PIKETON, Ohio - USEC Inc. recently awarded its quarterly E-III President’s Award to an employee team at the Piketon plant for their work on the Technetium (Tc) cleanup project during the fourth quarter of 2004. The team is comprised of Chuck Reed, Ken Whittle and John Albright.

The E-III Award, which stands for Employee Excellence and Entrepreneurship, recognizes employees for achieving corporate objectives through excellence in their work. James R. Mellor, USEC’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, presented each of the team members with a personalized dated desktop clock and a cash award of $1,000 during a ceremony in March at USEC's corporate headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.

The Piketon plant has been cleaning up out-of-specification uranium at the facility since July 2002 under the terms of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy. Cylinders of uranium feed material to be processed are shipped from the Paducah plant to the Piketon plant where they are sampled and then loaded into steam heated autoclaves where the feed material is liquefied. The material is then transferred to 14-ton daughter cylinders. During this process, the liquid passes through a set of traps specifically designed to remove Tc. The original traps were conceived and designed by the Piketon staff and patented by USEC.

After the initial cleaning cycle, the feed material continues to be trapped and sampled until the final analytical results are acceptable. The material is then returned to Paducah for use in the enrichment process.

Together the winning team members coordinated their areas of responsibility to ensure that all necessary equipment worked as needed and that Tc traps essential to the process were repaired, cleaned and available for replacement each time a trap was scheduled to be changed. The team successfully completed the recent phase of the Tc cleanup program, on time and within budget.

Based upon the success of the current program, the U.S. Department of Energy has entered into an additional Memorandum of Agreement with USEC to continue cleaning the contaminated feed and has expressed interest in USEC cleaning 5,500 metric tons of contaminated uranium owned by the agency.

Chuck Reed, Work Week Management, and his wife, Kandy, live in Waverly. They have five children: Joshua, Tyler, Brittany, Keiffer and Madison.

Ken Whittle, Operations, and his wife, Pam, live in Chillicothe. They have four daughters, Cassie, Asheley, Jacquie and Kendra.

John Albright, Maintenance, and his wife, Lynn, live in Chillicothe. They have two married daughters, Terrrina (Robert) Hull and Katy (Brad) Edwards.

The United States Enrichment Corporation is a subsidiary of USEC Inc., the world’s leading supplier of enriched uranium fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.

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