Centrus Energy, the former government-owned U.S. Enrichment Corp., got a lifeline this week from the Department of Energy to build a new 16-machine enrichment centrifuge cascade in Ohio, potentially strengthening the company’s ability to help the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) produce tritium for nuclear weapons in about 20 years.

Under a contract awarded Monday by DoE’s Nuclear Energy Oak Ridge Site Office and worth up to $115 million over three years, Centrus subsidiary American Centrifuge Operating LLC will build a brand new series of its AC-100M centrifuges at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio. The machines must by October 2020 produce an unspecified quantity of 19.75-percent enriched uranium fuel product known as high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU).

That is according to

a DoE sole source notice note and a press release from Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who has been a champion for Centrus at the Portsmouth Site. The contract has a two-year base and a one-year option period. The Energy Department plans to use the fuel for “its research and development for the advancement of civilian nuclear energy and security, and other programmatic missions,” according to the agency notice. The project will employ 60 people, Portman said.

Right around the time that Centrus’ option will come up on the new DoE contract, the agency’s semiautonomous NNSA is due to finish a three-year review of enrichment technologies for future defense needs — the first of which is production of low-enriched uranium to produce tritium for U.S. nuclear weapons from about the early 2040s onward.

The NNSA started this review, formally called an analysis of alternatives, in December 2016. Centrus’ AC-100 technology is one of two enrichment technologies the agency is considering in its analysis. The other is a smaller-scale technology being developed by DoE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The DoE branch needs a U.S. enrichment plant capable of producing what is known as unobligated low-enriched uranium fuel: made up of less than 20 percent of the easily fissile isotope uranium-235, and which may legally be used to produce tritium. 

Spot market uranium fuel comes tethered with so-called peaceful-use obligations that preclude the NNSA from using it to irradiate tritium-bearing rods in the Watts Bar 1 commercial nuclear power plant about 65 miles by road from Knoxville, Tenn. For that reason, the agency needs a domestic enrichment capability, owned and operated by a U.S. company and built with U.S. parts and materials that do not themselves carry peaceful-use obligations.

Tritium increases the explosive yields of nuclear weapons. It decays relatively rapidly, so the NNSA must periodically make more to refill the tritium reservoirs of existing weapons.

Then known as U.S. Enrichment Corp., Centrus shut down the last U.S. enrichment plant in 2011. In 2004, banking on a commercial nuclear power renaissance that did not materialize, Centrus signed a design, engineering, procurement, and construction services contract with Fluor [FLR] to build the American Centrifuge Plant at Portsmouth to demonstrate AC-100 technology. In 2010, Centrus secured a $90 million cooperative agreement with DoE to continue development of the 120-machine, industrial-scale cascade, which employed about 300 people before funding dried up. 

But the demo cascade — according to a 2018 Government Accountability Office report — was built with parts and materials that carried peaceful-use obligations, rendering it ineligible for defense work. At the same time, lack of demand for U.S. nuclear fuel, and nuclear power in general, made the cascade commercially unsustainable for Centrus. In 2015, the Obama administration’s DoE yanked the funding for the American Centrifuge Plant, which Centrus has since demolished.

A Centrus spokesperson did not reply to a query this week about whether the company planned to build the new cascade entirely from unobligated parts and materials. However, DoE said in its sole source notice that the new 16-machine cascade will make a kind of uranium fuel suitable “for use in any type of advanced reactor application, civilian or defense-related.”

Centrus told the Government Accountability Office last year that it had found U.S. suppliers capable of making defense-usable versions of the peaceful-use-only parts used in the American Centrifuge Plant.

Whether those suppliers are still available a year later is an open question. The 120-machine cascade used parts from more than 900 suppliers and manufacturers in 28 states, Centrus told the Government Accountability Office. The company also said many of its suppliers would go out of business or lose their ability to produce AC-100 parts after the demo was defunded.

An NNSA spokesperson said Friday that the agency still “plans to execute and complete a comprehensive Analysis of Alternatives [for domestic enrichment technology] by the end of 2019.”

In November, as part of its latest annual stockpile stewardship and management plan, the NNSA said it “is on schedule to re-establish a domestic uranium enrichment capability for future national security needs,” starting with a new enrichment capability to make low-enriched uranium for tritium production by 2038.

The new domestic enrichment plant could cost as much as $15 billion to build, according to the latest stockpile stewardship and management plan. The agency thinks “it could take until 2027” to start construction, the February 2018 GAO report says.