Monday, 23 June 2025
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The extension is worth around USD110 million over the next year, Centrus said. It marks the start of the third phase of a contract awarded to the company by the Department of Energy (DOE) in 2022.
High-assay low-enriched uranium – or HALEU – is enriched to between 5% and 20% of the fissile uranium-235 isotope. It will be needed to fuel many of the advanced reactor designs that are under development. The Department of Energy has been actively supporting the development of a domestic US supply chain for the material. In 2019, it awarded Centrus a contract to licence and construct a cascade of advanced centrifuges to demonstrate HALEU production at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio. In 2022 the DOE 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.
Centrus completed the first phase of the contract in late 2023 with the delivery of 20 kilograms of HALEU. The second phase of the contract called for the production of an additional 900 kilograms of HALEU by 30 June 2025, with a third phase of three optional three-year extensions for production of 900 kilograms of HALEU per year.
Earlier this month the DOE amended the contract to split the first of these extension periods into a one-year extension option followed by a two-year extension option. It has now exercised the first of these options, kicking off Phase III with additional HALEU production up to 30 June 2026, Centrus said. The remaining options in the contract would – if exercised – provide for up to eight additional years of production after that.
The extension “reflects the ongoing value of the partnership” between the DOE and Centrus, the company’s president and CEO Amir Vexler said: “We are delivering meaningful quantities of HALEU to catalyse a new generation of reactors, while laying the groundwork to establish a large-scale, US-owned uranium enrichment capability to meet America’s commercial and national security requirements.”
The HALEU produced under the contract belongs to the DOE and can be used to advance key national priorities such as enabling the demonstration and commercialisation of HALEU-fuelled advanced reactors, Centrus said.
