Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Dale Klein is a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas and former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He said, “The market signals are even weaker for HALEU. He also noted that the U.S. doesn’t yet have any commercial reactors operating that would use HALEU. That’s a problem for the dozen-plus private and public planning to build Generation IV reactors.
Klein said, “It is a chicken and egg situation. The fuel enrichers are not going to make the fuel unless they know they’ve got a market. You have to put in a lot more centrifuges, and you’re not sure what that market is going to be because none of these advanced reactors are running. It is an unsolved problem.”
Centrus has its own competitors. Orano is a French government-owned company. In 2024, it announced plans to build a multibillion-dollar enrichment facility in Oak Ridge. But Orano has some limitations that Centrus doesn’t.
Orano’s U.S. branch has publicized the proposed facility, but its chief executive in Paris said that they will not make a financial investment decision until 2027. In contrast, Centrus claims that it’s ready to scale up its Ohio facility which is already enriching small amounts of uranium as soon as it secures federal backing.
Dan Leistikow is Centrus’ vice president of corporate communications. He wrote in an email that “Our facility is already licensed. We’ve secured $2 billion in customer contracts. As soon as federal funding is awarded, we’ll pair it with private dollars and get to work,” wrote in an email. “Centrus offers a fully American solution: proven U.S. technology, built by American workers.”
Fleischmann believes that last point could be key to the company’s success. He explained, “Centrus’ strength is that they’re American, which means ultimately, if they get their act together, they’ll be able to produce weapons-grade uranium in addition to HALEU,” he said.
The other major U.S. nuclear operator is Urenco. In 2010 they opened an enrichment plant in Eunice, New Mexico which is designed to produce one-third of U.S. utility requirements for enriched uranium.
Data compiled from Urenco’s annual reports shows the plant’s annual capacity has dropped roughly twelve percent since 2018. No commercial enrichment facility in the U.S. or Europe lost that much capacity over the same time period.
Nuclear experts say that the reason isn’t demand for fuel. If anything, demand for nuclear fuel is rising.
Urenco uses “TC-21” centrifuge machines that are bigger and far more powerful than earlier commercial centrifuge technology known as the TC-12. Urenco has also deployed the bigger centrifuges in Germany and a few at Almelo in the Netherlands. Those two Urenco plants saw a respective ten percent and four percent decline in enrichment capacity since 2018.
Publicly available information is limited on failure rates of the larger centrifuges. However, technical experts in academia and the industry say the large TC-21s enrich a lot of uranium but tend to fail more quickly than the earlier model. “The TC-12, were running for decades uninterrupted. That is an incredible feat,” said Terrani of Standard Nuclear.
A Urenco-Orano joint venture keeps details about the technology closely guarded and have not responded to POLITICO’s E&E News’ request for failure rates of the two centrifuge models.
Jeremy Derryberry is Urenco USA’s Director of Communications. He said that declining demand was the main reason for Eunice’s enrichment decline in capacity.
Uranium prices sank after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, only months after the New Mexico facility opened. In the last three years, prices have risen due to restrictions on trade with Russia.
Derryberry said, “At any enrichment facility, machine failures are to be expected, and ours are within our forecasts and expectations. We are actively deploying the TC-21 at Urenco sites in campaigns to expand new capacity and to refurbish existing capacity, and we believe it is a superior technology to what is being deployed at other facilities around the world.”
Urenco is currently expanding its operations in New Mexico.