Expansion Projects Are Planned For USEC To Focus On Enriched Uranium Production

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). A new $150 million cascade centrifuge uranium enrichment pilot plant is planned at the existing gas centrifuge enrichment site in Piketon, Ohio for USEC, Incorporated (Bethesda, Maryland) called the Portsmouth plant. The Portsmouth plant will be home to the new pilot plant that will test a new and more efficient way of enriching uranium for the production of nuclear fuel. Construction is estimated to begin April 2004 and will include the installation of 240 state of the art centrifuge machines. This will be the first plant producing uranium for nuclear fuel to commence operations in the United States in over 10 years and should be online December 2005.

USEC is a global energy company and is the world's leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. By 2010, USEC plans to have a full-scale plant utilizing its new developed centrifuge process at an undetermined site with a $1.5 billion price tag. This centrifuge process separates uranium molecules by gravity in tall spinning cylinders and enables enriched uranium and byproducts to be separated. The Piketon location is a more viable location to build than its sister plant in Paducah, Kentucky because of its existing buildings and fewer risks of earthquakes.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has plans to build depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) facilities at the USEC sites in Piketon, Ohio and Paducah, Kentucky as previously reported by Industrial Information Resources May 2002. The total investment for the expansion projects total $558 million and will convert depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) into uranium oxide and depleted uranium metal. Uranium Disposition Services, LLC (UDS) (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) has been awarded the contract for the expansions. UDS is a joint venture made up Framatone ANP (Lynchburg, Virginia) the technology provider, Duratek Federal Services, Incorporated (Lakewood, Colorado) providing waste management services and Burns & Roe Enterprises, Incorporated (Oradell, New Jersey) providing engineering and construction services. Construction on both of these projects will begin early 2004 with completion scheduled for fourth quarter 2005.

DUF6 is the waste product created from the nuclear enrichment process and the conversions will enable the waste that is inevitably created to be stored in an environmentally safer way.