Current Status
In 2008, gaseous diffusion plants in the United States and France still generated 33% of the world's enriched uranium. However the French one definitively closed in May 2012 and the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky operated by the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), currently the last fully functioning uranium enrichment facility in the United States that employs the gaseous diffusion process, is also planned to close in 2013. The only other such facility in the United States, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio, ceased enrichment activities in 2001. Since 2010, the Ohio site is now used mainly by AREVA, a French conglomerate, for the conversion of depleted UF6 to uranium oxide.
As existing gaseous diffusion plants became obsolete, they were replaced by second generation gas centrifuge technology, which requires far less electric power to produce equivalent amounts of separated uranium. AREVA replaced its Georges Besse gaseous diffusion plant with the Georges Besse II centrifuge plant. AVLIS and SILEX are two more recently developed uranium enrichment technologies which may be utilized in the future, and are possibly already being utilized.
Read more about this topic: Gaseous Diffusion
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