On Tuesday USEC and Babcock & Wilcox announced they’ve set up a new company to handle spare parts and maintenance for USEC’s uranium enrichment plant under construction in Ohio.
USEC and B & W subsidiary Babcock & Wilcox Technical Service Group formed American Centrifuge Manufacturing on May 1, according to a USEC release. Located at a USEC facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., 160 employees were assigned to the new company with 440 hires possible if the American Centrifuge Plant is completed. Another B & W subsidiary has operated the facility since 2007, partially in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory under a cooperative research and development agreement.
The American Centrifuge Plant project, sited in Piketon, Ohio, was conceived to use gas centrifuge technology developed by the Department of Energy to make low-enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. USEC has developed and tested machines using the technology, which is more efficient than gaseous diffusion enrichment, but the plant’s completion and funding from other investors that include B & W and Toshiba are dependent on the facility receiving a $2 billion DOE loan guarantee. Last month, the federal agency completed the due diligence and negotiation stage of the loan guarantee application.