Centrus Energy on Monday announced Chief Executive Daniel Poneman will step down from leadership of the uranium broker and enrichment technology developer at the first of the year. He will be succeeded by Orano USA President and Chief Executive Amir Vexler on January 1.
Poneman joined Centrus in March 2015 and over eight years returned the company to profitability, Centrus said in a statement.
In October, Centrus inaugurated the first new U.S.-owned uranium enrichment plant to begin production in nearly 70 years and made its first delivery of high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) to the Department of Energy earlier this month. Vexler will shepherd Centrus through the second phase of Centrus’ contract to produce HALEU for DOE that, with options, is worth up to $1 billion over 10 years.
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.
With federal records increasingly available electronically, the Department of Energy is closing a Richland, Wash., repository for Hanford Site paper records, federal and state agencies announced last week.
In August 2022, the Tri-Party Agreement agencies that govern cleanup of the former plutonium production complex, DOE, the Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agreed to stop requiring hard copies of Hanford administrative record documents, according to a Thursday press release. As a result, the Hanford public information repository at 2440 Stevens Center Place in Richland, is closing according to the Nov. 16 press release from DOE and Ecology.
“Documents will continue to be added to the Administrative Record website during this time,” according to the online records repository. Hanford documents available for public comment can still be found at public libraries near the DOE site as well as a Hanford public reading room at Washington State University Tri-Cities in Richland and libraries at Gonzaga University in Spokane; the University of Washington in Seattle and Portland State University in Portland, Ore.
