The Daniel Poneman era ended Monday at Centrus Energy Corp., when the longtime chief executive, a former Department of Energy No. 2 who took over the company after its bankruptcy restructuring, turned the reins over to ex-Orano USA president Amir Vexler.
Centrus announced the transition in November. Poneman joined Centrus in March 2015 and over eight years returned the company to profitability, Centrus said in a November statement.
Centrus brokers sales of foreign uranium fuel, much of it Russian, to U.S. utilities. The company is also developing uranium enrichment technology, including a 16-machine cascade of its AC-100M machines at the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site near Piketon, Ohio.
Built and operated under contract to the Department of Energy the Centrus-owned cascade at Portsmouth is designed to produce high assay low enriched uranium. In the first phase of its DOE contract to operate the machines, Centrus was to produce a 20-kilogram test batch for DOE by Dec. 31.
The company said it produced the batch ahead of schedule.