Senior members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee this week requested communications between the Department of Energy and Centrus Energy Corp. as part of a bipartisan probe into the award of a sole-source $115 million uranium-enrichment contract.
In a nine-page Nov. 13 letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, the Democrat and Republican leaders of the panel’s energy and oversight subcommittees demanded to know:
- Why DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy insisted on funding a Centrus-built cascade that could produce 19.75% enriched uramium fuel, or high assay low enriched uranium (HALEU), suitable for both civilian or defense use;
- What national defense need such a cascade might serve;
- Why the Office of Nuclear Energy took money from a university research program to fund Centrus’ contract; and
- What communication the agency and the company had about the mission prior to Jan. 7, 2019, when DOE announced its intent to sole-source the work to Centrus.
The subcommittee leaders asked that the Department of Energy provide records of those and other decisions and communications by Dec. 3.
Centrus, in a prepared statement distributed to multiple media outlets, did not discuss its involvement, if any, in the House investigation.
“Centrus is the only American company pursuing HALEU production capability and 100 percent of our competitors are foreign, state-owned corporations that benefit from a range of subsidies, trade protections and other government supports,” a spokesperson wrote in an email Friday morning. “We are confident that our investment in this technology will deliver the best, most economical, domestic source of HALEU — a critical step to re-establishing American leadership in the global nuclear industry.”
Centrus’ contract is an 80-20 cost-share arrangement with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, under which the company will pay about $30 million out of pocket. The government’s share is $115 million over three years, including one option year, and requires the Bethesda, Md.-based uranium fuel-broker and technology developer to build a new 16-machine cascade at DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, using the company’s AC100-M centrifuge.
The company would use the cascade to deliver some 600 kilograms of HALEU by June 2022. The material could help DOE develop a new generation of nuclear power reactors for the civilian market, the agency has said. Current civilian reactors do not use HALEU. In a regulatory filing earlier this year, Centrus said the federal agency would obligate about $35 million to the HALEU cascade contract in 2019.
According to the House Science subcommittees’ letter, DOE got about $25 million of that funding in 2019 from the agency’s Nuclear Engineering University Program, which issues grants to universities for nuclear research and development and nuclear-infrastructure improvements. The lawmakers seem to have been referring to the DOE Nuclear Energy University Program. Funding redirected to Centrus in 2019 was close to one-third of the program’s full funding for the year, according to the letter.
In a May procurement note justifying Centrus’ no-bid contract, DOE said only Centrus could produce HALEU using an all-domestic cascade by the early 2020s, and that the agency needed a strictly “U.S.-origin” cascade to ensure the material produced could be used for defense programs.
That drew the Science Committee’s scrutiny, too. The four lawmakers asked DOE to explain why it needed HALEU so soon, and why the Office of Nuclear Energy was providing funding to benefit defense programs outside of its purview. The subcommittee heads also said that international enrichment technology could easily be used to produce HALEU for commercially focused research and development.
Aside from the Office of Nuclear Energy, Centrus is also competing to serve DOE’s semiautomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) with AC100-style centrifuges. The Centrus-owned technology is one of two in the running to become the NNSA’s next-generation domestic uranium enrichment cascade. The other is a technology developed in-house at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The NNSA needs a new cascade by the 2040s to produce low-enriched uranium suitable for making tritium for nuclear weapons in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s civilian-operated Watts Bar nuclear reactors. The agency is supposed to pick between the Centrus technology and the Oak Ridge technology by Dec. 31.
Centrus announced last week that DOE had definitized its HALEU cascade contract contract sometime this year. The company published the undefinitized version of the contract over the summer, in a financial filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Centrus has drawn heat before in Congress, both for the sole-source HALEU cascade contract and its knack generally for securing DOE financial assistance.
In January, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), whose state was once the largest domestic producer of uranium ore, asked why the NNSA was not funding Centrus’ HALEU cascade. A Barrasso spokesperson on Friday declined to say whether the agency had ever satisfactorily explained its actions, as the chair of the chamber’s Environment and Public Works Committee requested nearly a year ago.
Senate appropriators have also bristled at Centrus, though those concerns seem to have faded. The Senate’s version of DOE’s 2019 spending bill would have restricted NNSA funding for Centrus AC100 technology out of concern that it had an unfair advantage over the Oak Ridge technology. Ultimately, senators agreed to drop those restrictions in favor of compromise language that required the NNSA only to ensure that it had a “credible plan” for choosing between the Centrus option and the Oak Ridge option.
