PADUCAH, Ky. – USEC’s Paducah Uranium Enrichment Plant set a new production record in December, beating its previous record set in 1994.

General Manager Steve Penrod credits plant employees for their focus on safety and their longstanding commitment to continuously improving plant reliability, which he said were major factors in achieving this new all-time production record. “We enter the new year looking forward to even further achievements for the Paducah plant,” Penrod added.

“This is certainly an outstanding accomplishment,” said Russ Starkey, Vice President of Operations. “It has taken years of effort by everyone on site to achieve this level of performance.”

The December production record capped a year of extraordinary performance for the nation’s only operating enrichment plant:

• Plant employees experienced a record low number of injuries/illnesses
• 2007 annual SWU production was the highest in the past 10 years
• Annual number of enrichment cells in production was the highest in more than 30 years
• Both SWU production and plant efficiency exceeded annual targets
• December’s average power load, 2020 MW, was the highest monthly average in 30 years

Plant production is counted in separative work units (SWU), the standard measure for the enrichment industry. A SWU represents the effort required to transform natural uranium into an enriched two streams: one being enriched in the U²³⁵ isotope and one that is being depleted of U²³⁵

USEC Inc., a global energy company, is a leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. It expects to deploy the next generation uranium enrichment technology in Piketon, Ohio – the American Centrifuge. The United States Enrichment Corporation, a subsidiary of USEC Inc., operates a uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky, and does contract work for the U.S. Department of Energy in Piketon.

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