Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant - Centrifuge Separation

Centrifuge Separation

USEC ceased enrichment operations at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in May 2001 after it consolidated operations at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky. USEC began working with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 2000 to resume gas centrifuge enrichment operation activities, which DOE originally began developing in the early 1960s. During the 1980s, DOE had begun construction of a centrifuge enrichment plant at the Portsmouth site before abandoning the project in June 1985 after spending $3 billion. USEC sited its Lead Cascade Test Program at Piketon in late 2002. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed this demonstration facility in 2004. Lead Cascade operations using prototype machines commenced in August 2007. In March 2010, USEC began operating a new test cascade of commercial-ready AC100 centrifuge machines. USEC has been demonstrating AC100 cascade operations since then. USEC's prototype and AC100 centrifuge machines have accumulated hundreds of thousands of hour of runtime since August 2007. Performance of the Lead Cascade has been confirmed under a variety of operating conditions with product assays consistent with industry standards for the production of commercial nuclear fuel for power reactors. The NRC licensed USEC to construct and operate the commercial American Centrifuge Plant at the Portsmouth site in April 2007, and construction began in May 2007. Construction was demobilized in August 2009 due to the delay in receiving a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. USEC currently awaits approval of this $2 billion loan guarantee before it can remobilize the construction, which will create nearly 8,000 jobs in the United States. Once completed, the commercial plant will use approximately 11,500 centrifuge machines to generate 3.8 million separative work units (SWU) a year.