The low-enriched uranium (LEU) and high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) will be produced at Centrus’s American Centrifuge Plant in Pike County, Ohio. The HALEU will be supplied to X-Energy’s fuel subsidiary TRISO-X, for the fabrication of TRISO-X-coated particle fuel at its fuel fabrication campus in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The contract will see prepayments from X-Energy to Centrus “under a phased approach to scale HALEU production in alignment with the advancement of X-Energy’s commercial pipeline”.
HALEU fuel enriched to between 5% and 20% of the fissile uranium-235 isotope will be needed to fuel many of the advanced reactor designs that are under development. With no commercial source of the material in the USA, the US Department of Energy has been actively supporting the development of a domestic US supply chain. In 2019, it awarded Centrus a contract to license and construct a cascade of advanced centrifuges to demonstrate HALEU production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, and in 2022 selected the company through a competitive process for the three-phase follow-on contract to bring the cascade into production and to deliver HALEU for the DOE’s use.
Last year, Centrus announced plans for a major expansion of the plant to boost production of both low-enriched uranium and HALEU. The expansion is expected to create 1,000 construction jobs and 300 new operating jobs in Ohio alone, while retaining the 150 jobs that existed at the Piketon plant when the expansion began, the company said.
Prepayment arrangements and government funding has been helping to tackle the “chicken and egg” issue where advanced reactor developers need to know they will have the fuel for their projects, while the fuel companies want to be assured of future demand before investing in new facilities. Centrus says it has a USD3 billion “contingent LEU and HALEU backlog, of which USD2.4 billion is definitised”.
Amir Vexler, President and CEO of Centrus, said: “This is another significant agreement that validates Centrus as the go-to, de-risked supplier of HALEU to the global market. Agreements like these provide important non-dilutive, non-debt capital to support our build-out and serves to advance commercial LEU and HALEU capacity expansion.”
X-Energy CEO J Clay Sell, said: “Our approach is to build a resilient, long-term fuel supply strategy by partnering with enrichment providers that are investing in new HALEU production capacity. Through our agreement with Centrus, X-Energy has secured enrichment capacity that will support our customers’ initial fuel needs through the market’s transition to a robust commercial HALEU supply.”
Background
The Xe-100 is a pebble bed high-temperature gas reactor capable of a thermal output of 200 MW or (80 MW electrical). It uses fuel made from robust TRISO (tri-structural isotropic) fuel particles which are able to withstand extremely high temperatures without melting.
Optimised as a four-unit plant delivering 320 MWe, the reactor can provide baseload power to an electricity system or use its thermal output to support industrial applications with high pressure, high temperature steam.
The first deployment of the Xe-100 is planned for Dow’s Seadrift site on the Texas Gulf Coast, to supply both power and high-temperature heat to industrial-scale operations. X-energy and Amazon have also committed to the goal of more than 5 GW of new nuclear by 2039, starting with a joint plan with Washington state utility Energy Northwest to build up to 12 SMRs near Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.
In February, TRISO-X received a 40-year Special Nuclear Material Licence from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, enabling TRISO-X to commercially manufacture fuel using HALEU under a single licence.
TRISO fuel is composed of small spheres of enriched uranium that are coated with multiple layers of carbon and ceramic materials, forming a robust shell that can withstand high temperatures. HALEU contains between 5% and 20% of fissile uranium-235 – a higher enrichment than that found in typical uranium fuel used in today’s operating commercial reactors, which contains between 3.5% and 5% U-235.
