Jean-Luc Palayer will be Orano USA’s chief executive officer effective immediately, the U.S. arm of the French nuclear-fuel-cycle and services company announced Monday.
Palayer, most recently Orano USA’s vice president of business operations, took over the top spot after Amir Vexler left the company to become chief executive officer of Centrus Energy Corp., Bethesda, Md. Centrus announced Vexler’s hiring a few hours before Orano USA, also based in Bethesda, announced his successor.
Palayer has so far spent about nine years with Orano, prior to which he worked for 16 years at Areva, the French nuclear company from which the organization now called Orano was spun off in 2016.
Palayer holds an MBA from Georgetown University in Washington and a master of engineering in Nuclear Engineering from the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne in Saint-Étienne, France, about 35 miles from Lyon in the country’s southeast, according to his LinkedIn profile.
