about its latest earnings report in a conference call with investors scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. Those interested can listen in online.
